My faith in professional online etiquette was called into question last week, when I spotted a rather unflattering eBay auction—posted by a professional dealer no less—advertising a car. In a single run-on sentence devoid of capital letters, the auction promised heightened sexual attraction for anyone in the driver’s seat, contained several obvious spelling mistakes, and concluded with no less than 18 exclamation points. If ever there was an example of how not to conduct business online, this auction was it.

Acting professional in online communications, whether through email, online postings, or profiles, should be a matter of common sense for oDesk providers and buyers alike. Unfortunately, the comfortable anonymity that stems from communicating through a computer keyboard can be quite deceptive. As a result, the automatic etiquette-check in our brain that separates professional communications from informal situations may never get tripped. Should this happen, lucky individuals will just eat a crow sandwich and move on. Those less fortunate could miss key employment opportunities or even lose clients.

Blogs and guides for more detailed “netiquette” are everywhere, but Netmanners.com should be a prerequisite for anyone venturing into a professional online career. Carol Bory’s daily blog on business etiquette and Marcia Pledger’s suggestions are also worthy reads. If you don’t have hours to study the finer points however, these six etiquette tips can help ensure you don’t commit a professional faux pas.

• Don’t use smiles or emoticons. These are fun, cute ways to convey emotions in an informal email or forum post, but they don’t belong in a professional communication. Good rule of thumb: if you’re not sure a particular passage will be taken correctly without a smiley or emoticon, don’t use that passage.

• Don’t get fancy on fonts or formatting. Formatting can change between computers, fancy fonts or multi-colored formatting can sometimes be difficult to read, and frankly, it also looks like a cheap attempt to get attention.

• Keep email attachments small. Under 256 Kilobytes (Kb) is a good rule of thumb. If you’re unsure what kind of connection your recipient is using, contact them first to ask permission on larger attachments.

• Don’t use internet lingo or abbreviations. Everyone likes to LOL, but AFAIC, such lingo is far too informal—and potentially confusing—for anything but basic chatting between friends.

• Include your email address in your closing signature. Aside from being convenient, some mail readers don’t display email addresses. Sure, one could just hit reply, but what if your message was forwarded to someone else?

• Don’t type angry. You will type things when you’re angry that you’d never, ever say to someone in person, and if you send it, you will regret it.

The Message Center is one of the most heavily used screens in all of oDesk. It is used primarily to interview candidates and potential employers, and to communicate with your team.

We’ve gotten a lot of requests for the ability to attach files to oDesk messages. Now you can! Anywhere you send a message to another user, whether from the candidate list, the team room, or replying to a message in your Inbox, you can attach a file. You can attach files to tickets, too. Keep that feedback coming! Occasionally, we listen…

As all of our Pinoy providers well know, former President of the Philippines Corazon “Cory” Aquino passed away last weekend at the age of 76. Cory was the wife of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, the opposition leader who was famously assassinated at the Manila airport in 1983, after which Cory, a self-proclaimed “plain housewife” with no previous political aspirations, was swept into power under the People Power Revolution.

I was lucky enough to meet Cory in 2006 at the Aquino Museum, and I thought I’d post this picture as my little tribute to Cory.

I’m the big guy on the left, my lovely wife Amanda is second from the right, and my father-in-law (born in Bicol) is on the right. And front and center, gracious and full of optimism, wearing her trademark yellow, is President Cory.

Just thought I’d share!

Michael Levinson
Director of Products, oDesk

It’s everywhere you look in IT media these days–cloud computing. This constant news and analyst cycle has a downside though–figuring out what the heck is really going on in the cloud space has become complicated. That’s why I went to a premiere event for cloud computing a few weeks back to get the latest directly from the sources: the world top cloud computing companies. I learned a lot, but the number one takeaway from the event was how important cloud development skills will be for developers in the next few years. Today, there is a solid barrier between development and operations, but new platforms such as MS Azure, Amazon’s AWS, Google’s App engine and others make developers the front line of IT operations. Freelance software developers who want to command top dollars a year from now need to be paying attention to these markets and reading their expertise and skill. It may be an amazing opportunity to differentiate yourself from the pack and increase your billable rate. The following are my notes from the conference, and I will be paying close attention to the cloud space and checking in as major developments unfold.

