Photography: Dalboz17

It’s a really neat trick. Tell someone that you’re your own boss, that you usually work from home but that your office is a regular table at Starbucks, and you can watch them turn a shade of puce slightly lighter than your morning green tea frappuccino.

It sounds like a dream way of working. You get to sleep in late, knock off when you want, set your own vacation time and if it’s a sunny day, spend the afternoon at the beach instead of your local bean bar.

As an envy-sparker, successful freelancing is almost as powerful as a yellow Ferrari… parked right outside the Apple store.

Tell the same person that in practice, you’re at your desk at 7am, don’t turn off the computer until 11pm and that Saturdays and Sundays are just another way to make the working week longer, and you’ll soon bring back their smile though.

Freelancers are Tyrants
That old saying about the person who works for themselves having a tyrant for a boss is, for most people, sadly true.

At least part of the reason for that might be down to what Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek,” has described as the shift of work from being a place to go to being a thing to do. When you know you have to be at the office from nine till six, you don’t really care too much what happens between those hours. Time is no longer your own; you’ve already sold it to a company.

When you work for yourself though, each hour is valuable to you and you can measure that value. Take a couple of hours off to go to the beach, and you can calculate exactly how much money you’re losing. If you’re earning on average $40 per hour, then that beach trip has cost you $80… plus gas, ice cream and sunburn lotion. It’s not hard then to justify staying at home and making that money back.

And you can extend that principle almost endlessly. Coffee with a friend? $40, caffeine not included. A two-hour TV movie in the evening? $80, plus cable fees. A weekend trip with the family? Are you kidding?

It’s the danger that all busy freelancers struggle with, and it goes beyond maintaining the sort of good work-life balance that everyone battles to create. Because freelancing is inherently unstable — even rock solid clients can quickly dissolve away — it’s tempting to take on as much work as you can now before the hard times come back.

A big part of Tim Ferriss’s solution is geoarbitrage — outsourcing as much as possible to qualified assistants around the world, freeing up your own time for only the most essential tasks… and creating spaces to do the things that make it all worthwhile.

Outsourcing isn’t new of course. Lou Dobbs has managed to build an entire career at CNN explaining why it’s going to destroy America. But Tim Ferriss takes the idea of farming out tasks much further than anyone has ever done before.

As far as he’s concerned, any task that can be done on the telephone or by email can be done by someone else.

Apply the principles of geoarbitrage, and it can be done for a profit too.

What’s a Buck Worth?
The idea is to make use of the different relative value of money in different places around the world. Ten dollars for an hour’s work will barely buy a sandwich in London; in Mumbai, it can buy a week’s groceries and could therefore be a reasonable fee for a day’s work. That’s especially true if you’re selling services to clients in California who pay American prices while you’re wintering in Thailand and paying $300 a month to rent a house on the beach.

It’s a way of allowing anyone to make use of the benefits of globalization, spread wealth to developing countries and raise your own standard of living as well as your income.

And finding international assistance isn’t particularly difficult. Tim is known to use Elance, a freelance jobs site, to post requests and field bids from people around the world who are willing to help. Sometimes, those bidders can even be well-educated Americans benefiting from geoarbitrage themselves by living in low-income places and charging a smaller amount than they would do if they were in the States.

It sounds ideal, but it does come with a few considerations.

The first is the sort of work you can outsource. Tim believes that almost everything can be passed on to someone else, and he even once set up teams to organize his online dating for him. But he recommends hiring specialized teams that can do “repetitive time-consuming tasks.” That’s because outsourcing is a form of investment. It takes time to find someone suitable, explain what needs to be done and make sure they’re doing it right.

Once the system is up and running, you can leave it. But you have to trust your assistants first and keep things exactly the same so that you don’t have to retrain. In an interview with Lifehack, Tim explained that he has separate teams for Web design, online research, and finding buying solutions.

That initial set-up expense might not be enormous but it does have to be included when you calculate the return on investment of paying someone else to do a task that brings you revenue.

It’s also important to make sure that you and your helpers are on the same wavelength. A good principle in business is to find talented people and let them do what they do best. For outsourcing, a tighter control — or at least regular supervision — might be better at preventing expensive mistakes.

