Bloggy Hell

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I’m not sure how well this metaphor is going to extend outside of people from Christan or Jewish backgrounds, but I can’t think of a decent non-denominational analogue, so bear with me.

As has been the tradition for many, many years, when a child is baptised, the parents select Godparents. Now originally, it was the Godparents responsibility to ensure the childs religious well-being - however, I (perhaps under some childish misconception) always thought of them as the next in line for guardianship if my folks died or disowned me.

Why don’t we do this for businesses? I’m a freelancer and if I got hit by the #66 on it’s way to Morley would there be anyone to notify my clients? It’s a bit morbid to think about, but we write wills for such an event - but how many people think about this for their business?

Even if you had the best documentation in the world, and kept your Outlook contact list up-to-date, it is all pretty worthless if nobody can access it, so they can contact the people that need to get contacted. So I’m proposing a system of Business Godparents - someone that can go in if the unimaginable happens and sort things out, to make sure your clients aren’t left high and dry.

Things to look for in a potential candidate:

• Be someone you trust. You are basically giving them sensitive business information - if you think they will take your client list and start cold calling them , they may not be the best person.
• They don’t have to be in the industry, but make sure they have a list of people that they can contact in-case of emergency. Having someone in the industry does have the advantage that they can start taking care of your clients right off the bat.
• Your accountant might  be a good choice - they already knows your business intimately, so what is a few other bits and pieces?
• Family members are probably good candidates as well.

What they will need to know and have access to? Well, that depends on the industry you are in - but if you are in the web industry you might include:

• Your client list. They will obviously need to be able to contact your clients to let them know, as well as be able to do things like release source code, or graphics or whatever.
• Usernames and passwords. This one is a bit tricky - obviously good password security states that no-one else should know your password, and that you should change it regularly. Maybe you could have a “needs to know” policy, where you spread the knowledge amongst a number of people. A non-industry person might be an advantage, here. If your accountant or a sibling has a “master password” (or a USB key with a private key certificate) that they can give to a nominated “person  (or persons) in the know”, there may be a smaller risk.
• Names of services that you use, such as domain registrars, hosting companies etc
• A list of other organisations that could potentially take over certain jobs, as well as a list of other stakeholders in the project. If the job was inherited from another firm, or if the job was a joint venture, it may be really easy to hand it over.

This is a bit of a brain dump, so feel free to leave comments on how this could work. What would you include in the list? How could you get around the security issues associated with password lists? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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WANTED: Freelancers, startups, consultants or small businesses who need some office space.

If you are a small business, freelancer, consultant or a startup and you have out grown your back room but can’t quite afford a swish office of your own, the Silicon Beach house could be just what you need! Even though we seem to have attracted a number of developers and graphic designers, we are open to any body who is desk-bound by day.

One of the great things about having people with different skill sets is if you come across something that you can’t do, there is quite possibly someone there who can (Within reason - we don’t have any wood-workers, so asking questions about lathing may not get such a quick response). Personally, I would love to see an accountant and a lawyer join us, so I can pick their brains! We are all friendly, maybe a little talkative, but all in all it is a great place to work.

You can see the inside of the office below - but it is a second-floor open plan office with a small board-room table, kitchenette, a couple of couches and (obviously) some desks. It is fully furnished, so basically you just need to bring your computer. Whilst many of us just bring our laptops, a couple of us do leave desktopmachines there, and we all leave external monitors, so your stuff will be safe.

The beach house has a monitored alarm, ADSL connection, wireless, printer/copier/fax machine and water cooler all included in the rent (which is pretty darn reasonable), is REALLY close to the Perth train station (It’s across the road) and is basically slap-bang the middle of the city CBD. If you want more information regarding prices, please contact me, and I’ll put you on to the right person.

If you are interested in coming and having a look, we are at

Level 2, 90 King St
Perth WA 6000

[Google Map]

So what are you waiting for?

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Oh how I love alliteration. Especially on a leap year. This Friday, the 29th is the next installment of everyone’s favourite open house co-working day, Freelancer Friday. At this point I would make some smart-alec remark about how Freelance Fridays would only fall on a leap every x-number of years, however, I can’t be bothered working it out (I’m sure someone out there who will) so instead I’ll point you at the wiki, where you can put your name down. Hurry, time is limited.

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I can’t believe we are almost 0.083333% of the way through the year. By now everyone should be back at work - those of us at the Silicon Beach House are. Well as a result, Freelancer Fridays are back! Keeping with the “Last friday of the month” timeline, the next Freelancer Friday is on 25 January at the Silicon Beach House - Level 2, 90 King St, Perth WA. Turn up anytime between 9am and 5pm.

If you are interested in turning up (as always) add your name to the Work@Jelly wiki.