The two biggest web technology players at the event (Facebook, Google) used this term often in referring to their programming discipline. The Register has a nice piece covering a passionate exchange between Microsoft and Google engineers on adherence to consistent primitives. Google said MS would fail at matching its speed because they lacked discipline around programming simplification. Google forces developers into narrow development frameworks driven by GFS, map-reduce and big table. If you want to create a service it must be built on those–end of story, game over.

Facebook then revealed much of the original PHP-MySQL code originally written by Mark Zuckerberg is still in use today. They also emphasized a very disciplined approach to keeping simple primitives as the core. This has allowed them to scale primarily by buying lots of servers without ever having to change much of their core code. Microsoft’s Azure product manager made Twitter #structure09 waves when he suggested very few people know how to scale the LAMP stack. Azure, he promised, would solve this scalability problem as a feature of the platform.

Overall code primitive design was foremost in the mind of the two web leaders, far surpassing infrastructure optimization, or even application features. Primitives are the new infrastructure for world scale web aps; servers/data-centers are now referred to as ‘atoms’: “Data centers are just atoms. Any idiot can build atoms together and then create this vast infrastructure”. —Vijay Gill, Google

Its a trend not a technology:
The conference speakers each offered quips about the definition of clouds. While everyone’s explanations were taken seriously, the biggest reaction was one of relieved laughter at Russ Daniels’ quip “Why are we so excited about the cloud?” Daniels asked, “One answer is everyone can draw a cloud.” It was clear despite the a conference being organized around the term, some healthy debate on nuance remained.

Ultimately speakers agreed on one thing above all, cloud computing is a macro trend not a technology. Trends aren’t easily bottled in a concise definition; they are multifaceted and manifold by nature–they spawn different instantiations, and propagate along a vector of continuous change. So what exactly is that change? I’d point above all to a new set of programming primitives where parallelism and massive scale are built in. At some point these new primitives become the new ‘infrastructure’ of IT.

Legacy vs. Cloud
Legacy vs. the cloud was discussed by every speaker connected to a legacy (so not Wordpress, Joyent, Google, or Facebook). While many journalists and some analysts say things like “will X business application move to the cloud,” this generally has a simple answer “No.” Applications do not like to move, and never have. Why does HP still have a Tandem business? Enough said.

In truth, there have not been many highly stateful, transaction-based cloud apps yet. It will come, but for now many of the process-based IT apps will stay on traditional infrastructure.

Just say no to servers:
Servers were essentially mentioned twice the whole day, other than in passing as a component of the cloud. “The biggest mistake we ever made was buying servers.” Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Wordpress said, which was then followed in the afternoon by Facebook’s cajoling of sytems OEMs.

Storage:
The problem described by almost every panelist operating a cloud infrastructure was storage. Its currently poorly virtualized and hasn’t gotten faster in years. This forces them to do unnatural acts of engineering and spending to grow storage and keep it cheap and fast. Everyone was excited about the coming wave of flash based storage devices–they are hungry for fast cheap storage.

Does this hot problem leave the door open for a hot new set of companies?

Whatever you may think about the current fascination with obnoxious media pranksters (Ali G, Bruno), their results are somewhat stunning. They manage to hack their way through layers of PR consultants and access some of the world’s better known personalities for fake satire interviews. In this video, the farcically clad Ali-G (Sacha Baron Cohen) interviews the ex head of the CIA.

While the whole scene is surreal, it is made possible by meticulous preparation on the part of the production company to make the interview offer look as official and legitimate as possible. When dealing with unknown companies and personalities – as we all do on the Web – we are conditioned to look for cues of legitimacy and signals of professionalism. We will often choose to move forward with a relationship if the right professional signals are in place, even if the company is otherwise unknown to us. An exposé into the snaring of these prank victims revealed the elaborate lengths the producers went to make the interview offer appear legitimate.

“The letter is so thorough that the URL in the e-mail address at the bottom actually goes to Somerford Brooke’s fictitious one-page website. (Potential interviewees for Baron Cohen’s libidinous Kazakh persona, Borat, say they have been contacted by United World Television which maintains a suspiciously similar site.) The producers have even gone to the trouble to make sure Somerford Brooke and their other fronts are officially registered companies.” (Slate.com, 2004)

When a proper and professional business appearance is in place, the prank unfolds. Despite the inane and sometimes insulting questions, the interview continues, all on the premise of its legitimacy. I can think of no greater proof of the power of professional appearance.

