You're all intelligent people, so we probably don't have to tell you that your boss (or at least that guy in the IT department who always gives you the stink eye) not only can, but probably does keep track of your web browsing habits. While you might think that means you should just avoid job hunting sites and web pages you wouldn't want your mom to see you looking at, a recent New York court case upholds your boss's right to fire you for just spending too much time dawdling on sites that have nothing to do with your job.
In this case, an employee of the New York City school district was fired in 2006 for spending too much time checking out travel web sites like Lonely Planet, China Advisor, and Escape Artists. Apparently the guy was warned, and a few days later his boss had taken a look at some 300 web sites he had visited anyway.
The specifics might not apply wherever you are. But the message is pretty clear: find a way to anonymize your web surfing. Or umm, refrain from mixing business and pleasure.
Sharing your portfolio or a gallery can be done a number of ways, from building an HTML or Flash version to hosting a presentation gallery online at Google Docs. ViewBook makes it easy to create professional looking web presentations.
ViewBook's presentation toolprovides a photo album and slideshow at a custom domain. Users can create galleries and portfolios with images, titles, descriptions and custom background colors. Works can be then embedded on a website and viewed at full screen. ViewBook offers a public page with a listing of the presentations you have available, with a bio or profile. As for uploading imagery to use, there are a few different options, from a batch upload tool to a drag and drop feature with a minimal toolset for editing.
If you have a portfolio or presentation that is constantly changing, or want an easy way to make and share one and you aren't too comfortable fiddling with HTML or Flash files, this could be the tool to check out. The embedding feature makes it easy to embed display your works on the comfort of your personal website in a clean and professional manner. The free beta account does have some limitations: 250 images and five portfolios. Check out a sample of what you can do.
If you are a Google Docs user you are going to be happy to know that Google Docs Mobile was recently released. Accessing your online Google Docs has gotten easier but don't get your hopes up yet, there are some restrictions.
There were some hints in September about the new mobile service when users came across a working web address for the service. Google Docs Mobile is still in its early stages and it's far from perfect. For instance, only iPhone and Blackberry devices are officially supported. And you can only view documents. You can't edit them. You can either open spreadsheets as an HTML document or you can download an XLS version.
Presentations are said to be viewable on the iPhone. Other devices may work with the mobile version, but Google has said that the more advanced a phone's browsing capability is, the more seamlessly it will work with the Mobile Docs site. As for the interface, it's basically a stripped down version of the online site offering not much more than plain text with no formatting.
A trend that has been flowing with Google has been the development of proper mobile applications, as with Gmail, and Gmail Apps for your domain. We wonder how long it will take for a Google Docs mobile application to get off the ground?
As the shift towards online applications grows strong, so do the conferences and events that promote working online.
The Office 2.0 conference is just around the corner in San Francisco, September 5-7th 2007. The event is aimed at the discovery of future online productivity and collaboration efforts brings together leaders and visionaries in the field to discuss innovative online services, and ways to get things done both at home, and in the office. Speaker's sessions include: The Future of work, mobile productivity, death of the app., and GTD with Office 2.0.
A very cool part of the event is that conference attendees will get an Apple iPhone, or PS3 running on Firefox with Linux, to play with and connect during the event. The iPhone experiment will allow conference go ers a way to easily check out the conference schedule, map the area, utilize the facilities WiFi and to lookup conference speakers and biographies. Of course the device is built in to the $1695 registration fee, and users are responsible for activating the iPhone with an AT&T plan. Nonetheless a very intuitive idea from conference organizers.
There is also word that Google could be announcing Google Presentation, and Google Wiki at this event.
Think coffee helps you stay productive through the day while you bang away at your keyboard? Ok, so it does. But how would you feel if you knew the exact amounts of coffee or caffeine it would take in order to stop your heart?
The online "death by caffeine" tool calculates your weight with your beverage of choice and serves up some stats on how many cups it will take in order for you to drop dead.
They have also put together a caffeine database chart that compares how many MG's of caffeine are in a drink. Ok, enough writing, its time for my 4th cup of Starbucks. 30.86 more to go.
When you signed on for your job, you likely signed a hefty stack of paperwork as well. Do you remember signing something called a non-compete agreement? It's a fairly standard doc which limits your ability to strike out on your own in your employer's line of business, and also may limit your ability to switch jobs and work for a competitor. A California court has ruled that Non-Compete agreements may not be so universally enforceable.
According to The Labor Law and Employment blog, "The court threw out the clause in the contract that required a penalty to be paid in the event that ultimate client hired any of consulting company's employees. It held that such a clause was simply a non-compete clause dressed up differently. That is, it does not matter how a non-compete clause is structured. The courts will look at the end result, and if it looks like a non-compete, it will be treated as a non-compete."
Salary.com put out a study saying that most of you don't deserve the salary you're being paid. OK, that's not what it says, but it does suggest that the average worker wastes 1.7 hours out of an 8.5 hour day.
What qualifies as waste? Chatting with coworkers, doing personal business during work hours, and oh yeah, personal internet surfing tops the list with 34 percent of survey respondents saying they spend time online performing activities that have nothing to do with their jobs.
