slamboard

I am not going to get into specifics and name names with this post. I just want to relate something to you in the form o a story.

I spend part of my day looking through a plethora of WAH job postings and publishing suitable ones on a website. Some posting that show up in the feeds are obviously scams. Exclamation marks are usually a dead giveaway and, sadly the word legitimate is also a red flag.

Some postings look perfectly good and I only find out when I follow the links that they end up at a site that is just designed to generate adsense money. I was suspicious that some of these postings were copy and pasting text from real jobs elsewhere to be more effective. My suspicions were confirmed when I saw one with a paragraph from OUR site. Grrrr…

Here is a sign that Google is getting too close to omnipotence. I was doing a search to see if I could find out why Alexa is down and I found a cool article called ‘Top 17 Search Innovations Outside Of Google’. This is a meaty article, I am going to use it’s contents as a springboard for several posts on this blog.

The first thing I want to talk about is SimplyHired. It is one of the 17 items mentioned and it is something I use everyday. I did not know that they had innovative search aspects, since I only ever use a few very unimaginative queries, like ‘Telecommuting‘

Here’s an interesting aside there’s a footnote on the Search innovations article conceding that after its initial publication it was pointed out that a few of the innovations actually exist inside Google. If you have never looked around in the nooks and crannies of Google, you should, I almost always find something new.

I took a relaxing day trip with my family on May Day. I didn’t think about work at all. Somehow after I got home and settled in I ended up staying up until 2am because there was work for me to do. So much for a day off. Working at home really requires that you take the initiative in creating balance in your life.

We make a point of going out to a sunny cafe for a coffee at 3pm every day.

There is one bad habit that transcriptionists have to shake before they can excel. I never managed this discipline. You have to pay attention to the words being said without getting caught up in the human drama that is going on.

I can’t say a single word about anything that I was listening to, it is a privacy issue. I am going to use this article as an example because it literally none of my business. An interested party is having the minutes of the meeting of those involved in the OLPC project that has run into cost issues and delays. This is big business and NPO types head to head. Some attendees were probably very surprised and angry about the $175 price tag announcement for the fabled $100 laptops. Somebody has the job of converting heated vocal discussion into a text file. I won’t be giving anything away about past projects when I say that when people get emotional, they sometimes all talk at once.

I spend part of every day going through dozens, sometimes hundreds of postings for telecommuting jobs and seperating the good from the bad. Some jobs are eliminated not because they are scams, but simply because they are not WAH jobs. Many of the postings are painfully obvious scams. I don’t get too bent out of shape about them, they just take three to five seconds out of my life.

There are scams that have been masterfully worded. It bothers me that someone with the people skills and the literary talent of these scammers can’t be satisfied with some gainful employment that doesn’t hurt anybody. Some of these I only know about because of WOM from victims. And once the scammers get word of the bad word of mouth…they change their company name. Luckily for me, they are usually too lazy to rewrite the masterful ad copy. Recognizing this unfortunately takes more than three seconds.

Now that I have vented a bit about this topic, let’s all laugh at these scammers that got scammed themselves.

The Internet has caused an exponential increase in the number of jobs that can be performed without being tied down to any particular geographical area. Many of them do not offer the kind of job security and benefits that a lot of us have come to expect. Many of us are tied to one place by things that have nothing to do with our income.

My wife and I have flown the coop and we don’t have any significant regrets. My first winter without seeing snow was kind of trippy. If you have online revenue streams and wanderlust in your veins I would like to offer my encouragement. I would also caution you to examine the political climate of any place where you are considering as a possible home. We decided on our island destination using a process of elimination of sorts and several of the short listed places have had significant trouble in the past two years.