So What?

Before you dismiss this as a bizarre outlier, meet and mingle with a few young, start-up CEOs. You may find more Baron Cohen savvy in their approach than you’d suspect. Many acted the part long before they were hired, funded or cast for it. They, like the pre-interview Ali-G, signaled legitimacy and gained significant access. Steve Jobs was famous in high school for calling companies, claiming to be working on a prototype for a major production to receive free parts; he even called Bill Hewlett of HP fame personally from the phone book for a part and landed a part-time summer job from it.

It seems so simple, but it bears repeating: if nothing else, appear the consummate professional. Be courteous and direct in your business communications. Rid the Internet of items that may potentially damage your reputation and credibility. And remember that judgments can be formed quickly, so do everything you can to give the appearance of professionalism from the first impression.

Pricing is the outcome of a negotiation between buyers and sellers on the value of a service to the buyer, versus the value of the service to the seller. It is a dialogue between the two parties with subtle value-cues and signaling, even if they never speak. While we are all innately wired to seek value for ourselves both as buyers and sellers, negotiation theory can be a powerful intellectual back-drop and help you understand what’s really going on in the process.

One of the hottest new trends in negotiation theory is “mutual problem solving” which has – to some extent – replaced the more basic bargaining-based approach. The key to mutual problem solving is looking for hidden benefits or creative possibilities for both parties when working together. The classic example is two parties asked to split a pie 50/50.

At first, it seems only a simple act of cutting the pie directly down the middle will be feasible. But mutual problem solving theory asks the parties to look further into their real needs beyond their primary sense of fairness. What if one person enjoys crust more than the other? What if the pie were to be cut in half but with one person receiving more crust and the other more middle; suddenly a volume not only equal but also more mutually beneficial outcome springs to life from the simple act of splitting a pie.

Great pricing negotiations manage to get to this level. Perhaps one job offers a higher and more appealing pay rate, but the client has a lower volume of work to offer. Do you need maximum income or maxim income per hour. Looking deeper, do you have unique skills fit specifically to the customer? What are the creative ways you can work together for maxim value beyond just a market based ‘fair wage’ settlement? Unique fit can create unique value for both parties in unexpected ways.

BATNA is another key concept in negotiation theory. Also known as the ‘best alternative to a negotiated agreement,’ BATNA drives the willingness of both parties to participate in problem solving together. If either party feels they can immediately walk away from the table to a well understood, solidly better offer, then the negotiation is over. Knowing both parties BATNA is fundamental. Many people start negotiations from a gut sense of what they are worth–but how deeply do you know the market for your offer? It could be both radically higher or lower than you suspect. Doing BATNA research and discovery is a key to taking the emotional part out of the negotiation.

Online labor marketplaces now routinely list hourly rates, skill levels, and feedback that fuels transparency into possible alternatives. Use it to your advantage. Don’t forget what you learned about mutual problem-solving when you do your research; if a competitor has lower pricing but also a far lower number of engagements, comments, and hours worked, they might not represent an alternative to your offer. What if you pursued a more specialized market where alternatives are thinner and walking away becomes more challenging for a buyer?

ZOPA is your intended destination. ZOPA is the ‘zone of potential agreement,’ the overlap between buyers’ and sellers’ agreeable terms. ZOPA theory focuses on wide and narrow zoned approaches to negotiation. Some skill buyers, such as large companies, have very very large ZOPAs and pay their workers vastly different salaries, while others have a very narrow range. Understanding your buyers’ ZOPA can be the key to pulling out additional value.

Before you split your next pie – or price a freelance job – brush up on a contemporary negotiation tactics. Know your BATNA, excel in joint problem solving, and score customers with a wide ZOPA. It never hurts to have powerful ideas behind your plans.

Today we are going to look at the some of the interesting creations that have graced the iPhone App Store. Whether popular or not, these oddities stand out above the rest.

