If you are considering freelance work and plan to use Odesk or Elance then there are a few things that you should consider. I am writing this article with a provider’s perspective. When I hire someone there are certain things that I look for and would recommend that you consider in order to increase your chances of winning more jobs.

Cover Letter

Make sure your cover letter or application letter is specific and customized. It should specifically address the project at hand and the person or company doing the hiring. Generic letters that you use for every occasion wont work. If I see a “template letter” then your moved to the bottom of the list. It shows the person hiring that you don’t care enough to address them directly.

Experience

If you have no work history and no references then you will be eliminated. You have get at least one job under your belt but preferably two or three. No history equals high risk, particularly on Elance where the dispute process is lacking.

Portfolio

Having a quality portfolio with relevant work examples is key. If you don’t have a portfolio then you will need to create generic examples for the type of work you intend to do. Make sure that you are providing relevant information and don’t show examples of articles on web development if the provider is asking for articles on SEO.

Profile Picture

Use your best headshot and make sure you don’t look like a serial killer. Put on your best smile and a decent shirt without holes or wrinkles. I wont hire someone that looks like they tolled out of bed to take the picture. It demonstrates a lack of self respect and if you don’t respect yourself then you probably don’t respect your own work.

Summary

This is from a provider’s perspective, the company doing to hiring, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the perspective of the freelancer. If you have anything to add to this general overview I would love to hear your thoughts.

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Confused by the mass of internet social media tools? I am and I read, interact and write about this stuff everyday. Why do we need all this crap? Today I am feeling particularly overwhelmed to the point of web paralysis (deer in headlights).

Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, Twitter and a other similar social communication tools are confusing. I only want to deal with one or at most two platforms. Which one will win the long range battle and remain the dominant player? Without a doubt, Twitter is the current leader but I think it lacks certain features that might make it really appealing.

I would like to see the following features or changes to improve its usability :

1. Categorization of Contacts and Followers – I following certain individuals because I want to hear what they are saying and doing but for others I want to share certain topics but not all of them. Provide groups or categories and allow people to put themselves into a group or allow me to organize them.
2. Noise Level Adjustment – Some people, although I am interested in them, are just too noisy. Chris Brogan is a social media leader but following him on twitter is a full time job. Perhaps a daily digest feature or something similar would be useful.
3. Universal Client and Standards – This is a problem for many communication platforms, including email and IM. I would like to have a universal twitter, plurk, pownce etc.. client.
4. Intelligent Broadcasting – I hate receiving the same information more than once. I need a way to ensure that a twitter follower, that is also on plurk or pownce, does not receive the same information twice.

Summary

I could probably keep going here but I wont. Instead I would ask you to provide me with your view on the subject. Your comments are welcome.

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I have to give a shout out to my good friend Michael Wong , author of http://bigmoneylist.blogspot.com , he has been posting useful links to tools and information on the web. Almost daily you will find that he has listed something worth reading or at least looking at for entertainment purposes.

He recently published a link to http://popurls.com which is a comprehensive web aggregator. this is a tremendous resource that allows you to quickly determine hot articles, picture, videos and general trends with a simple and short peak at the front page.

I have recently started using popurls as a source to inspire creativity as I seek to learn and read. I can usually find a topic that I strongly agree with or perhaps even disagree with and use this as a springboard to get started .

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As Australia’s government finalizes its plans to “filter” the internet, the currently unfiltered internet community is up in arms. Unlike the Chinese government, most countries have allowed the internet to remain wild, free and open. The open nature of the internet has allowed tremendous creativity, vast possibilities and a steady stream of entrepreneurship. Why in the world would or should it be necessary to filter this wonderful source of opportunity and information?   I find it interesting that this question was asked in the recent Digg Dialogg interview with Al Gore. Al Gore is a free internet proponent and endorses it’s democratic nature as well as it’s potential use in saving the planet.

