I screwed up my back yesterday afternoon. Can't sit upright for more than about ten or fifteen minutes at a time, so I'm going to try and cobble something together here. I hope to update later in the day.
- Would You Really Follow a Manager into Battle? It's a pretty harsh criticism of middle management.
- The paperless office, more efficient or an impediment to getting real thinking done? In my case, the piles of paper are critical. They're reminders that are there even when the computer is off. They also never crash.
- Tech refugee's trek shows path others tread, too, or how one woman made the move from high-tech to something else. [strib]
- The Seven Deadly Sins of Free Content. Now admittedly, this is from a site that's trying to publicly figure out how to make money putting content on the internet, but the author misses out on one of the big reasons for people to provide content for free: self-promotion. One of the reasons I keep putting free content on the web is that the free content helps people find me, and keeps work rolling in for me. People discover that I've written about printing and then I get offered contracts.
Another of the big reasons for me to provide online content for free is that it actually makes life easier. I initially wrote Mead Made Easy thinking I might make some money from the book. I put it online because that helped sales, but also because it kept people from asking me questions I'd covered in the book. Same thing with a lot of the writing I do. If I've answered the same question two or three times via email, I'll spend a little time editing up a good answer and put it online. Then people can either find the link with google or if they do email me, I can reply with a link in a few seconds, rather than retyping a long message. And again, because I'm providing answers, people who are looking to hire help see me as someone who can provide answers.
It might be hard to believe, but the only time I've gone looking for work has been when I decided to drive school-bus back in the late 80s. Other than that, jobs have come to me. And now that I'm a contractor, I need to have work find me more frequently. My free content online helps that work find me.