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Stefan Theil shatters a few myths in this piece from Newsweek:

“As it turns out, the average founder of a high-tech startup isn’t a whiz kid like [Mark] Zuckerberg [of Facebook], but a mature 40-year-old engineer or business type with a spouse and children who simply got tired of working for others, says Duke University scholar Vivek Wadhwa, who studied 549 successful technology ventures.

“What’s more, he says, older entrepreneurs have higher success rates.”

Incidentally, the version published in the hard-copy September 6, 2010, issue is only two paragraphs long, whereas the Web version runs four times as long.

That’s some skillful editing, but I was surprised to find the longer version on the Web, with only a digest in hard copy. This seems like a reversal of recent publishing practice.

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Many people want to do something that will benefit others. The open-source software movement has been one avenue for the technologically inclined.

Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera wrote a recent article about three organizations that give people another way to help: the Extraordinaries, Philoptima, and Ushahidi.

“Platforms that use crowdsourcing principles are experiments in using technology to effectively engage people and channel their interests into a cause,” he writes.

Source

Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera, Networks Direct Volunteers to Micro Gigs, San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 28, 2010; printed in hard copy as “Tapping into Brainpower.”

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Even before his death from cancer in June 2008, I had started looking around for backups. Everyone was fair game, anyone who could cast a similar eye on the passing scene, who would look over as if to say, “Did you see that?”, who could make me laugh with an arched eyebrow or make me look at the other side of things quickly and deeply.

After two years, it’s dawned on me that I’m really seeking a sense that everything is OK, everything will be well, that there are always new people to meet and connect with, to laugh and cry with. I have met them in spades since that year that he was dying. Perhaps my other brothers were always there, but I hadn’t needed to see them. Their strong shoulders, gentle humor, teasing reproaches.

You never stop missing a loved one who has died. But if you’re very lucky, others help you with the burden. Others help you see that the empty places don’t go on forever.

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Charles Purdy provides seven steps for using Twitter in your job search.

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Journalist and blogger LaToya Egwuekwe has created an animation that plots U.S. unemployment data by county and state from January 2007 to early August 2010, The Decline: Geography of a Recession. She gathers the numbers from the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Thanks to my friend James for the pointer.

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As a telecommuter who works on web content, I rarely meet my colleagues face-to-face. My work world is virtual, based on emails, attached documents, and phone calls. In most cases, this suits me fine. But the recent death of a colleague I’d met only once pointed out some limitations.

I wanted to send my condolences to those closest to her. But who were they?

Google and Yahoo searches turned up the name of her high school, some Twitter and Facebook postings, her comments about an apartment she’d rented during a vacation in Paris. The local newspapers had no obituary for her.

From postings on the private blog she’d invited me to, I knew that her parents in a nearby city had helped care for her during previous bouts with cancer and that she’d found their help problematic: needed but tinged with a sense of impending doom that she greatly resisted. I knew that she had many friends. But who had sat with her in her final hours?

In the end, it was a mutual colleague who sent me an address for her parents, by email, of course. I bought a sympathy card and wrote the note, a stranger writing to strangers about a talented and complicated person, their adult child, whose death came much too early and was far from virtual.

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Where you work helps define who you talk with, what you think about, how you solve problems, and how you think about the future. The economic downturn has led to changes in how and where a number of people do their work.

If you miss going in to the office, the San Francisco Chronicle has two recent stories about people who’ve found some new ways to work together:

• Tom Abate, Shared Work Spaces New Resource for Solo Worker (June 4)
• Carolyn Said, San Francisco Sees Influx of Tech Incubators (June 18)

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How do you present numeric data in a way that will catch the viewer’s attention? Here are two bright examples of ways to convey information:

• Doug McCune superimposes crime statistics on a map of San Francisco, California.
• Marca.com provides a World Cup 2010 calendar that shows teams, schedules, and events.

These brightly colored graphics are much more immediately interesting than are rows and columns of data, even if they convey the same information.