Annoy A Teen

It gets points for honesty in advertising. Apparently teenagers hear high frequencies that the rest of us do not and use of this app will irritate them thoroughly.

iFart™

I’ll spare you the explanation. Needless to say, the value this app provides to mankind is immeasurable.

Hello Cow!

It has a cow, that moos at you. Vital!

Hold On

Hold on to the button as long as you can. Compete against yourself, compete against the world, prove to everyone you’ve got the stamina to out hold them all!

iDrunkTxt

Here is a disaster waiting to happen. The premise here is that you are out on the town, drunk, and want nothing more than to call up someone and have a conversation. This handy app will randomly select a friend or date from your contacts list and dial for you – no need to trouble yourself with deciding between your boss and “that girl” to determine who is more worthy of hearing your slurred speech!

Zits and Giggles

For those who enjoy this sort of thing. Uh … yeah.

That’s What She Said Pro

The easy way to come up with a response for anything and everything.

There you have it. If you like developing iPhone apps, there may be inspiration above.  As always, post missed gems in the comments.

Finding contract work as a web programmer can be a challenge.  You depend on the market and you need the connections.  Plus, people need to find you and gaining that kind of visibility isn’t easy to do if you are on a budget. A lot of programmers don’t even notice a readily available source of free advertising that would not only build their networks, but would also help keep their coding and design skills sharp.

How?

Use those skills to build pro bono websites.  That’s right, I said it: “Build websites for free.”

“If I can find someone who wants me to build them a free website, shouldn’t I try to get them to pay me?”

Sure, if they are a Fortune 500 company.  But if you have connections with big companies that usually pay to hire your type of talent, you’re in better shape than most. I’m not talking about those types of companies – I am talking about building free websites for those who wouldn’t normally hire a web programmer.  Just ask for two things: a link and a referral.

Ask them to put a link to your website in their footer.  (Make sure your site is up-to-date, looks good and has useful contact info!)  Be sure to make it descriptive like “Website Design by Peter Griffin” or “Web Programming by Bonnie Swanson”.

Secondly, ask for them to refer people to your site if they are ever complimented on your work. If you do a good job, then they will be happy to tell others about you.

See?  You just got some great advertising and you didn’t even have to pay for it.  Also, its likely that these websites aren’t going to be updated for a while, so your name could be out there for a long time.
The more sites you build, the more places on the Internet exist that point to your site, Google will start to take notice and… you catch my drift.

But wait… there’s more!

1.) You get a place to practice your skills – whether it be design, programming, coding or all of the above.

2.) Instead of sitting around in your underwear, eating pizza-flavored Pringles® and watching SportsCenter, you can be at your computer, earning money, making connections and honing your talents! (You can even do these things in your underwear and while eating junk food if you’re inclined to do so!)

3.) It’s a great way to get a break on your taxes. If you build websites for charities, then you can write off the value of your time as a donation on your tax return the following year. (Please verify the best way to do this with your local tax professional!)

Challenges

You have to be careful how much you take on.  Be sure to set expectations, time limits, and deadlines clearly with your client and yourself.  You don’t want to get overloaded and not have time to work on any contract jobs that might come your way.

Where Do You Start?

• Charities – Most charities can’t afford to hire a web designer and their sites suffer.  Don’t forget that these sites will need to be ADA compliant; be sure you brush up on your W3C knowledge.
  Bonus:  You’re doing someting good for the world.
• Schools – See if your local schools have a website and if they are in dire need of some tender love and care.  Think of how many students have parents whose business might be looking for a quality web programmer like you…  This could be a gold mine!
  Bonus:  You just might find a new team to root for when football season comes around.
• Sci-Fi Conventions – These sites are notorious for looking terrible and are usually in desperate need of help.  Some like ArmadilloCon, PulpFest and Pi-Con look good, but take a look at some of the others at LocusMag.  Danger, Will Robinson!
  Bonus:  You may meet like-minded people and can forge friendships with a new crowd.
• Just Chillin’ – If these suggestions don’t work, then just sit around in a coffee shop. I met a guy at Starbucks last week who is a photographer and I offered to redo his site. And all it cost me was the price of an iced venti chai.
  Bonus:  Someone might buy you a cup of coffee in return for your expertise.