Our favorite stats from the survey are the list of reasons people gave for slacking off:
18 percent said they were bored and/or had nothing to do
13.9 percent said their work hours were too long
11.8 percent said they were underpaid
11.1 percent said their work wasn't challenging enough
It's not clear how any of those (except perhaps the first) justifies spending time playing online video games or surfing web sites. (Download Squad doesn't count. Reading this blog keeps you informed and is thus vital to your job security, no matter what your job is).
In a day and age where everything from YouTube to Pownce are vying for both our free and shouldn't-be-free time, it's great to see a company like Remember the Milk figuring out an ingenious way to help keep our daily tasks organized while we're goofing off or micro-blogging with Twitter. On the company's blog today, RTM announced not only that they have a Twitter account of their own, but that you can actually get some clever use out of it. By adding the RTM Twitter account as a friend and then direct messaging it with a specific syntax they have put together, you can actually create tasks, send tasks to friends and even command tasks (mark them as complete, get an SMS of a list's tasks, etc.). This is a stellar way of combining such a dynamic service as Twitter with a way of being productive, and all it requires is some simple linking of your RTM account with your Twitter username.
Fortunately, both Twitter and Remember the Milk are free to sign up for, giving you a valid way to justify all that time you spend on Twitter to your boss.
There are many task-list applications out there, but not many with the impressive feature set that Toodledo has. Its deceptive simplicity of task entry using inline editing via AJAX makes for lightning fast tasking and better productivity, while providing integration with Google Calendar, Google Personal Homepage, Firefox, and IMified.
One of the best features of Toodledo is the distinction between folders (for projects) and contexts (the many hats you wear). Contexts allows only your current frame of mind for work, and doesn't show you your home tasks. This keeps the honey-do list away from your work list, so you aren't thinking about that darn swing-set you have to put up in the middle of working on Mr. The-man's presentation.
If that isn't enough to make you jump over and check it out, they also have a printable tasklist, email alerts for your top tasks (called a hotlist), but also the ability to import/export tasks to iCal, Palm OS, XML, CSV, and text. Task lists can be published to the web if you want to share your inner-workings with the world, and with a non-free but reasonable price ($14.95/year) you can have others edit and append to your task list among other things. Toodledo offers a free 7-day trial of their pro account for your enjoyment.
Wait, there's even more. There is a developer API, it fully supports GTD, tags, history and stats, a scheduler, some goal-setting functions, RSS support, SMS support, WAP support and more. Tasks can be imported from Outlook, Apple iCal, and Remember The Milk. Seldom is there such a complete feature set in a free application. It is a major time-saver for the quick-and-dirty type task person who doesn't want to spend 8 years filling out a task form. If you don't have a solid task-list manager yet, this is the ticket.
Isn't everyone in the Web 2.0 blog-o-sphere starting a job board? JobCoin takes just moments to set up and get running, and provides website owners an extremely easy solution to jumping on the bandwagon starting your own job board . Site owners set their job ad rate, and JobCoin skims 30% off the top for providing their unique platform.
JobCoin doesn't recommend charging for postings unless you have at least 2 million page views, but it doesn't hurt to experiment if you have a dedicated audience.
Setting up the actual job board service is simple, open a free account and drop in a single line of HTML code into any page on your website where you want the listings to appear. HTML or CSS code can be customized as you please so it fits in with your websites design. With other job posting locations demanding in upwards of $300 per listing, you might have a possible money making machine on your hands.
Want to work like Bill Gates? As has been widely
circulated around the interweb, the world's most technologically advanced human has walked us all through his
workflow. Unfortunately for us mortals, he's using a bunch of bloated, pricey MS-branded tools. So I took his
tools, found free alternatives, and reconfigured his workflow to be a little cheaper. There's nothing I can do about
hardware though. So if you're looking for a $100 Tablet PC, sorry folks. I couldn't find an OSS version of whiteboard
capture tools either, probably because it relies on hardware. I will admit that Bill's three screens improve
productivity. Now if I could only afford two at once... But still, his major goals are the same of most managers:
reduce paper, increase communications, and share information centrally. So let's look at these, shall we?
Email & Calendars Obviously Bill's going to use Outlook. He's fortunate enough to have
assistants filter his email. Mere mortals will have to depend of their ISP and local softwares. My recommended Outlook
replacement is Thunderbird, for its cross-platform goodness. Want to
know how to use Thunderbird, and retrain yourself? Check out this series on using Thunderbird, a very
thorough walk through from installation to spam filtering. To integrate calendars, you'll want to stick with the iCalendar format, which is supported by Sunbird, Mozilla's standalone calendar application. My
preference in calendars is Calendar, also from Mozilla, because
it integrates with Thunderbird and Mozilla browsers. iCalendar is also supported in OS X's iCal app, so Mac users can
keep their native app if need be. If you need to sync with Palm devices, you can try using PHP iCalendar in conjunction with this Datebook
to iCal exporter. If anyone knows of a more elegant solution, I'm all ears. Next up: your document creation and
sharing issues solved...
When you signed on for your job, you likely signed a hefty stack of paperwork as well. Do you remember signing something called a non-compete agreement? It's a fairly standard doc which limits your ability to strike out on your own in your employer's line of business, and also may limit your ability to switch jobs and work for a competitor. A California court has ruled that Non-Compete agreements may not be so universally enforceable. 
In a day and age where everything from 
Want to work like Bill Gates? As has been widely
circulated around the interweb, the world's most technologically advanced human has 
