What your picture says about you

If you are an intensive user of the freelance networks - as I am - you will easily notice a lot of choices regarding the profile pictures. Some will prefer to hide their identity and post a picture with an avatar, somehow related to their work recommendations. The most used are a computer for the IT specialists and a pen for a freelance writer. 

There are also some that did not make a difference between their hobbies and their tailored profiles and thus they selected as professional recommendations images with favorite pets and various spots visited during their vacations. If the last choice could be a decent option after all, in the case of the pets pictures, I will think more than twice before hiring someone that considered that his representative picture should be a cat or a monkey. 

Last but not least, some decided to upload pictures with their children - could impress the audience when you realize that you will help the person to feed his/her family, but probably it doesn't work for all - or with their lovely spouses. Not few of them are fake and use other people's pictures randomly stolen from the social media networks or from Google. 

What I honestly prefer is a decent picture, when you can say something about yourself, with a professional look that will inspire the potential employer to work with you and not with anyone else. 

Less spam on Freelancer

After quite a long time when at least once the month I was somehow affected by a spam employer on Freelancer.com, I was more than happy to notice the introduction of a new option: the 'verified account'. Thus, before you bid to a project, you will be able to check the accountability of the company or person that you are supposed to work with. 

The checking involves the financial situation, as well as the identity of the employer. Another interesting feature that helps the bidders and employers is the option of checking the dashboards for evaluations, new messages for projects you applied as well as other details of your submissions. 

Good news for me and for other current users of Freelancer.com. 

The main competitor to Pinterest

is called LoveIt. After reading the article, I realized for the first time that this time I will not hurry up to open an account. Simply because I realized that the high frequency of apps and networks is appalling enough for competing seriously with my time.

Thus, the next time when I find out the news about a network, will try to focus from the business point of view and  thus the next account will be open only when no other solution to survive socially.

Is freedom the future of social media?

Wordpress and pictures

I am not such a big fan of Wordpress, but I take any opportunity to learn something new about it. My big problem is that sometimes it might take a lot of time to upload your post, because you need to consider various technicalities that blogspot, for instance, does not have. Very often, due to my hectic work, I need a simple application allowing me to write my posts wherever I am and eventually attach some pics.

While editing some blog posts in Wordpress, I needed to ad some pictures too and I was impressed by the options. First, the picture can be inserted in a very elegant way, with a nice format and a quality space dedicated to the caption. Another great possibility is the creation of galleries of photos. Especially for blogs dedicated to travel, this is a great option. You can follow the slides of pictures at a very good quality. You can insert the picture relatively easily, with many options of the location and the dimensions. The result, is impressive and if not too lazy and with a lot of work to do, I wish I have more than one blog on Wordpress.

Adventure in the freelance world: oDesk

Very often, I complained about the problems that a poor freelancer like me should face regularly when it comes to finding reliable work and most importantly, reliable employers paying their duties in time. 

Till now, I used Freelancer.com - with regularly jobs and a couple of unpleasant financial surprises - and elance - without being selected after more than 4 months. But as I want to improve my porfolio, experience and, not less importantly, my financial situation, I considered too the option of trying out other resources of jobs for freelancers. 

The newest on my list is odesk.com, where I opened an account a couple of months ago, but did not went further. Today, I had the pleasant surprise that, besides updating the usual details and porfolio, I was requested to confirm my ID. It means that the chances of working and not being paid are very slim. I need to wait for around 7 days until the identity is confirmed - the PayPal and Moneybooker type of checking - and only after that I can start browsing the offer. I am curious what the situation is out there and waiting impatiently for the latest news from odesk's team.

Geek recommendations of the week

This week was a very busy week for me, with a lot of work and interesting projects and I hope to continue in this rhythm for the rest of the month. However, I also used my time in a very good way, thanks to Rescue Time application and thus, I limited my social media presence to the basic communication. 

Out of my geek's pocket, a couple of recommendations for the week:

As a dedicated Twitter user, I will start by recommending Tweetcast that I often noticed recommended  by many people interested in mobile Twitter applications. It offers not only multi-account support, but also a good management of the profiles of interesting users from your followers lists, and of the topics of interest. 

If you are a well organized person and you want to have a good control over your time, you should immediately start using - for free - Evernote. It can be accessed from every device and it helps you to save ideas and information in order to be used later on. 

If you are better with the voice notes and you are using an Android, then you should try for less than $2 Dictadroid. All your voice recordings - including music, could be shared automatically via e-mail. Now, your secretary will not have any reason to complain that she did not hear you when you asked her to do something as soon as possible. 

A couple of yours ago, when I left a job for another, an important part of my box was represented by the business cards. Many of them did not know that I have and most part of them were lost anyway since then. Nowadays, you can carry your office with you from a job to another and thanks to ABBYY Business Card Reader all the information on your business cards is digitized and collected by your contact manager. You will automatically have when you need all the phone numbers and e-mails and any other contact information on your business card.

Book review: How to produce successful advertising

Anyone with an interest in the domain of advertising and communication at the beginning of their career should carefully read this book about How to produce successful advertising. It was updated permanently and this third edition includes a lot of references of the domain of online communication.

The main advantages: there is a lot of information, organized in a very practical way. You can find almost everything you need and want to know about advertising, from the basic definitions, to the planning and media buying details. Most information are about 'how to' and thus, if you have some small questions about the actions and type of approach of various domains, you need to read this book. Also, if you are a student taking a class in advertising, this book will bring you all the volume of information that will help you to have a better perspective on this domain. 

The main disadvantage: someone with a basic knowledge of the domain and a minimal experience in this domain will expect more analysis of specific cases. There were included a couple of examples but not enough to help the practitioner to behave in various situations.

Anyway, if you are looking for something useful to read over the week-end, you can give a try to this book.