• Name: Blellow

  Quick Pitch: Blellow is a social network allowing freelancers and professionals to collaborate, find work, and solve problems through a friendly, familiar micro-blog interface by answering the question: “What are you working on?”

  Genius Idea: One of the reasons that people are embracing Twitter with open arms is the quality of people and networking opportunities that arise from the 140 character community. With Twitter trending towards the mainstream, however, conversations are becoming more social, so freelancers using the popular microblog to find clients and projects might start to feel like a small fish in an expansive sea.

  For niche networking with a professional purpose and Twitter-like feel, we can now turn to Blellow, a more focused microblogging site to join groups, find projects, check the job board, and meetup with other Blellow members.

  

  The Twitter-similar site launched at SXSW and asks users, “What are you working on?” to foster professional conversations and create networking or project-related conversations. Members can update their status, seek advice when stuck on tasks, share files, give and receive kudos for peer-to-peer help, engage in threaded conversations, and join public or private or groups. Kudos are like credibility, so each time you receive kudos for a job well done, you’ll rank higher in Blellow search results, which could expose you to new clients and more work opportunities.

  

  Blellow also has three important features for freelancers looking for gigs: a job board, project listings, and a meetup page. The job board is a community-generated list of full-time and freelance jobs that Blellow users can peruse for work, while the projects page lists paid and pro bono deliverables which include the available budget for the project. Plus, if you’re looking for professional face time with other Blellow members, you can check out upcoming meetups or create your own.

  

  Blellow would be a killer app if it offered a better way to find friends. Currently the site limits users to inviting friends or searching for existing users, but it would be beneficial to see the TwitterTwitter reviews friends and email contacts shared in common with the Blellow user base. Blellow, however, does make it easy to self-identify yourself with groups based on your specialties or interests. Group conversations abound using the % + group name tag, and updates of that nature typically get quality replies. For $5/mo or $10/mo, Blellow users can create private groups with 1 gig and 10 gigs of space, respectively.

  Since Blellow is so new, its Achilles heel right now is the sparsity of people, jobs, and projects, but the site does serve freelancers, Web workers, and information seekers extremely well with the groups feature. So, Blellow’s survival will depend of whether we Twitterers will find enough value in creating and maintaining another microblogging profile.

  For a quick tutorial on the site, watch this video:

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In just about every field there is a corner reserved for women where the pay and prestige are lower even though the work is equally demanding.

Think about it.

As Imdiversity.com points out, “….the medical profession provides a case study in the opportunities and problems for women in general. Most women doctors are in the so-called nurturing fields — pediatrics, family doctors, obstetrics and gynecology. Few are in the more prestigious and highly compensated fields such as neurosurgery or heart surgery. Women remain a distinct minority on medical-school faculties, and there are precious few female deans.”

In fact, when women begin to be the majority in a field, the pay goes down.

Melanie Perry reports she “was wondering during a recent salary survey of Design professionals that I did that Training, Marketing, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design were among some of the lower-paying fields when they obviously require such skills… then it occurs to me… those are the fields with some of the highest percentages of women in them.”

So, my question is, What is it that the Women’s Bureau is doing for us? They’ve had a long time to do it, so why are women still only earning 78 cents on the dollar for men?  Why is it that Federal law requires that certified women-owned businesses receive at least 5% of all Federal contracts, but less than 3.2% of all contracts are awarded to women.

Yes, Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter act but are individual women going to have to sue huge, rich conglomerates to get fair pay?

I have to wonder if the Women’s Bureau itself is a Pink Ghetto?  Is it like the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there to babysit us and hold our hand and see that we don’t get off the reservation?  Or, if we do, we don’t get into too much trouble?

If women are going to be marginalized couldn’t they at least give us our own plot of land so we could build a casino and make some real money? ( I’m kidding.)

Long ago many women decided the only way to get a fair break was to start their own business, which women have increasingly done and are making almost $2 trillion doing it.