Today, I was discussing with one of the housemates, Angela about the problems in finding other freelancers when you need to do something outside of your skill set. We discussed what I called Company-as-a-Service and came to the conclusion that Freelancer co-ops were definitely plausible. Well, to facilitate some better communication between us freelancers, I’ve created a Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/australian-freelancers. If your are a freelancer, please sign up, that way we can all support each other, and find experts when we need them!

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Call it lazy blogging, but the beginning of a new year is a perfect opportunity to write a list post. I’m not going to call the list below predictions for 2008 as there is absolutely no scientific basis for any of this, so I’m calling it Hot or Not - stuff that I think/want to be hot in 2008 and stuff that I would love to see head to the big TCP/IP stack in the sky.

OAuth: Hot. Anything that brings some sort of order to the big bad world of web APIs is a good thing. If you haven’t seen it yet, it is a specification that describes a method for token-based access to third party applications. So now there is really no excuse for that confounding social network to ask for your usernames and passwords to all of your other confounding social networking sites, just so it can spam have access to all of your friends.

Confounding Social Network sites: Not. OK. That is enough. I am over been bamboozed at the sight of another social network that has no direction, meaning or business model. The concept behind a social network is cool - we used to call them forums, remember - but it is now officially out of control. To the “entrepreneurs” behind them - stop trying to kill Facebook, they have more money than you and careless less about their users than you ever could (Exception: Spock - You are still Satan’s spawn).

Software as a Service: Hot. It’s kinda like Web2.0 but this time with meaning. Bring back computing to what it was meant for - helping humans to do what they do. The web is the perfect delivery method for a lot of the desktop software we use everyday. Google has already shown us what can be done with apps like GMail and Google Docs and there is a myriad of web applications that have made the leap (If I can build one, anyone can). Pay for what you use, don’t worry about license fees any more, don’t worry about what happens when you hard drive crashes, or about deploying to all 500 machines in your organisation.

Advertising as a Business Mode: Not. The darling child of Web2.0/New Media/Social Networks. Unless your site is already doing the traffic of Google/YouTube/Facebook or your are a porn site, go and erase the “we will pay for our hosting via advertising” line from you business plan. Seconds thoughts, if you are Facebook, you should probably do the same (Nice work on beacon - at what point did that actually seem like a good idea?). Advertising only works if there is eyeballs a LOT of eyeballs on pages and if your target audience is the type that clicks on ads. And since every man and his dog has released a social network this week, you aren’t a unique snowflake. Get a real business plan first.

Mashups: Hot. Yeah, I know - these have been around since the first beta of Web 2.0 but it has never really extended much beyond adding a Google Map to your site. I think 2008 and will see some really cool productivity apps built leveraging the webservices of other web sites. I think that it may even spill over in to the corporate world - I’d love to see company intranets using webservices to customise workflows.

Getting VC funding then hoping to sell to <insert large company name here>: Not. Now, I have no problem with the concept of funding, or the hopes and dreams of having a large company with a bank balanace bigger than your phone number (including country and area code) throw you some bones, per se. Where I do draw the line, however is pitching with a business plan that can’t really pay back a return to the investor unless the business get bought out. Mind you, the investors really should know better - or maybe they are just much smarter than I am, who knows. Regardless, when this whole thing collapses in on it’s self, I’ll be dancing like it is on sale for $19.99…

Mobile: Hot. This is the next frontier for the web. Everyone has a mobile (some people two or three) and they are generally on their person at all times. Extend the SaaS idea to these small devices and you really will be able to get your stuff done when it suits. Again, this isn’t new, but there have been some advancements in technology and some new players who understand the web much better (that’s Google if you were wondering). I think 2008 is the year that see the mobile platform as a first-class netizen rather than something that the work experience kid gets to work on.

Using user data with out permission: Not: You would have by now seen my (MANY) rants about Spock and Facebook. Those playing in the dirty, back alleyways of social networking really need to take a long hard look at themselves. It’s my data, and I’d prefer it if you didn’t sell my browsing habits to the highest bigger. And don’t even think about scraping my data from other sites without my permission - they asked nicely, you didn’t.

Company-as-a-Service: Hot. Haven’t heard of this? That’s because I just made it up. We have seen Software-as-a-Service, Hardware-as-a-Service (eg Amazon EC2), so why not have have companies that can shrink, grow and churn as required? There are so many freelancers and consultants out there, as well as a huge number of micro businesses. If they all grouped together, they would be able to work on sites ranging from the very-very big to the very-very small. Many places kind of do this already (this is why contracting was invented) but I can see this working in a more peer-to-peer sort of way - you aren’t contracting for someone, you are contracting with someone (there is a remarkable difference).

New years lists: Not.

Leave a comment - Is this Hot or Not