Why Working From Home is Nothing New | Work From Home

Working From Home is Nothing New

Working from home is a whole new way of working — a revolution in industry, in society, in the way we live. Or is it? While making a living by sitting in a cafĂ© with a frappucino and a two-way link to the cloud might be something your parents never dreamed of doing, the idea that you can ignore the corporate world and earn from home is actually about as modern as iron horseshoes and knitting needles. In fact, not only are today’s home-based tech workers more traditional than the average cubicle drone, they actually have a long way to go before their numbers come close to those of the good old days despite recent trends.

According to the US Census Office, the number of people who work at home more than two days a week increased between 1980 and 1990 by 56 percent from 2.2 million to 3.4 million.That’s a remarkable rise and one made all the more impressive by happening before the expansion of the Internet. In the decade following 1990, as communications improved and email replaced memos, the figures increased by a further 22.8 percent to reach 4.2 million people. By 2000, the Census Office reports, 3.3 percent of the working population was able to skip the commute for most of their workweek.


When One in Fourteen Worked from Home

But those are still significantly lower than the numbers in 1960 when almost 4.7 million people were earning their keep from home – a full 7.2 percent of the population. That number halved over the following twenty years, a decline which the Census Office puts down primarily to the closure of family farms and the movement of doctors and other professionals away from home offices and towards large shared practices.

But it wasn’t just the last of the small farmers and home-visiting doctors who were able to call their homes their workspaces in the 1960s. Some of the most important contributions to American culture were being produced in home offices even before the era of free love and one-way commutes to Southeast Asia.

Pay a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s home in Oak Park, Illinois, for example, and you’ll be able to see not just the house in which the creator of the Prairie style lived from 1889-1909 but also the office in which he designed 125 of the country’s most important structures. Nor was his own home just a workplace. It was also an architectural laboratory on which he tested his design concepts and theories. Most home workers work in their house. Frank Lloyd Wright’s house was also his work.

That a creative professional like an architect should be able to avoid an office building is perhaps not surprising. Designers, painters, sculptors and other arty types tend to work alone, relying on their own inspiration to deliver their ideas. They rarely need the kinds of equipment that’s best supplied by large office buildings and having secretaries, assistants, sales staff and watercoolers around might even be distracting. Around 40 percent of artists are believed to work from home studios – or at least they do until children come along and claim the studio as their bedroom.

The Web’s Work from Home Industrial Revolution


According to the 1990 census though, almost half of all home workers were in the service industries, which included business and repair work, entertainment and recreation, and “other professional and related services.” By 2000, 1.9 million people were providing “professional services” from home – by far the most popular category – but there were also more than 42,000 people preparing food professionally in their own kitchens and over half a million cutting hair, giving massages and delivering other kinds of personal care. Interestingly, almost 5,000 people in the fishing, hunting and forestry professions worked from home at the start of the millennium too. You have to wonder about the size of their yards.

Even this variety might not be anything new. Perhaps the most important characteristic of the Industrial Revolution was the movement to cities as factories became the shared workspaces of a new urban working class. But what were those new proletarians doing before the opening of the mills and the invention of automated looms that could fill factory floors and lop off children’s fingers? Some, as in early twentieth century America, would have been driving horses on farms but others would have been crafting from home. For women in particular, the loss of hand looms to the spinning jenny meant a shift away from home and family to cotton mills and hard-nosed bosses. For men too, the rise of the assembly line marked the end of the kind of sweating, hammering and hand-crafting of unreliable quality that could be done in a home workshop.

Interestingly, Peter Sweeney, Founder & CTO of semantic technology firm Primal Fusion, has described Web 3.0 as the Internet’s own industrial revolution, a time when the social connections of Web 2.0 gives way to the automated production of content. Wolfram Alpha, he says, is one example of the way in which information can be produced automatically and without the kind of work-at-home handicraft that predated Dickens and which now characterizes the Web’s co-working content producers.

That sounds unlikely. Easy communication is only going to increase the return to home-working and recession hit tech-types who have spent the last few months consulting from home will take some persuading to get back to the traffic jams when the economy does pick up. But today’s home-workers are now primarily tapping keyboards rather than driving tractors. They’re in the cities rather than in the dust fields of Oklahoma (although many of them, like those former agriculturalists, are also now in California). And unlike independent spinners and weavers, they find that they can compete easily with the productivity levels of factory and office-based employees.

Working from home then isn’t a new way of working. It’s a return to an old, traditional – and more enjoyable — way of working, and don’t let the Luddites tell you otherwise.

