International Freelancers Day online conference

If you haven't already heard or signed up, the International Freelancers Day online conference will be taking place on September 24, 2010. A quick look at the agenda and 25 speakers makes it look like a worthwhile confab. It's founded by Steve Slaunwhite, Pete Savage and Ed Gandia of TheWealthyFreelancer.com, which is one of my regular RSS reads.

And it's free, too.

If you're registered, you'll also be able to watch replays of the presentations, in case you're working on deadline or out of town.

Simplicity is hard. Let's go shopping!

Simpler, generally speaking, is better. A clever little riff on the subject can be found here.

H/T to my tech-entrepreneur-iPhone-app-developer-and-deep-thinker bud Chris DeVore.

The S-word, the R-word, and the F-word

When my daughter was about 4, she tattle-taled that her 5-year-old brother had said "the S-word." This didn't seem right to me; even though my wife and enjoy cussing, I was pretty confident that we'd shielded their young ears from four-letter words to that point. (That's no longer the case.)

After a bit of cross examination, I managed to get her to reveal that Nick had actually said "stupid"--yes, a banned word in our household, though mercifully not the one I'd feared.

Which brings me to the recent kerfuffle about "the R-word" as a placeholder for the word retard or retarded. I will say that Rahm Emmanuel's use of it, paired with the F-word gerund, is appalling language for a person in the public eye. It was appropriate for him to apologize. On the other hand, I'm not on board with the pledges to forcibly remove retard or retarded from the everyday lexicon, and scrubbing it from U.S. law seems quixotic at best, Orwellian at worst. It is a completely inappropriate pejorative, but where do you stop? Languages are full of nasty, hateful words.

I'm confident that turning "the R-word" into a euphemism for an ugly phrase doesn't solve the root problem, which is crudeness and thoughtlessness. Anyone with a brain knows EXACTLY what the placeholder means. That's why I loathe the phrase "the N-word." Hiding behind that "N" is a concept at its ugliest.

On a lighter note, I wonder who's in charge of deciding which word gets first rights to the use of each of the letters in the alphabet. (The OED?) On occasion, I'll jokingly call freelancing "the other F-word," because so many people have had a bad experience on one side of the fence or the other. But right now, you can just call me "the B-word": bored with the whole stupid issue.

"Free" advice from Wired's Chris Anderson

I don't commonly link to articles I've written, but I'm making an exception for "The Freeconomics of Speakonomics," which appears in the October issue of Speaker magazine. It's a feature about Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, from an interview we did shortly after his best-selling book Free came out.

My reason for posting is twofold:

1. Chris responded to my interview request within two hours of being asked, and within another two hours, his assistant had provided a half dozen times for me to choose from. That kind of response time is incredibly unusual, and should be praised to the skies.
   
2. Even though the story is targeted at professional speakers, there are some parallels and lessons for freelancers. As an entrepreneur, "free" is something that you can't ignore, but you can leverage to your advantage.

Whether you ultimately agree or disagree with Chris's conclusions, Free will challenge your assumptions about pricing and value. His blog, The Long Tail, is one of my regular reads for the same reason.

Mommy-Blogging Bait

I'm not a mommy blogger and don't consume beauty products other than soap and toothpaste, but as a former denizen of the custom-publishing world, this story in Ad Age caught my eye... "P&G to Launch Custom Beauty Magazine Rouge in U.S.: Package Goods Giant Plans to Build Database by Relying on Mommy Bloggers to Spread the Word." The scale of the project is pretty astounding for a mailed piece:

Procter & Gamble Co. is enlisting help from mommy bloggers as it makes over its Canadian custom-published quarterly Rouge for a full-scale U.S. launch expected to reach 11 million households in both countries by next year....

...The appeal driving mentions of Rouge among bloggers is pretty simple: It's available at the internet's favorite price (free) and comes loaded with coupons, which happen to drive much of the routine chatter regarding package-goods brands in social media.

I do wonder if the mommy bloggers will get behind the cause without a quid pro quo; maybe the bad economy is what makes coupons an attractive ploy. Even without knowing the cost per unit, I'm inclined to think that P&G will eventually kill the physical magazine and focus on the web site after a few issues (i.e., once they've captured the names). Then again, a custom publication isn't at the mercy of the horrific ad sales environment, and with publications going out of business, it may be a buyer's market in the print biz.

Anyway, they got their links and couple of minutes of free press out of me, so I guess I'm an honorary mommy blogger after all...

Velveeta sandwiches

In an entry a few weeks back, "Res ipsa loquitur," I'd piled on (along with a million other people) in opining about an ad agency intern's public nastygram to her former employer.

Today's post is triggered by two items in the same vein: 1) An article in the New York Times about the trend in students (or rather their parents) to pay for internships, "Unpaid Work, but They Pay for the Privilege," and 2) a LinkedIn discussion this week based on a letter titled "A beginning writer bitches about the publishing industry."

It's said that bad luck and celebrity deaths come in threes, so perhaps it stands to reason that stupidity also is happiest in a trio. Several common threads run through these three items, but to me the most important is this: a sense of entitlement. The world does not owe you a living, and it doesn't even have to be nice to you. As a wise old man once told a younger me, when I was whining about something or other, "Son, 'fair' is something you enter your prize pig in."

So, what the heck does "Velveeta sandwiches" have to do with anything, you're wondering? They were my standard lunch fare when I was an intern (at a New York Times-owned magazine, ironically enough) making $4 an hour, after earning my bachelor's degree but before being hired full time. And, no, I wouldn't trade that summer for the world.

Tool of the trade

Aside from my computer, there's no tool more important in my freelancing arsenal than my Olympus DS-2 digital recorder. (Prior to owning it, I went through probably a half-dozen microcassette recorders of varying crappy quality...and still have a bunch of those stupid tapes lingering around.) The other item that goes hand in hand with it is the TP-7 recording device, which is an ear bud that allows you to record both sides of the conversation when you're talking on the phone. Yes, I always ask if it's OK to record; I've only had two people say no.

In short, here's why I can't live without it:

• If I'm playing back a fast talker, I can slow it down to 87%, 75%, 60% or even 50% of actual speed. If I need to blast through tedious stuff? Speed it up to 125%, etc.
  
• It allows me to capture exactly what someone said, no note-taking required. Clients love it when they hear their own words...and interviewees appreciate the accuracy.
  
• Depending on what quality setting it's on, it can hold hours of content
  
• I can download everything to my computer through a USB cord
  

I'm not a huge gadget guy, but this thing is an absolute lifesaver. Note: The links are to Amazon, but you can shop around for a better price.

Babies, don't let your mommies grow up to be bloggers

I subscribe to the free daily AdAge email blast, and I'll usually click through on the most interesting link in any given issue. Today's video, "Inside the Mommy Blogger Business," caught my eye based on an offline conversation I've been having with Chronic Fatigue in response to my "Make a six-figure income as a freelance writer" post last week.

The video is only about 10 minutes long, and offers some interesting insights on the growing number of women who've successfully monetized their blogging. Primarily, it sounds like the ones who have a large following then get hooked up with a big brand name can probably make a living at it, or at least get a bunch of free crap. Nonetheless, if 8 million women (by AdAge's estimate) currently publish blogs, forgive me for being a bit skeptical that there's a measurable percentage of Mommy Millionaires, or that your odds aren't better to win the lottery than they are to be "discovered" by Wal-Mart.