I understand that the Australian government’s plan has the best intentions, which the road to hell is paved with, such as the filtering of terrorism sites and pornography but if you have every worked with filtering then you know that classification systems don’t necessarily work. Often times perfectly legitimate or “good” websites will be tossed out with the bad and at what point do commercial interests start to lobby and call for the filtering of small competitors like Australia’s own Darren Rowse of problogger.com? Will they actually filter out a site like problogger.com? Probably not, but there is talk of degraded access for what “unimportant” content and a prioritization method or system that will determine what’s important or legitimate or not. This is where I see the commercial interests potentially working to squash the average blog or small ecommerce site via degraded access.

Take Action

I recently visited http://savetheinternet.com and added this site to my blogroll. If you have a website, myspace or facebook account then please consider reading about this and adding a link to your site or personal page. The potential filtering and prioritizing of content has real and negative implications for “small  bloggers” and internet users everywhere. I recommend that you do your part in fighting this potentially negative change and voice your opinion regarding net neutrality. I am definitely against filtering as it potentially threatens your online marketability as line between good and bad begins to blur. I am also concerned that this will lead to the involvement of the United States government leading a similar effort.

Final Thoughts

If the U.S. government gets involved it wont be long before special interest groups start squashing the little guys, the everyday bloggers like you and I. Am I paranoid? Does anyone else see this as a long term concern?

Original Article Excerpt

As if Australians weren’t riled up enough over their government’s Internet filtering initiative, the level of discontent has risen amid recent revelations that certain filters will not be optional, as citizens were first led to believe. Criticism is building against Australia’s Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, and now Australia’s ISPs

read more | digg story

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I received an email survey request from Elance today. Perhaps Fabio, Elance CEO, happened to see my past post “ Elance.com, Great Concept, Terrible Experience“ . Is Fabio attempting to determine recent sources of dissatisfaction or customer loss? Elance executives don’t need to look any farther to find a qualified respondent with rich responses and honest feedback that may include some colorful adjectives. Despite the obvious chip on my shoulder I am glad to see Elance attempting to seek customer feedback. On the off chance that you did not receive one of these coveted invitations, I have posted the questions here:

1. How likely is it that you would recommend Elance (the Elance service itself) to a friend or colleague?
2. What would you tell your friend or colleague about Elance?
3. How likely is it that you would recommend Elance service providers (the people you hired on Elance) to a friend or colleague?
4. What would you tell your friend or colleague about Elance service providers?

Question

If anyone has any positive or negative feedback regarding Elance I would be interested in some debate or commiseration.

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I just finished watching the Digg Dialogg interview with Al Gore. Its an interesting concept as questions are posted and then the user community “diggs” or votes-up certain questions. The most popular questions are voted to the top and surprisingly the number one question was about the legalization of marijuana. What, marijuana? Is that what influences everyone on Digg or is this the typical profile of the internet user? Perhaps not, it could be that this is a real issue and I suppose that legalization could provide some real value assuming that the government taxed the stuff.

Another question that has a little more relevance, in my opinion, is the subject of net neutrality. If you are not familiar with the subject, net neutrality is the battle between the service providers, mainstream media and your average internet user or blogger. This is a really large issue that I plan to tackle in a later article but is you are interested in learning more please visit www.savetheinternet.com .

Although many other interesting questions were answered in this interview, I think the real story is the use of the internet and Digg as an interactive question and answer tool. A new platform that opens up the world to discussion and debate. Just imagine if the presidential debates were handled in a similar fashion or if the town-hall meetings used this method. I suspect that we will see more of this from Digg and undoubtedly  the mainstream media will follow. I wonder if we can expect a major network to license technologies from Digg, attempt to purchase Digg or creator their own technology? For now, lets sit back and see what happens. What do you think the mainstream media will do to compete?

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Wordpress is the content management system (CMS) of choice for most bloggers and one if the reasons I like Wordpress is the tremendous number of powerful plugins. I have spent hours and hours installing and removing various plugins and trying to determine which one did what and why it would work or wouldn’t. I also figured out the hard way that you can’t install too many plugins and have them active. Installing too many plugins can result in poor performance for your blog and a shabby viewing experience for your visitors as the web page load times increase. How many plugins are too many? I have heard that you don’t want to exceed 10 active plugins because of the potential for failure, slowness and other complications increases once you pass that magic number.