But we shouldn’t have to jump out of the labor market to make equal pay.  And that, it seems, should be the base line expectation for the Women’s Bureau. Whoever is appointed to lead the Women’s Bureau we should hold her feet to the fire until she accomplishs that one goal.

I remember a personal trip like that when I, my niece and a few supportive friends made the trek to visit a nephew of mine who had misguidedly joined the remote Rashneesh compound in Oregon.  Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rashneesh had purchased the 64,000 acre Big Muddy Ranch near Antelope for $5.7 million and enticed many of his followers to join him, their wallets in hand.  Our goal was to get my nephew to sign some papers to preempt him from emptying out any of his other relatives’ bank accounts into the guru’s pockets, to support the guru’s lavish livestyle or his fleet of Rolls Royce’s, in which he drove by and waved to followers like my nephew whose job was digging fence posts and pledging more money.  As we drove on and on into the Oregon wilderness one of my friends asked dolefully:  “Is someone running ahead of us, moving these signs back 5 miles, every time we drive 4 miles?”

Good question.

And one which Lilly Ledbetter and a lot of other women must be asking ourselves about now. My nephew was not the only one ever to be suckered.  My niece and my friends and I were not the only ones who ever made a long trek only to have the sign posts moved down the road ahead of us to forever prolong the journey. Lily Ledbetter is an unfortunate symbol for women. She embodies the wrong that has been done to us all.  And one more time, there are promises on the table to correct it.  But will it happen?

According to the AFL-CIO in House Passes Two Major Working Family Bills: Fair Pay Act, Paycheck Fairness Act, Lilly Ledbetter says she knows she’ll never recover the hundreds of thousands of dollars she lost from her paychecks because of nearly 20 years of pay discrimination. But a few days ago, by a vote of 247-171, the House passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Act (H.R. 11) overturning the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that denied Ledbetter—and any worker who suffers pay discrimination—justice. Then shortly after, lawmakers added some new teeth to equal pay laws and passed the Paycheck Fairness Act (H.R. 12) by a 256-163 vote. Both bills now go to the U.S. Senate.

During a conference call with reporters Ledbetter said:

“I’m a living example of the fact that pay discrimination is a pervasive problem in workplace today….My case is just the tip of the iceberg. My case is over and I will never receive any pay. But Congress has the power to ensure what happened to me won’t happen to anyone else.”

After years of working at an Alabama Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant, Ledbetter discovered she was being paid less than the lowest-paid man doing the same work. She gathered enough evidence to file suit, and a jury awarded her $3.8 million. But Goodyear appealed to the Supreme Court.

But in May 2007, the Supreme Court squelched the award and ruled Ledbetter—and other workers—has no right to sue for a remedy in cases of pay discrimination if she—or any worker—waits more than 180 days after her first paycheck, even if she didn’t discover the pay discrimination until years later.

Following the court’s ruling, hundreds of pay discrimination cases have been thrown out based on the 5-4 decision that basically overturned decades of precedent that considered each paycheck a discriminatory act, thus allowing workers who don’t discover the discrimination for years to seek legal remedies.

Marcia Greenberger of the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) says the Ledbetter bill is a matter of economic justice and a matter of economic urgency for women and the families they support. More than 300 cases…were lost because of the court’s ruling. How many more were told by their lawyers, “It’s too bad. You’re too late.” We can’t wait another day to pass this law.”

The Paycheck Fairness Act, introduced by Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s (D-Conn.), would provide more effective remedies for women who are not paid equal wages for doing equal work, by adding some teeth to the 1963 Equal Pay Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act makes the 45-year-old Equal Pay Act a more effective tool. It stiffens penalties, protects workers from retaliation and offers concrete solutions to what is a real problem.

Anti-labor groups and Republican leaders in the Senate are sharpening their knives for the upcoming vote on this and the Employee Free Choice Act.  It is sure to be a knock down drag out battle.