Which URL Shortening Service is Best to Use

URL Shortening Services/ Top 10 URL Shortening Services
URL shortening services have taken strong root in the internet community. It seems that there is a lot of bias in which URL shortening service is the weapon of choice. For instance- Twitter users commonly use TinyUrl for their shortening needs. But TinyUrl is far from being the only URL shortening service out there. In fact, each service has its own very special service to offer; so don’t take sides just yet.

Doiop.com
Doiop brings something interesting to the table: you can pick your own URL. Unlike many other services that pick a random URL for you, this feature will let you remember the shortened URL. If you’ve ever tried to remember URLs of other services- you know what we mean.


SnipURL.com
SnipURL has the ability to change the URL to something more memorable- a big plus. What we liked about SnipURL was the fact that it provides traffic statistics on the newly created URL. A private key can also be created to limit access to the URL. Finally, there is just something about the “Snipped! 92% of original url,” line that makes the experience very satisfying.

DwarfURL.com
DwarfURL is an elegant yet simple AJAX application. Like SnipURL, it enables traffic statistics for submitted URLs. What really made it shine, however, was the fact that a Mozilla Firefox Add-on can be installed to use their application on the fly. Clearly, this application was optimized for speed and efficiency buffs.

MemURL.com
MemURL is the classic URL shortening service. It doesn’t bring a lot to the table, but it does get the job done. But don’t discredit it just yet- what really sets it apart from other services is its naming convention. MemURL automatically creates human-readable URLs. Sure, they aren’t real words, but they sure are fun to pronounce! Services like this will likely take over when other services that allow users to edit URLs become flooded. This alternative is much better than trying to guess a URL no one else has taken.

TinyURL.com
At long last, we get to Twitter’s dominant URL shortening service. TinyURL has the same kind of shortening service everyone else does, but it packs a punch: it includes a preview URL! How many times have you clicked on a shortened URL, only to find that it led you to a virus, disgusting picture, or web prank? With the preview functionality, that will never happen again!

TraceURL.com
Out of all the URL shortening services available, TraceURL is easily one of the most advanced. It features a highly advanced user interface that makes the process incredibly simple. Sadly, you have to register before you can use the service (which is free). It supports tracking statistics, the ability to choose your URL, and features a simple pop-up interface. If you need options, TraceURL is your shortening service.

URLTea.com
At first glance, URLTea.com is just another URL shortening service. If you’ll look at the above image more carefully, you’ll notice something more is going on behind the scenes. When you submit a URL to URLTea, it will automatically copy the new URL to your clipboard! This makes the copy and paste process a thing of the past, and we aren’t sad to see it go. Just make sure you don’t have anything important in clipboard you’d like to save before using URLTea.

NotLong.com
NotLong is yet another URL shortening service, of which offers statistics, password protection, and the ability to chose your own URL. It’s fast and simple; what more could you ask for in a URL shortening service?

XAddr.com
XAddr is an interesting URL shortening service. They offer the basics, and not much else. What they do throw into the mix, however, is extra security options much like TinyURL does. When the shortened link to a URL is clicked, you are instead brought to a landing page- not the direct URL. XAddr then gives you options to check McAfee SiteAdvisor for more information on the URL. If security is an issue, XAddr is a great alternative to TinyURL.

Azqq.com
Last but not least, we have AZQQ.com. We like this shortening service because it doesn’t do anything extra- just shorten URLs. Sometimes it isn’t about how many features you can pack into a URL shortening service, but how fast the service works. If you just want the bare bones of URL shortening, AZQQ.com is your man.


Please scream loudly in the comments if you want to propose a different/better solution. Is usage/popularity or functionality the best metric for this kind of decision? Should we have "guest" URL shortening services based on unique functionality?

First space hotel to open by 2012‎

First space hotel
space hotel
A private space tourism company, Galactic Suite Limited, has announced that they will be opening the first space hotel in 2012

The company is offering a three-night stay for 3 million euros ($4.4 million).

The zero-g resort will orbit the Earth at 30,000 mph, completely circling the planet once every 80 minutes, while offering visitors 15 sunrises per day.

Galactic Suite plans to transport its travelers to space via Russian rockets from a spaceport to be built on a Caribbean island.

The trip to the hotel will take one day and a half and guests will undergo an eight-week training course in the Caribbean prior to launch.

Currently, the GS Project is still in design phase. The project consists of the spaceport, the ship, and the orbiting space resort.

The hotel is expected to be constructed of connecting pods around a central hub. Each pod will be able to hold four guests and two astronaut-pilots.

Galactic Suite CEO Xavier Claramunt, says “an anonymous billionaire space enthusiast” has granted $3 billion to finance the project.

Galactic Suites claim that more than 200 people have already inquired about staying at the hotel, with 43 of them actually putting in their reservations.