Must-Have Plugins

1. Sharethis – the best and only plugin required to enable social bookmarking on you wordpress blog.
2. Google Analyticator – Allows you to easily add tracking code for your Google analytics
3. Google XML Sitemaps – Makes managing your sitemap and submitting to Google, yahoo and msn a piece of cake
4. All-in-one SEO Pack – SEO enable your blog and simplify management within wordpress
5. Feedburner Feedsmith – If you use feedburner to centralize and track your blog and web feeds then you will want this plugin
6. Commentluv (optional) – If you want to empower your audience and incent them to leave comments.

Your Thoughts

I have used other plugins and these are just the basics but sometimes it depends upon the purpose of the blog. If you have found alternatives or disagree with my selections I would love to hear about it. Do you have any plugins that you think are better? What about the ten plugin limit?

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How many different online, currently free, social tools or services do you use and if they changed to a paid service would you continue using them? I read an article from the International Herald Tribune that assumes services like LinkedIn are going to find creative ways to charge for services or bolt-on applications and benefit from the current financial condition. How real is this? What would you be willing to pay for in a social tool? At this point in time I don’t know that I would pay any amount of money.Its important for the provider of the service to offer varying levels of service, free, 5.99 and 9.99. the Starbucks Tall, Grande, Venti pricing model but with the software as a service instead of expensive coffee. At this point I would agree that most of us can live with the free versions. However, I wonder what will happen when all your photos, word docs, banking and everything end up100% "in the cloud". Will you be forced to use these services or pay more?

Surprise! Rate Change

We might find online services changing the game on us, like Ebay did with listing fees and the drip torture of pictures or premium listing fees. My favorite is the credit card companies with 0% interest plans that have so many strings attached and fine print that within 30 days you are at 30% interest. Lets not forget blockbuster with late returns, restocking and the old days of  the “rewind fee” which died with the obsolescence of VHS and the emergence of DVD. These are all examples of organizations trying to expand their revenue potential using existing clients. I expect services like LinkedIn to change once the race to find customers is over and the providers have maxed out their pre-calculated market potential. Its going to get interesting as these companies try to find new ways to make money while maintaining their customer base.

read more | digg story

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BookSwim is a brand new service for individuals interested in reading but tired of buying a new book every time it comes out. I guess it fills the void between the library checkout system and actually purchasing every book that you want to read.

In terms of budgeting it can be advantageous but you will be losing out on the ability to reference the book or mark it up. For me this can be a problem in some cases, I like highlighters,  in others it isn’t. Bookswim  is a great fit for your casual reading requirements.

The plans are affordable if you consider the cost of a new book. Most books are in the twenty to thirty dollar range which is where the three (3) and five (5) book check-out service is priced.

I don’t know if this new service would work for me. I guess I would have to see how much I spend on new books over a 6-12 month period and try to justify the monthly expense. I have no idea how I could begin to analyze this information but I might find that this would be a worth while service.

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So, who is going to write a script or neat little utility to grab up all the really cool key words and famous names? I personally don’t have time for such eccentricities but I bet someone out there in the vast internet does have the time and they are grabbing up names right now. If I did have time or the ability to write some sort of automated name grabbing script what would I register? What name would you register? Thinking out load here are a few that I haven’t tried but if they were available they could be interesting:

1. joetheplumber (limited shelf life)
2. craigslist (taken for sure)
3. (yourname) – mine is robertmstanley
4. tmz (celeb gossip)
5. godaddy (getting desperate)
6. nytimes (out of ideas)

Well, You can see why I am destine to make millions registering twitter names. I have trouble thinking of names that arent already taken but I would be willing to bet the there are many niche names available. Try registering your hometown or city. I noticed that my city is available but I am unsure if it would be of value to the city or if they would even be able to pay for it. Its interesting to contemplate.

Final thoughts

At a minimum I would recommend registering your name or url and you might consider registering across all the new twitter-like services such as plurk and pownce. I am certain that there are individuals out there that are far more creative with registrations. I would be curious to hear anyone’s thoughts on what they have registered or if you have even considered registering. What names have you registered on twitter?

Excerpt from inspirational original article

Latest land grab is under way. All single letter Twitter IDs long gone. Major brand names like Coke, Pepsi, Nike and Chevrolet are already being squatted.

read more

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