Telecommuting's Role in Going Global

So Des and I finally talked in real time yesterday. Turns out he has an Australian accent. Who would have guessed?

We started firming up some of the ideas we wanted to talk about and got to talking about The Four Hour Work Week, a book I had read but he hadn't gotten to yet. During the discussion we moved onto professional nomads and telecommuting. I quickly added telecommuting to my Google Alerts and started getting hits on that keyword.

Flexible Steel: An appropriate name for a company that found that flexible working with a unified communications system made it possible to keep key members of staff after an office move. Read the case study here.

United HealthCare: Job opportunities for telecommuters.

ARG Interactive: More job opportunities for telecommuters.

In fact, someone has gone and build a blog that pulls telecommuting jobs from all of Craig's Lists, because apparently you can't search multiple cities at the same time. Brilliant.

Also, I just remembered this Dilbert strip from Monday. The gist: Dilbert's boss needs to complete a job that should take 300 worker days, so he hires 300 workers and tells them to clean out their desk by 5pm.

Although this is painfully funny, IMHO, it maybe talks about a day in the not too distant future (or past?) where people come together for a specific purpose, complete it, and regroup for other specific jobs.

Maybe Monster or LinkedIn becomes an employer/general contractor in the future, bringing together the cream of the crop for a specific task, pays people as temps, and disperses the group afterwards. Now that would be a flexible workforce.

Rich Brooks

Second Life and Business

A businesswoman relative was incredulous recently when I started to talk about Second Life and business. She found the basic concept of Second Life challenging enough. When I talked about it in terms of offering business possibilities she looked at me as if she thought I'd been smoking funny cigarettes.

Her reaction was understandable. What got her attention as a businesswoman was when I said that there is a recent estimate of some US$1.5 million (real money, not Linden dollars) business being done  per day on Second Life.

My source for that statistic was a very interesting document, Business in Second Life: an Introduction,  produced by the Smart Internet Technology Cooperative Research Centre (free download).

Blogger Susan Reynolds shares her view on Second Life (SL) and draws some interesting comments with her post Social Networking With Face and Place.

A couple of sites with more information:

Nick Wilson's Metaversed

Lee Hopkin's Lee's Second Life

The women's blogging conference, BlogHer 2007, to be held next week in Chicago, boasts a parallel, virtual BlogHer conference in Second Life: I posted about it on Business and Blogging.

Will this become a trend? To have a Second Life event to parallel "First World" conferences on Web 2.0 topics?

Would it make sense for us to include discussion of Second Life in our session at BlogWorld & New Media Expo in November? Is it a subject we must include? Or is there an appropriate topic of a more generic nature, e.g. "metaverses and global business" rather than being focused on Second Life?

About the Go Global Blog

BlogWorld and New Media Expo in Las Vegas, November 2007, is being billed as "the first and only industry-wide tradeshow, conference, and media event dedicated to promoting the dynamic industry of blogging and new media".

Because we are both passionate about blogging and new media generally and want to share ways for these tools to be used more effectively - no, make that "brilliantly" - in business large and small, we were delighted to be asked to run a session as part of the Executive and Entrepreneur Conference on November 7.

We have a great topic for our session: Going Global With New Media. Not that we have fantasies of world domination - well, not just yet anyway :). But technology is increasingly "globalizing" all of us, our markets and our businesses, all of us need some help with navigation. And we need help with knowing what options are available to us and which options are more likely to help our business and which ones are more likely to be just distractions and time-wasters.

Let's face it, we are all travelers into these new worlds of experience technology makes possible - even the young digital natives among us but especially those of us who are digital immigrants (using that powerful metaphor of Marc Prensky's http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/).

And as travelers do in the offline world, we need to realize we can't go it alone. We all need to share experiences, tips and knowledge about what works and what doesn't (or not just yet), the risks and the rewards in taking certain paths.

That's how we see our session at BlogWorld & New Media Expo. A full-on share-fest.

A comparison of maps and traveling arrangements, if you will.

So we thought it would be a good idea to start the discussion now and invite you to contribute to our session between now and November 7, especially if you are planning to be there and participate on the day. But you don't have to be attending BlogWorld Expo and New Media to contribute here. In fact, as we intend to keep this blog going for at least a while after the event, you can expect to get plenty of feedback here on what actually transpires on the day.

Let the sharing begin!

Des Walsh & Rich Brooks