Tim, for example, describes how when he set up teams to handle his online dating (a task he outsourced as a joke), awarded each group a small budget to improve his chances of getting dates. One team then created a MySpace page for him and marketed him a little too well. When the date turned up, she was disappointed to find that he had “forgotten” their in-jokes.

That incident was fairly harmless, but it might suggest that keeping your assistants within clearly defined guidelines is important if you want to avoid nasty surprises.

Clearly, outsourcing can always be helpful. It’s what keeps freelancers in work, after all. But spreading tasks around the world so that you can benefit from price differences can also make it cost-effective and give you a life too.

Now all you have to do is find someone to outsource the outsourcing for you.

Check out Tim’s blog here and watch this chat with Google for a fascinating look at Tim’s productivity system.

Vanessa Pike-Russell

Most of the people on Flickr are a friendly sort. They’re helpful and chatty, and they usually have something nice to say about your pictures.

Most of them.

Like anywhere though, you do get the odd creep sneaking in.

Here are six true stories that should make you just a little bit scared next time you’re uploading your vacation pictures to Flickr.

Stalked by Fetishists!
Flickr has a block option that lets members stop strange people from contacting them. What it doesn’t have is a way to stop those strange people from signing up with a different username and doing it all over again.

And some of those people really are strange.

Kriegerinhummel, for example, complained in April 2007 that someone was leaving “disturbing ‘foot fetish/sexually suggestive’ comments” on her pictures and Flickrmailing her seven times a day. He wanted to be a friend, apparently.

Kiwi_Kirsch had a similar experience, but this time with a neck fetishist of all things.

Flickr, it seems, can’t block users at the IP level in case it cuts out lots of other users (on a college computer, for example). Instead, the site recommends restricting comments to friends and hitting the Report Abuse button each time it happens.

It’s not much of a solution but it is a pretty good warning against leaving too much personal information on your Flickr page.

Dead Cats Sent Through Flickr
Blocking did work for TestyCatLady in April 2007. Known for her love of cats — and for showing plenty of pictures of them in her Flickr stream — she wasn’t too pleased when someone started to send her group, Crazy Cat People, their pictures of moggies… in various stages of rigor mortis.

She deleted the dead cat lover’s images and banned them.

Staff’s response? Don’t mention the sender’s name in the Help forums but do hit the Report Abuse button.

Hacked by Spammers
TestyCatLady was lucky. It didn’t take much to drive away her creepy pest. Lisa Kettel though was left with a real fight after some horrible hacker broke into her Flickr page, placed an offensive picture then used her Flickrmail to spam other members asking for pictures of naked women.

Lisa and the hacker then battled for control of her pro account, a struggle that only ended after the hacker had deleted her photos, testimonials and contacts.

The suspicion was that he might have been using a Trojan to log Lisa’s keystrokes and track her password changes.

Spammed by Spammers
When loupiote (Old Skool) found a long list of similar, bland comments on his photos, posted by people with names like “a5pegDe64qo” and “af8da17Xmn,” he knew what was coming.

It wasn’t long before those random strings of Yahoo! usernames weren’t just telling him what great shots he’d taken. They were also recommending that he visit a certain website where presumably he could buy cheap meds, play poker or become more of a man.

The people at Flickr were pretty quick at wiping out the first set of spam messages but struggled to clear them from the comments on loupiote (Old Skool)’s sets rather than on the images themselves, and because the tests didn’t contain URLs, they kept slipping under Flickr’s filters. The messages continued to show in the Recent Activity list… and they kept coming in, filling loupiote (Old Skool)’s comment space faster than he could block or report them.

Flickr’s response?

“Each new wave teaches us something and we calibrate our proactive and reactive responses. Your patience is appreciated while we adapt to this latest wave. We hate spam as much as you do.”

Not as unpleasant as pictures of dead cats but still very annoying.

She’s Copying Me!
We’ve all heard the story of the freaky roommate who starts dressing like you, talking like you, tries to muscle in on your friends and generally freaks you out.

Kristi Bogel had that experience on Flickr.

Each time she posted a new photo, someone she knew would post an image that looked almost exactly the same.

After the fourth time her photos sparked something that was more like imitation than inspiration, she asked other Flickr members what she could do. Responses ranged from nothing through Report Abuse to “put up pictures of her boyfriend and her house.”

