Freelance Jobs 21st Jan

A recent ad asking for a writer in Craigslist said "Even if you're not published, you need to have passion". How do you inject passion into a 'howto' for reducing credit debt? Because that's the kind of article requests I get.

Well, you could take inspiration from the mystery visitor who leaves "a half-empty bottle of cognac and three red roses at the grave on Poe's birthday".

Anyway, here's today's freelance jobs:

If you're unpublished, but the passion's bubbling out of your nose, this gig is for you.

Got delusions of grandeur? Well, here's your one and only chance to get paid for it, unless you happen to be a member of the US senate.

SEO guys who blog wanted. Or Bloggers who can do SEO. I think.

Someone wants you to litter the internet with traces of their product. Forum and message board poster wanted.

Some more buzz marketers wanted. Well, I prefer that to ' swarm of locusts', which is what I heard one bunch of forum posters referred to as, by the regulars of the forum.

Wanted a humor writer for sketches.

Get paid to blog. $5 per post.

Web content writer wanted. Small pay, bulk work.

65+ writers wanted. Yeah, that's what I thought too. Unfortunately ( depends on which side of the hill you are ), he's looking for writers over 65....

Writers who know a thing or two about international students can get hold of a writing gig here.

Want to earn $100 per week for sending emails from home? No, this ain't a scam. It's a real CSR job. You have to respond to customers' emails. Catch is that you need to know a lot about New York.

Essay writer wanted. Make sure he flunks if you do get the gig.

Another copy writer wanted to con international students.

Audio transcriptionist wanted. $200 gig.

Writers needed. ASAP. And that's all the ad says. Nothing else.

More delusions of grandeur. They want hacks who can see the big picture.

Freelance writers wanted for women's lifestyle mag.

Hillary Clinton jumps into the ring. Going to be a really, really great year for political columnists. I don't really care who's going to be the next President, but the media is going to make a lot of hay while Hill and WhosYourMama duke it out.

Literary Fingerprint

No one is safe. Shakespeare has been caught red-handed, ink-stained fingers and all. "A team of researchers that includes scholars from the University of Massachusetts Amherst is using computerized analysis of the writing of William Shakespeare to dispel lingering doubts about his authorship of many works and to trace the outlines of his total body of compositions... The Shakespeare 'fingerprint' also provides strong evidence that he, and not other authors, wrote the works generally believed to be his..." - Physorg.com

So now we know that Shakespeare is the perp responsible for 'Arden of Faversham'. I think there should a national 'literary fingerprint' database. So any writer who refuses to acknowledge his crappy novel can be held to account.

Margaret Boyes writes about wannabe author Skip Hollingsworth's quest to get published. 42 rejection notices and counting...

And in other news, medical transcription work outsourced to consultants in India has landed King's College Hospital into a steaming tub of hot water.

A Big Pile Of Rubbish

Who's the biggest slob, living in the middle of a massive pile of rubbish? That would be 'you', as in Time's Person Of The Year. The internet has become a big pile of rubbish. Nobody reads anything except news and geek stuff. And yet, we all navigate and gingerly step over the billions of pages of rubbish, and leave it to someone else to clean up the mess.

Well, Hello - There is no one else. It's you that made the mess, and it's you that needs to clean it up. According to a survey of technorati results, 50% of blogs for 'E-Consultancy' were spam blogs or splogs. A quick google search for 'work at home' gave me the following first 100 results:

Number of scam alerts and government advisory results: 13
Number of services asking for money to get you a work at home job : 22
Outdated news : 3

That makes for 38 results, out of a total of 100, which are absolutely unnecessary, in the sense that if there were no scam sites asking for money, there would be no advisory listing to avoid scams, thus eliminating 35% of unwanted rubbish, leaving space for 35% more genuine and informative sites.

Let me ask you something. If you had 10 keys which looked the same, at first glance, in your pocket, and you had to try each one everytime you wanted to open the door, what would you do?

What we need to do here is clean up the internet. Why does wikipedia rank so well in google? Simply because there is no page on wikipedia which is not what it is meant to be. And who is it policed by? You. Unless the internet, as a whole, follows this principle, it's not going to be in business much longer.

There are over 1 billion internet users in the world, and that number is going up rapidly. The U.S.A. has exported many dirty habits, including gas guzzlers and junk food, to various parts of the world, and we're just beginning to understand the implications. Let's not make the same mistake with something as magnificient as the internet.

Telecommuter? You're toast!

