some info, myspace style 
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Back in the 18th century, you basically had 3 choices of jobs–you could be a blacksmith, a butter churner, or a carriage driver.

Okay, so maybe there were more choices than that (how about tailor, butcher, barber, milk maid, footman), but the point is that there were well-known job titles already in existence for every occupation.

If you were hangin’ out at the local tavern and someone asked you what you did for a living, all you’d have to say is “I’m a blacksmith”, and you’d instantly be greeted with nods of acknowledgment and understanding.

Not so with the internet jobs of today.

To folks who aren’t online much, the internet seems like a sketchy place where folks look at porn and gamble at online casinos :) –sort of a boulevard of broken dreams and sleazy get rich quick schemes, not a place where you conduct a reputable business.

As a result, many of us who are very active within the blogosphere or work online run up against a lot of blank stares and misjudgements when we try to explain to our offline family and friends what in the world we do for a living or why our blogs are so important to us.

This isn’t surprising–we web workers have some of the freakiest and most confusing job titles on the planet.

Off the top of my head, ones that make sense to me, but I know would puzzle 99.9% of mainstream society are:
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To be honest, my first impression of Twitter was that it was for folks who had way too much time on their hands who narcissistically wanted to broadcast every random thought that crossed their brains.

While this may be true in some instances, there are also some very smart, professional, forward thinking people whom I respect who are using Twitter intelligently.

Yep, you heard that right–I just used the words “intelligently” and “Twitter” in the same sentence. :)

Like cell phones, email, and blackberries, Twitter is a tool that can either add value to your working life or become the perfect interruption machine, depending on how well you use it.

To keep yourself from falling into the Twitter abyss, it might help to focus on these 5 smart uses of Twitter:
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I love the way Roger von Oech challenges me to see things from alternate perspectives. He says:

One of my favorite metaphors was concocted by the American biologist Leigh Van Valen who was inspired by the Red Queen character from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass.”

If you remember, the Red Queen is the one who runs hard but never gets anywhere because everything else in the landscape is also running. As she tells Alice, “It takes all the running you can do to keep in place!”

Van Valen used the Red Queen as a metaphor for his evolutionary principle that regardless of how well a species adapts to its current environment, it must keep evolving to keep up with its competitors and enemies who are also evolving. Thus, the “Red Queen” effect: do nothing and fall behind, or run hard to stay where you are.

Roger lists a few examples of how the “Red Queen Effect” is taking place in modern society– you can see it in the business landscape, new technology development and the arms race, for example.

All around us there’s the seemingly constant need to one-up each other, not necessarily to create groundbreaking ideas and advance society, but simply to keep up with the status quo.

I was thinking: Do these intense evolutionary pressures occur in blogging?
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It looks like mainstream society is starting to notice (a bit belatedly) that more and more folks are conducting business out of cafes and coffee shops. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

A new breed of worker, fueled by caffeine and using the tools of modern technology, is flourishing in the coffeehouses of San Francisco. Roaming from cafe to cafe and borrowing a name from the nomadic Arabs who wandered freely in the desert, they’ve come to be known as “bedouins.”

That’s cool that they’ve adopted a special name and all, but the last time I checked, this was not new news.

Web workers all over the world, not just San Francisco, have been using coffee houses as mission control for their businesses for as long as Wi-Fi has been in existence.

And remember when folks used to write with pen and paper and old fashioned typewriters?

The Lost Generation was one of the most famous early bedouin tribes. American ex-patriots like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller and Ezra Pound were creating and collaborating in cafes in Paris and other parts of Europe in the early 1900’s.
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