With the financial world in extreme crisis and various government running around in what can only be described as blind panic, one would could be forgiven for joining the mass panic. Granted that when the world economy does slide into recession that it is going to be tough generally.
However having been through three down turns I can give a few pointers that maybe helpful in these times of crisis. Particularly for people in Australia and New Zealand:
During the two conferences I attended recently, Web Directions South and OZ-IA there was a distinct theme in some the sessions on opening up the corporate knowledge based.
You know the score, you have bound to have heard this before. Don’t lock the corporate information up, allow those statistics and figures, you are already presenting to the public to be readily accessed via some type of API. Allow people to remix, mashup and represent the information. The concept goes that it’s better to allow this via a controlled API then have people scrape and represent or misrepresent the information. Hence you maintain control of your information using the API than the traditional scrape method.
Following on from the Downside of Freelancing post, for every downside there is an upside, the flipside of the coin As you would expect the upside of freelancing out weighs the negative aspects, or you would hope so.
That said sometimes the benefits that I’ve outlining below will appear to be mostly on the positive side, but not to put a negative spin on them, some can have a few little traps if you don’t watch out for them.
This can put a dampener on your freelancing lifestyle. But as with anything this does depend on your personality and expectations.
Over the years I have been freelancing in the web industry it has been peppered with it’s good and bad times, when you look back on these times you can see a distinct pattern of things that are good and bad aspects of the freelance lifestyle. Okay this is not going to have every solution to freelancing, but at least you get another view point and a few ideas. Now I’m not discouraging people from taking up freelancing, far from it. It]s just a very good idea if you are considering getting into freelancing that you understand the full implications of what you are taking on. This is the first of a two part article.
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