According to a new survey by Korn / Ferry International, "So-called 'telecommuters' are less likely to advance than peers who work in traditional office settings, according to 61 percent of the 1,300 global executives surveyed."
Aargh! I give up my tiny office cubicle for a perch in my mom's spacious basement, and now they tell me I'm a deadbeat without a career.

Arthur Black, writing for the Parksville Qualicum News, asks a good question. "So you want to be a writer?....Being a writer isn’t like being a structural engineer or a biophysicist — or even a long-distance truck driver or a TV repairman. You have to go to school to get those jobs. You have to take examinations and pass rigorous tests. On the other hand, anyone can be a writer. All you have to do is … write. Right?"
Riiiiight, and it helps if you ran away from your own wedding or if you're Britney's ex-husband or if you're an un-convicted murderer or a candidate for President.

Speaking of Presidential candidates, Obama-Take-That-Mama just made it official. It's going to be a heckuva ride. Bring out the popcorn.

Freelance Jobs 17th Jan

Paid forum posters wanted.

Freelance writers needed to do ghost writing.

Writer wanted to write-up descriptions for real-estate website.

Garden writers wanted to write up short paragraphs.

Real estate copy writer wanted.

Transcription gig. Data entry into word from audio interviews.

Freelance translators wanted. Continuous jobs.

Freelance writers needed. Upto $100 per article.

Reality TV show review writers wanted.

Got blog? Get paid.

NYC Publication looking for a freelance writer.

Snarky non-fiction writer wanted.

First person essays about garden & hearth wanted.

Laptop Correspondents

The MSM is doomed. It's the dawn of a new age of citizen journalism, where politicians are blogging and every blogger is a local correspondent. With a camera in every mobile phone, wireless internet and laptops, everything from Saddam Hussein's execution to Britney Spears' new boyfriend is being reported live by 'laptop correspondents'.

As of now, it goes straight to youtube, and spreads virally. There's not much pay involved. Just fame. But that's about to change. Where the audience goes, so do the ad dollars. And where the ad dollars go, the jobs follow. Just as blogging and google news pulled away ad dollars from print magazines, laptop journalism is peeling away jobs from MSM magazines to local writers.

Time, Inc. is about to cut a 150 jobs across it's array of publications. All these 150 jobs are about to land in the hands of local correspondents working from home with a laptop and a mobile camera. No office expenses, no heathcare, no retirement benefits. Only a fat check per story, pictures and videos blogged in.

My point with all this bloviating? Get up off your butt, get a mobile phone with a camera, if you don't have one already. Go wireless. And start writing and submitting stories, pictures and videos from in and around your neighbourhood to various print magazines. It's the in-thing. And you'll be the latest recruit to the army of laptop correspondents, working from home for Time, USA Today, US weekly and of course, your own tiny blog.

So just who is hiring laptop correspondents? Click here and here to find out more.

Dear Limey Writers

No, I didn't make a mistake. This is about English writers who managed to stuff their own feet solidly and completely into their own crevices.

"Visit an American university, bump into random students in the corridor and loudly call each one ‘asshole’. Then measure their reactions. This is what a team of psychologists did in a controlled experiment at the University of Michigan". Paul Robinson, starts off with inside the frying pan, and quickly jumnps into the fire.

Comments to his above post:

"This is complete and unadulterated Bovine manure. I'm from the North and if I was accousted and sworn at by a stranger I would feel compelled to give some instruction in manners, and I would do it with my boot."

"Hmm, another conclusion to the study could be that Northerners 1) accept that they are assholes or 2) they are too wimpy to stand up for themselves."

And in yet another case of the Brits landing in hot water, just before the 2004 elections, The Guardian organized something called Operation Clark County, trying to get their readers to send letters to voters in Ohio and convince them to vote Democratic. Here's a few choice responses to the letters:

Dear Limey assholes

"...Each email someone gets from some arrogant Brit telling us why to NOT vote for George Bush is going to backfire, you stupid, yellow-toothed pansies ... I don't give a rat's ass if our election is going to have an effect on your worthless little life. I really don't. If you want to have a meaningful election in your crappy little island full of shitty food and yellow teeth, then maybe you should try not to sell your sovereignty out to Brussels and Berlin, dipshit. Oh, yeah - and brush your goddamned teeth, you filthy animals..."

Consider this: stay out of American electoral politics. Unless you would like a company of US Navy Seals - Republican to a man - to descend upon the offices of the Guardian, bag the lot of you, and transport you to Guantanamo Bay, where you can share quarters with some lonely Taliban shepherd boys.


To read all the replies to the letters, visit The Guardian.