Open up a browser and get to work. The next programming job you have could start sooner than you think!

Photos credited to Jayel Aheram and scragz

It hurts me to share these. Prepare for major cringe. But with the good viral efforts (thank you, exploding Mentos guys!), we must also accept the bad, as well as the… paid. It’s time for the most contrived corporate viral videos and ad campaigns.

Our first hackneyed harlot is from casual dining with Ruby Tuesday. They went to the extreme of blowing up a building and still weren’t funny. The whole thing feels staged from the start. Let’s follow the sickly saga, shall we?

>> Visit Cheeto’s Underground

Strangely, the site is now shuttered. I’m shocked. All that remains, as is often the case with corporate viral campaigns, is the blow back mock-u-mmercial.

Charlie Murphy’s kinda silly TV ads ran for a while. Nike is the suspected – and only possible – sponsor. Nothing can be bought there and no brand is advertised on the site. At least they learned not to be blatantly obvious. I went to the site out of curiosity, puttered around a bit on it, and left very confused.

>> Watch Charlie Murphy’s videos

An oldie, but still a goodie.

It’s a statement of our times. I almost hesitate to mention I’m qualified to write this piece because I’ve gone through a layoff. The experience is ubiquitous, hardly unique. I’ll mention it only because the following isn’t a compilation of what others have written on the topic. There won’t be many links to well meaning lists of tips about LinkedIn usage; it is just my perspective having gone through it personally and vicariously through countless friends.

Thought 1

I like to start with the basics: what is a layoff? This is especially important if it’s your first one. Think of it this way:

A layoff is when your current employer is no longer a qualified buyer for your skills.

I prefer this simple definition because it reinforces the impersonal nature of the event as well as the market system driving our careers. Many times a subtle game of “but I was very good at my role,” will come into the conversation about layoffs. Don’t go down this road. Don’t even begin to look at a layoff as a measure of your worth. If you want insight into your performance, look at your performance reviews.

Now you’re thinking about the event as a market event. You are also focusing on your previous employer’s financial situation instead of your own self worth. Your emotional approach to this event is very important in the job market; nobody likes to buy even their favorite products if the packaging is badly beaten up and damaged. Your perspective is your packaging.

Thought 2

Hire yourself.

I’m a huge advocate of “working is its own reward”. I hate government statistics about unemployment. Maybe this term made sense in the early 20th century when factories and farms were the primary employers, but it certainly doesn’t in 2009. While you may have faced an immediate drop in your pay, you are now working for yourself, not unemployed.

When you were company employed, more of your task direction was dictated by your organization’s needs and inputs. Now that you are working for yourself, hour is just as precious as when you were on the clock, probably more so.

Realizing you are now the manager of your own day is my most important step in facing a layoff. Managers have goals, objectives, and tasks to monitor and metric. What are your management metrics for yourself?

Don’t try to boil the ocean. What are the three big areas where you can accomplish something related to your employable skills? Are you a writer? Keep writing. A coder? Keep coding. An executive? Write a business plan and study your market.

It’s important to have your own vision and understanding of what you are uniquely good at. If you don’t know, figure it out. Where have you had success in the past and why?

Don’t fall into the trap of accomplishing generic, perhaps household, tasks to feel better. It’s great if you finally have an opportunity to clean your pool, but will it contribute to rejuvenating your career?

Thought 3

Use your self-driven accomplishments to network meaningfully. Who can you collaborate with on your projects? How can you market and promote them? Big companies no longer have a strangle hold on our attention. The TV advertising era is over and this is the era of social media, Meetup, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and more.

The best way to get hired is to be a product someone wants to buy. How much easier is it for a friend to help promote something you have accomplished or created to a hiring manager vs. simply mentioning you are available?

Contract work is a great way to network and impress new contacts with your abilities. This is thinking like a marketer. Maybe the pay isn’t the same as your prior role, but what is the value of the new connections? Perhaps it’s better to take a lower offer with a company with a long-term future.

Meaningful networking is putting your highest value skills on display in front of qualified buyers and their recommending peers. Build your life around this metric – it’s your new job.

Use social media to build and support these networks. Not only will it help you in the present, but it will be a good investment the next time you may be looking for a new job.