It could just have been a bit of a teenage tiff, but definitely not the sort of person you want to rent an apartment with.

Pedophiles on Flickr
Perhaps the scariest creeps of all on Flickr though are the people who post no photos or profile details but who have a long list of favorites… all of them featuring children.

It’s a complaint that crops up with disturbing regularity in the Flickr help forum. Citykitty, for example, describes how one user added her as a contact, only to find that his favorites consisted of a long list of images containing young boys. Flickr icon, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, had a similar complaint after finding someone had marked photos of her children as favorites… and that all his favorites were pictures of children.

Flickr responded my extending the power of the “ignore” feature to prevent blocked users from adding users’ images as faves.

Of course, none of this means that Flickr isn’t a good place to hang out and show off what you’ve been pointing your camera or your iPhone at. But it does mean you have to be just a bit careful if you don’t want to be stalked, hacked, harassed or creeped out.

roboppy

Flickr is usually a bit of fun, a place to put up pictures of the family vacation or shots of the cat sleeping on your keyboard.

But there’s a lot more to Flickr than pets, sunsets and ahem, free online image storage.

Flickr makes people money too.

Toyota’s marketing people commissioned an amateur photographer they spotted on Flickr to shoot a series of ads for the Prius. Microsoft’s MSX design team asked a Kuwaiti medical student they spotted on Flickr to supply images for Vista. (Did they ask him to do the coding too?) Entire photography careers have been built on knowledge picked up in Flickr groups.

All of that is fine if you want to be a photographer. But for any business — even one-geek-and-their-computer businesses — Flickr can also be a good place to find products, people and information.

Researching Products On Flickr
Most Flickr members are individuals who put up personal photographs, but a few smart cookies have started to use the site as a forum to bring together potential customers and to build brand loyalty.

They release exclusive images through their photostream and they use the groups as places for fans to hold discussions.

Both of those can be valuable sources of information for potential competitors… and for entrepreneurs looking for inspiration for their next big idea.

Just try tossing a product name — or keywords related to the product — into Flickr.

Naturally, you’ll get a long list of photos tagged with that term.

Most will be images shot by customers who want people to see what they bought (because we don’t see enough pictures of iPhones). A few will be publicity images taken from the company’s website and placed there by people who think you might not have been able to find them for yourself.

Some photos though, may have been uploaded by a company to generate interest before a product launch.

Isa Chandra Moskowitz, for example, is a cookbook author who places images of her books and publicity appearances in her photostream to let readers see what she’s up to. A picture of her latest book appeared in her collection long before it came out, and a group dedicated to her last book has produced a stream of images that are likely to increase sales and send buyers back to their kitchens to bake more of her cakes.

You’re unlikely to come across any giant secrets searching product names on Flickr — unless you’re looking for creative marketing strategies (or techniques for a smoother chocolate ganache). But you could find sneak peeks from insiders or responses from team members to released material.

And that’s where things can start to get really interesting.

Targeting People on Flickr
This image, for example, of the cover art for a racing game came with a reaction from a member of the team saying how excited they all were at the design.

Photography: David Babylon

By itself, that doesn’t tell you much. But it does reveal the identity of one of the team members. You might be able to read the comments in that person’s groups to see if any useful information slips out. Their descriptions and images might give you an idea of how they think or how they work.

And if they have access to information that you don’t have, you might find that occasionally it turns up on their Flickr page. (Robyn Lee, whose image we used above, is a food blogger who sometimes goes to food industry expos. The picture is from a new confectionary catalog and shows what you might be able to find in the office vending machine soon. And who said you can’t find useful information on Flickr?)

Who knows, you might even want to get in touch and offer that person a job… or ask if he can get you one.

Finding Your Way to Information
An alternative to targeting products or people is to look for a place. If you know the address of a company, you can toss it into Flickr’s map and see all the pictures that have been geotagged with that address. That should give you a useful list of employees and access to images that were shot at work.

Even if you don’t glean any useful information from them — and your own idea collapses — at least you’ll see what it would be like to work with them.

Life at Apple. Screenshot from Flickr.
[tags] flickr, flickr research, researching with flickr, flickr research tool [/tags]