Thanks to Ryan Kim of the San Francisco Chronicle and hound at Testy Copy Editors for the pointers to these pages.

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The May 2010 issue of the Editcetera newsletter mentions the onlinestylebooks.com site, where you can research style decisions from more than 50 style manuals.

Thanks to the people at Copyediting.com for the recommendation.

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“Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month… Older teen girls ages 14-17 [are] averaging 100 messages a day,” according to this report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Many teens in the study used text messaging for chatting with peers and saved voice communication for calls with their parents.

Sources

. Ryan Kim, More than Half of Teens Now Send Text Messages, San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 2010.
. Amanda Lenhart, Rich Ling, Scott Campbell, Kristen Purcell, Teens and Mobile Phones, Pew Internet & American Life Project, April 20, 2010.

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“According to the National Alliance for Caregiving, about 50 million Americans are providing some care for an adult family member. I was swimming in an invisible crowd of caregivers every day,” writes Jonathan Rauch in the Atlantic Monthly.

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The latest issue of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox newsletter is about how users read on the Web, whether they scroll down pages, and what kind of attention they pay to particular page elements.

Take a look at the graphics under the heading “Scrolling Behaviors” that show readers’ attention, captured through eye-tracking technology, and particularly at the “gaze plots.”

Note that the final paragraph of the text-heavy Amazon.com page on the left gets a lot of concentrated attention. That shouldn’t happen, if it’s true that people don’t like to scroll down to read long chunks of text on the Web.

Nielsen does not say which of the three pages in that graphic got readers to buy the item(s) in question, rather than just to browse pages about them. That would be even more interesting.

Source

Scrolling and Attention, Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, March 22, 2010.

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What are the differences between traditional publishing, vanity press, and self-publishing? How do the newer print-on-demand options compare?

Writer Carla King takes a look at the issues in her PBS MediaShift column, Self-Publishing, Author Services Open Floodgates for Writers.

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From the nation of Georgia comes an example of what not to do with your media.

French television station TV5Monde reported last night that a Georgian broadcasting station had perpetrated a hoax on the order of Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds.

A news broadcaster at the station had falsely reported that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had been killed and that Russian tanks had begun to invade the nation.

The French station reported that Georgians had panicked, causing a run on food supplies at markets, and that calls for emergency medical help had skyrocketed as a result of the so-called news. But it was all a hoax.

In the article Panic in Georgia After a Mock News Broadcast, Andrew Kramer of the New York Times gives some details.

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Working with a new tool requires patience. Learning how to use it often takes time from the very thing that you wanted to use the tool for.

I recently worked with five busy professionals to put together a panel discussion on freelancing. Tiny decisions about who, where, when, what, and how had to be made around multiple schedules and across geographical distances.

At first, we communicated by email. But the volume of email soon got out of hand, and some information got lost in the shuffle.

I set up a Google Sites wiki as a virtual meeting place. We were able to write updates, introduce ourselves to one another with short biographies and photos, store contact information, post target dates, and work together on the questions that we would discuss. Best of all, each panelist could check in at his or her convenience to see what others were saying.

But some panelists hesitated to add to the wiki, perhaps intimidated by not knowing how to use the tool. Others were not checking in regularly. So we reverted to emails that said things like “Don’t forget to check the wiki!”

Although everyone agreed that we should meet before the night of the panel discussion, finding a time and place to meet in person proved too complicated.

To schedule a meeting time that would work for the greatest number of people, I set up a poll through Doodle.com. The panelists and our helpers could then vote on when they could attend.

We eventually held two conference calls on FreeConference. The service was not quite free, but setup was relatively simple and the call automatically recorded for later use.

The February 24 panel discussion, Tips for Surviving and Thriving as a Freelancer, went very well, with 75 people seated in the Mechanics’ Institute meeting room and café for the meeting.

Publicity had reached Bay Area Editors’ Forum, the Northern California Translators Association, the Northern California Science Writers Association, San Francisco Women on the Web, readers of the Sin and Syntax site, and likely a few others.

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