Summary

Defiance for me is self-autonomy in work, growth, and accomplishment. It’s knowing your employer was only a buyer of your skills, not a parent evaluating your worth. It’s having the ability to relentlessly pursue qualified buyers with a “WOW must have” product demonstration.

If you are looking for a blog that will help to boost your spirits and give some good advice, you should look into Rajesh Setty’s blog “Life Beyond Code“.  It’s a high-tech way of looking at the world without focusing so much on the work.

Photo credits: pirano, Andrew Feinberg

Chris Stanton, a PhD candidate at Stanford Business School, is using oDesk data in his research. Below, he shares some basic economic insights about the oDesk market.

Introduction

In this post, I will concentrate on the role of feedback on provider wages. I hope these results, coupled with previous posts on the returns to tenure and training, help providers form expectations about long-run earnings trajectories. Overall, the results suggest that providers who receive good feedback and gain experience on oDesk can receive significantly higher wages over time.  I find that a change in feedback score from 2.5, the mean score in the data, to the maximum score of 5, results in wages that are about 5.4% higher.

Method

While oDesk users surely expect a positive relationship between feedback and provider quality, quantifying the economic effect of feedback on wages is statistically tricky. The difficulty arises because the best providers are likely to get the best feedback, but these same top-notch providers are also likely to have unobserved attributes like superior interviewing skills that simultaneously result in high wages. I use a statistical procedure to account for unobserved provider skills.

The data covers matched assignments on oDesk from the platform launch until May 2008. This includes observations on 7,123 providers matched to 28,321 assignments.  The description of my statistical strategy may be esoteric, so the casual reader may wish to skip to the results section. The basic idea is that I use fixed effects multivariate regressions to control for any time-invariant provider characteristics which may be correlated with a provider’s feedback. Because I am able to identify how changes within a single provider’s feedback influence his or her wages over time, this strategy addresses unobserved provider characteristics which otherwise hamper the measurement of the effect of feedback on wages. In my preferred specification, I regress the logarithm of hourly wages on a polynomial of the provider’s weighted feedback score, time using the platform, and overall platform time trend.  I also include controls for the number of tests a provider has taken.

Results

In this first graph, the overall effect of feedback on wage percentage changes is given in blue. Separate results for Indian and Russian providers are also provided.  Not surprisingly, the results show that relative to having zero feedback, providers with low scores do slightly worse. On the positive side, providers can expect 2.5%-5% more earnings from the best feedback scores.

The second graph breaks out the effect by job type. The graph is a bit difficult to interpret because the effect of feedback on wages for writing jobs appears huge. But be warned – the effect for writers looks large in the sample, but is not statistically significant. Web and software developers can expect to earn about 5.6% more with a feedback score of 5 versus 2.5, while providers of administrative support earn even larger percentage increases with good feedback.

Most buyers post their first job to fill a skill or budget gap on a particular project. You find a skilled worker or two and get the project taken care of. But success breeds success – as your needs grow, you hire more providers. Suddenly you’re managing a growing remote team, which may be more demanding than you’d anticipated.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed trying to keep your remote team in motion, use oDesk to hire a project manager (PM). A good PM minimizes the direct management required on your part, so you can leverage your time and expertise more wisely.

To hire a PM using oDesk you’ve got two options: Search for new candidates, or promote someone who looks promising from your existing team. Either way, you’re looking for exceptional communication skills, business savvy, leadership experience, and technical expertise.

oDesk’s network includes both independent contractors and provider companies with dozens of affiliated contractors working under the same roof. If you hire your PM from a provider company, he will tend to hire from within his company. The downside is that, arguably, there may be better-qualified people for a specific task elsewhere on our network. The upside is that while you are remote, your PM could be on location with his team members, allowing closer management. Plus, a large provider company can quickly move the right people in and out of your team as the project requires.

Once you select your PM, take the time to provide her with in-depth training on your projects. Give your PM ìhiring managerî or ìrecruiterî privileges (in the Team Admin section of My oDesk) and ask her to build your team. Pay attention to whom she interviews and hires and why – discuss how she handles initial recruiting decisions, and offer guidance as needed. Set clear goals, deadlines, and metrics for success. Stay in close communication, and don’t hesitate to reward top-quality results.