Top 6 Ways How to Check Your Website Backlinks

How to Check Websites Backlinks / Check PR / Check Internal Pagerank / PR Checking tools

1. Google Webmaster Console (http://www.google.com/webmasters)- absolute leader for checking backlinks. Webmaster console is probably the most accurate source for backlink checking. The big downside is that you can only check backlinks for your own websites. Also, some people say that its yet another way for Google how to get more information about your site - if you are doing something dodgy, be careful.

2. Yahoo SiteExplorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)- if you don't have access to the webmaster console then Yahoo is your tool. Its not as accurate as GWC but still good enough. You can see up to 1000 backlinks for every domain but results include nofollow links as well. You can also export backlinks to TSV file (like CSV but separated with tabs), but only a current page.

3. Google Allinanchor command - This is not very known trick. Using allinanchor command with your website name you can get quite a lot of backlinks for your site. The advantage is that using that method you can get links which were not reported by google link command or yahoo siteexplorer e.g.

allinanchor:www.yourwebsite.com or allinanchor: yourwebsite

The disadvantage is that if your website name is a generic phrase then you will get lots of results which are not links to your site.


4. SEO Elite, Backlink Analyzer etc. (http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer) , (http://www.seoelite.com) - These tools can help you with digging up backlinks from search engines in an easier way. You don't have to manually check every page in Google/Yahoo as this tool compiles a report with backlinks along with other useful information like Google Pagerank, Alexa rating etc..

5. Alternative search engines - There are other search engines that can give you information about backlinks:
MSN - uses link operator like G or Y - link:http://www.yourwebsite.com
Exalead - uses link operator like G or Y - link:http://www.yourwebsite.com
These search engines can give you sometime a backlink which is not reported by Yahoo SiteExplorer, but mostly its waste of time.

6. Google alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) - This is a less known one. You can set Google Alerts on your domain like - http://www.yourwebsite.com and Google will send you a n email when the link is found somewhere on the web. This is a cool way how to check for new links but Google will report also pages where only your website is mentioned but no real link is present. The disadvantage of this method is that Google Alerts are not as accurate as they could be, sometimes emails are not being sent, even Google have indexed a page with the link.


Best Pagerank Checking Tools
http://www.smartpagerank.com/pagerank-backlinks.php
http://check-backlink.com/cgi-bin/bl_checker.pl

Have I missed something? Any suggestions/corrections are welcome.

What Is PageRank Leakage? Is Your Website Leaking PageRank?

What Is PR Leakage? Is Your Website Leaking PR?

Improving and maintaining PageRank is a top priority for webmasters because it affects how much traffic a website will receive from Google. But what many webmasters do not realize is that their websites are leaking PageRank, causing their overall site-wide PageRank to be lower than it should be.

What Is PageRank Leakage?
PageRank leakage is when outbound links to external websites give away pagerank that could be better distributed among pages within the website. The effect of pagerank leakage is most profound when a website has many links to external sites, and when internal pages are not well linked.

How To Prevent PageRank Leakage
There are two main ways to prevent PageRank leakage:

1. Eliminate many outbound links
Many websites and blogs have footers and sidebars which contain outbound links. The footer, for example, might contain links to the company that developed the website or to the content management system on which it was built. And the sidebar often contains a blogroll.

The problem is that these links are typically displayed on every page of the website, causing PageRank to exit and adding no value to the page.

To fix this problem, you can remove all of these redundant links and place them in all in one single page. This solution is very popular because it enables webmasters to share a limited amount of PageRank, while not dramatically contributing to the website’s overall PageRank leakage.

2. Use Nofollow Links
Another way to limit PageRank leakage is to completely stop links from passing PageRank. This is easily done by adding nofollow to links, as shown in the example below.

Example
This method is very effective, however, many webmasters are reluctant to add nofollow to links because it is often considered selfish to avoid passing PageRank to legitimate websites. And you also don’t want to completely stop linking to websites because there is evidence that Google does take your outbound links into consideration when ranking your website. But you should consider using nofollow when linking to advertisers and sponsors, and in any links that you do leave in your footer or sidebar.

What About PageRank Distribution within Your Website?
You can also use these techniques to control PageRank distribution within your website. If you have some preferred content that you want to rank well, you can prioritize it by linking liberally to it from your other pages. Additionally, if you want to avoid wasting PageRank on a page, you can opt to use nofollow links when linking internally.

In the Google Webmasters/Site owners help, Google calls this crawl prioritization and gives the following example:

Search engine robots can’t sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there’s no reason to invite Googlebot to follow "register here" or "sign in" links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you’d prefer to see in Google’s index.

