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DOING WORK REMOTELY
The global labour markets are integrating into "a single market for jobs that can be performed remotely", writes Deepak Mankar.
The trouble with poetry is that it doesn't call a spade a spade. Anthropomorphic language tends to confuse every issue. For instance, if you call a piece of real estate motherland or fatherland, you're bound to confound the confusion by believing yourself in the role of her/his gallant son/daughter and transferring a host of human attributes and emotions to her/him.
In the wake of the recent deluge in Mumbai, people have been talking about 'Nature's 'revenge', 'Nature striking back', etc. All this fancy stuff merely alludes to a sequence of events where greedy and callous people misbehaved and Nature continued to behave as it always does according to the Cosmic Law. If you reclaim land from the sea, the sea will flow somewhere else when the high tide is in. If you block the flow of water, it will find an alternate course. Making Nature into a malevolent villain shrewdly shifts the focus of the discussion from working towards a solution of the problem to telling the tragic tale of human suffering and endurance. For more on anthropomorphic skullduggery, go here: Anthropomorphic.
SHEER GENIUS! The US Prez as Homo sapiens. Well, almost.
No. I haven't watched a single episode of Desperate Housewives so far. But I'm most impressed by the use of Laura Bush's desperate stand-up act at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner on 30 April 2005 in the series' worldwide promo. It shows a chuckling George Bush looking rather sheepish and tacitly agreeing to her charge of "Nine o'clock and Mr Excitement here is sound asleep and I'm watching Desperate Housewives". I guess that's a stroke of pure unadulterated genius in spin doctoring - almost subliminally projecting the beleaguered, widely hated US President as 'a nice next-door guy, didn't you know?' The full transcript of Laura Bush's 'First Lady of Comedy' act is here. usatoday.com/life/people.
P.S.: I guess, in retrospect, that there's something fascinating about the American way of living and talking as my own experience during my impressionable years shows. I was among the first in my circle of friends to wear blue denim jeans as everyday apparel. I also diligently gleaned American usage, circa 1950s, from pulp fiction, comic books and movies. You know stuff like yup, gonna, gotta, guess, reckon, guys, dolls, babe, baby, dame, hombre, get it, capiche, reach for the skies, gat, grub, dick/'tec, private eye, jalopy, dough and so forth. I remember feeling superior while trying it all out on lesser folks who didn't 'get it'. Find your own way around the beguiling bye-lanes of slang at spraakservice.net.
DOING WORK REMOTELY. Quo vadis?
Outsourcing is a topic this column follows fairly regularly. The last coverage was on 16 July 2005, for instance.hindustantimes.com. (Check out the opening section as well as 'SOFTWARE WAR. China versus India.') I just found an interesting new article ('Sizing the global labor market') mckinseyquarterly.com. Its theme is expressed along the following lines. The global labour markets are integrating into "a single market for jobs that can be performed remotely". Right now, it's small. (The Ventoro research to which the link is cited below found that slightly over19 percent of respondents had a current offshoring strategy.) "But as it grows, the demand for offshore labour from the developed world's companies will increasingly affect wage rates and employment levels in the developing world." Also: "Offshoring is unlikely to create any sudden discontinuities in overall levels of employment and wages in developed countries." And, finally: "Both companies and countries can take specific measures to help clear supply and demand more efficiently in this nascent global market." You may download the Ventoro research report on outsourcing (pdf) at ventoro.com.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE. Talk the talk.
As glossaries go, this one in its 'updated' avatar gets my vote. Not only is it more comprehensive than its previous incarnation, but also it has many additional definitions as well as significant corrections and amendments to its original contents. By the way, no attempt has been made to ascribe authorship. The complier is Vernon Prior of Prior Knowledge who conducts seminars on business intelligence and knowledge management throughout Asia and the Middle East. Prior is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA) and a member of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals. scip.org. You may download the full article (pdf) at languagebi.pdf.
CONTENT TO SHARE? Go to OurMedia.org.
By the looks of it, OurMedia.org ourmedia.org is a non-profit initiative that provides free storage space and bandwidth to anyone with videos, audio files, text files or software that they'd like to share with the world. It's a website intended to promote the personal-media revolution, supporting individual content creators (writers, podcasters, videographers, photographers and the like). The website claims that there are "no catches." Storage of content is to be provided "forever." OurMedia.org is funded by Internet tycoon Brewster Kahle en.wikipedia.org and foundation money.
WIKIPEDIA. Is the freeze finally on?
Of course, everybody knows what the wiki scene is all about. The idea behind the wiki concept en.wikipedia.org/wiki is to generate content by embracing a process of group intelligence - that is to say, by allowing anyone possessing the knowledge of a topic to write or edit at will. Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org, the free-for-all encyclopaedia, is the showcase for the concept - presumably a largely successful one at that. But now the word is out (via Reuters) that the wiki concept may not continue to be as utopian as we thought. yahoo.com.
Wikipedia may soon impose stricter editorial rules to prevent vandalism. Founder Jimmy Wales was quoted saying that Wikipedia needs to find a balance between protecting information from abuse and providing public access so that entries can be improved.
In other words, it amounts to freezing some pages "whose quality is undisputed". The straw that broke the camel's back is vandalism such as that on the page about the new Pope Benedict, in which a user substituted a photo of the pontiff with that of the evil emperor from the Star Wars film series. Wales wants to find a way to prevent that sort of mischief because even if a spoof image is online for only a few minutes, it will damage the overall credibility of the wiki. This may usher in a new wave of partially closed wikis as opposed to the pure wiki concept with complete openness. Wikipedia's sad experience mentioned earlier is probably pointing in the direction of wikis written and edited by vetted groups of experts. "Human nature being what it is, perhaps the ideal of complete openness is a pipe dream," as Steve Outing points out in his 8 August 2005 post at poynter.org.
That's all for now though there's plenty more out there. Join me again next week, same place.
Copyright (c) 2001- 2005 by Deepak Mankar. All rights reserved. Deepak Mankar, an advertising practitioner on the creative side since 1965, is also intensely passionate about the web and web content creation. Read his online articles athttp://www.asiaondemand.com/.
Website:http://www.addgandhi.com/original/.
You may e-mail him at dmankar@bom8.vsnl.net.in.
