Web Worker Daily is one of my favorite resources for everything having to do with online business. I just came across an article in the archives from last fall (I only started reading them a couple months ago) titles “Going Bedouin“, complete with their recipe for doing so (it basically consists of a laptop, cell phone, mailing address, a space - or spaces - to work in, and a host of web-based applications for keeping track of everything).

The basic idea is that as companies (especially tech companies) grow larger, they tend to overinflate, which usually leads to their demise. As they move into the posh new offices, they become more conservative, more constrained, and much less likely to innovate. Going Bedouin, on the other hand, leaves you with pretty much all of your options open. If you can fit your entire company’s infrastructure into a backpack, you know you’re on the right track.

Having mobility can be essential for a small business. It leaves you with many more opportunities to make changes, to grow and transform as your business changes, and with much lower overhead (and therefore higher profits). Which would you prefer? A luxury office (complete with reflecting pool and Zen garden) and constantly having to worry about making the rent (or mortgage)? Or would you rather have a small but functional office with the flexibility to pack up and work from the beach in Brazil for a month at a moment’s notice? How about the option to work from home for a couple weeks? Or taking in twice the profits because your overhead is nil? Personally, I’d prefer the last three.

And if you really need the Zen garden, get one of the little one’s that sits on your desk (and throw in an Itty Bitty Buddha while you’re at it).

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Web Worker Daily has a head to head post comparing Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and Hotmail. Pretty interesting…

I’ve never really used Yahoo! Mail, so I can’t really comment on that (although I’ve heard that it’s in their terms of service that they sell your information to other companies — if someone could confirm that would be great), but I have used Gmail and Hotmail. Here are my thoughts on those:

Hotmail has an insane amount of spam, and absolutely horrible spam filtering. Unless you set your account to only accept whitelisted email and put everything else in your junk mail folder, the spam makes it pretty much useless. The new Windows Live Hotmail interface isn’t that great, and has tons of advertising. It’s also pretty slow to use.

Gmail is my favorite of the three. It’s got a better interface than Hotmail, although it takes a bit of getting used to (the conversation view is a little different than the chronological views of most email programs). The spam is also significantly lower than most email accounts. I’m interested to try their new enterprise accounts, where you get the benefits of Gmail, but with email at your own domain…

But, I have to say that I don’t really use any of the above at the moment. I’m currently using Entourage on my Mac (the Mac version of Outlook), which is okay. I’m thinking of switching to Thunderbird, at least for my professional email correspondence…but have had some pretty negative experiences with Thunderbird for PC (but that’s a completely different post). I use webmail for each of my domains, as well as an account from the ISP that my husband works for.

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Shift Happens is the winner of the World’s Best Presentation Contest from SlideShare.net. This slideshow will absolutely blow your mind. The statistics are just beyond belief (China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world, If you took every single job in the U.S. and shipped it to China…China would still have a labor surplus). If this slideshow doesn’t make you think twice about, well, everything, then you’re not really thinking about it. I was absolutely dumbfounded after reading it, and was unable to really think about anything for a few minutes afterward.

With the speed at which information and technology are growing, and the rate of that growth, humans will soon be outdated. Our brains will no longer have the capacity to understand and comprehend what is going on around us. We’ll become dependent on computers to interpret, store, and organize the data (more completely than we do now), and without those computers we will be unable to function. With the advent of more intelligent computing systems and artificial intelligence just over the horizon, are we making ourselves obsolete?

Via Guy Kawasaki’s How To Change The World.

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