How To Install CommentLuv On Your Blogspot Blog

How To Enable CommentLuv Pugin On Blogspot Blog

I took the skeleton insructions from here for easier reference and cross navigation for you. You can have better guidelines on what to do to install CommentLuv on your blog by seeing instructions there, and switch here if you want more detailed explanations..


The first thing to remember is, CommentLuv is a Java-based script, and thus you have to allow Javascript to run on your browser. Don't be like me, activating NoScript on my Firefox and was wondering why CommentLuv didn't work. :P My instructions, once again, is a modified version of instructions posted on commentluv.com. This instructions have been tested thoroughly and confirmed working. I recommend you to follow these instructions step by step so there won't be any mistakes happened.

Step 1
Register your site and verify it
This is a simple process. Don't tell me you don't know how to register a new account on a website.... -.- Go here-> http://www.commentluv.com/wp-login.php?action=register to register new account on commentluv.com.

Fill out the necessary fields, and continue. You will be told that a confirmation email has been sent to your mailbox. Check it and click link embedded in it to activate your account.

Next, you have to add commentluv tag to verify your site. Go here: http://www.commentluv.com/settings/ , and fill out your site address. You will have to put html code (below badges display) like provided on this pic, on your blog. Just add a new page element (Javascript) and paste the whole code there.























Once you have inserted the code, click 'verify' to claim your site. The verifying phase now is done.

Step 2
Import your comments and convert your blogger template
Go here: http://js-kit.com/comments/blogger.cgi .



















Again, it's a javascript based website, so disable your NoScript if you have it installed in Firefox/ add an exception for this website.

Fill out the fields on 'Step 1: Importing Your Comments.' Blog URL should be filled with your blog's URL, Ex: eternalblackzero.blogspot.com, Account should be filled with YOUR BLOGSPOT EMAIL ADDRESS that you use regularly to login to your blog. And finally, Password is your blogspot email address password. Click import button and wait, confirmation screen should appear in a minute or so, depending on your connection speed.

Then, please follow instructions posted on 'Step 2' carefully.

If you have followed everything correctly, after you had finished 'Step 2' on js-kit.com, your blog's comment form should've been changed by now. Please refresh your browser if you haven't seen the difference.


Step 3
View the commentluv code
Go back to commentluv.com to get your code now. The code is located here: http://www.commentluv.com/download/blogger-commentluv/ .





















You HAVE to click 'Click for your code' and small text box will appear there. Copy the whole text and switch to your blogspot control panel now.

Step 4
Install to your blogger template

Add one page element (Javascript/HTML) . I suggest you to leave title field blank, so the widget won't clutter your blog's appearance. The script should be stay invisible as it adds functionality/design on your comment form only, not enhance your blog's general look and feel.





















Paste the code there on a 'content' field.

And there you go, you've successfully installed commentluv on your blog. ^^b But there is a thing you need to know. Here it is,

Step 5
Your js-kit settings
Now go to your comment form, and click "powered by jskit" hyperlink. It should take you on this page:

Here you can change many settings for your commentluv widget. I personally didn't change anything (before I removed my widget to experiment it on my other test blog) and was quite satisfied with commentluv.

If you'd like to uninstall commentluv, just upload your original template that was backed up during js-kit installation. Just restore your original template and blogspot will delete the commentluv widget automatically. Easy, huh? ^^

And that's the end of my tutorial. I hope you're able to make a good use of this great widget. If you have anything you'd like to speak, post it on my comment form here.

List Of Cool Blogs Using CommentLuv Plugin

  • Nihars World

  • Shout Me Loud

  • Domain Marvelous

  • Blog Solute

  • Letssermo

  • Blogussion

  • Teenius

  • Serradinho

  • Web Journey

  • i Blog Master

  • AnimHut

  • MyBlog2Day

  • The Marketing Park

  • Technically Personal

  • Quick Online Tips

  • Asnio

  • Dollar Shower

  • Better Blogging For Bloggers

  • Chidimar

  • Blogging Diary

  • The Anand

  • Cats Who Code

  • Guide To Tech

  • Amit Bhawani

  • Tech Zoomin

  • Pallab

  • Jacob Yap

  • Tech 18

  • Tech Genuine

  • Techie Buzz

  • Dat Money

  • Tricks Daddy

  • Shanker Bakshi

  • Dish Tracking

  • Softpoint

  • Techie Blogger

  • Technobuz

  • My Technology Guide

  • PSD Recipes

  • Novice Bloggers


  • If you own a blog or know a blog which has Comment Luv plugin and if you like it to be displayed here, then please mention in the comments with some details and i'll add them into this list!

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