And one more time, can women look forward perpetually to have the destination of equal pay enticingly in our sights then have it moved down the road again?  Will we keep getting suckered in?  Will we once more go SPLAT against the wall of our expectations?  Stay tuned..……

Simply Hired is partnering with Sramana Mitra, Forbes columnist and author of Entrepreneur Journeys, to bring you an online entrepreneurship forum. The open forum will take place on January 14th, 2009 at 11am PT/2pm ET and will center on job seekers taking their careers in their own hands by learning to create jobs now.

During the 60-minute session, Sramana Mitra will answer participant questions in real-time about all aspects of entrepreneurship including:

* forming a business idea

* finding great mentors

* funding your business idea

* mistakes to avoid

* anything else participants might ask

The session is open to everyone, however only the first 15 participants to register will have the opportunity to interact with Mitra.

The forum is free to all participants and will be run on the Dimdim Web Conferencing platform. To register for this event, go to http://entrepreneurshipforum.eventbrite.com or visit http://www.dimdim.com.

Check out the press release for more info!

So, here goes:

Career News & Job Search

All Top Career News:  a cornucopia of career news, articles, tips by hundreds of bloggers.

Job Mob: has some insightful articles and good tips.

Entrepreneurship

How To Change The World: Guy Kawasaki, is a pretty down to earth guy, but he is actually world famous as a tech entrepreneur, evangelist, author, speaker and blogger. He gets it, big time, and he shares his insights generously.

Toilet Paper Entrepreneur: If you can get beyond the initial toilet paper analogy, which is humorous, if a little indelicate, Mike Michalowicz offers good advice and tips for new entrepreneurs.

About Entrepreneurs: Scott Allen’s practical guide for entrepreneurs.

Planning Startups Stories, the very seasoned and successful Tim Berry’s blog, sharing his insights on starting your business.

Bootstrap Me: about bootstrapping, small business, entrepreneurs, start up.

Escape From Cubicle Nation: a favorite and one which will start you thinking about how to move on.

Marketing

Duct Tape Marketing: John Jantsch has to be at or close to the top when it comes to marketing.

Seth Godin’s Blog: marketing guru has insightful things to say about all things marketing

Winning the Web: internet marketing strategy and other very insightful tips on running a blog.

Social Networking

How To Change The World: Guy Kawasaki, from time to time, has more social networking how to information in one blog than others do all year.  Yes, I know I mentioned Kawasaki under entrepreneurs, which he definitely is, but he is an uber successful guy, who wears many hats, so I thought I’d mention him again in this context.

ChrisBrogan: one of the most popular social networking bloggers, sharing many moments of his life with you and informed tips on how to raise your social networking IQ.

Tech
TechCrunch: Tech news for those in the know.

Silicon Alley Insider if you like to keep up with gossip and goings on in Silicon  Valley

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Create An Interview Preparation List – AdvancingWomen.com Careers-Employment.

Here’s a quick way to compare your own job experience and qualifications with those that your prospective employer is looking for in a specific job position. Make an “Interview Preparation List”. When you prepare for a job interview, it’s good to have a quick reference of your past work experience that you can study ahead of time to help prepare you for the specific job you’re interviewing for.

Grab a sheet of paper and make three columns.

Column A will be “Position Requirements”;

Column B will be “Your Qualifications and Experience”; and

Column C will list “Your Stories”. For this exercise, you’ll be using the actual job description from the employer.

So, in Column A (Position Requirements) you’ll take one piece of the job description and write for example: “Ability to work well with others.” Ok. Now you’ll have to think about your own experiences while working well with others. What specific examples do you have that demonstrates this ability?

Great. You’ve thought of something. In this example, we’ll write under Column B (Your Qualifications and Experience) “Worked on the XYZ project team.”

Now you need to break it down even further and list a specific action-oriented example of “working well with others” on the XYZ project team.

In Column C (Your Stories) you write something like this: “Coordinated winning marketing campaign which resulted in a successful launch of new product.” See how successful that makes you look?

(And don’t forget personal branding: be sure to include those signature elements of your style, your talents and achievements which differentiate you from the crowd and make you stand out.)

Keep going until you’ve listed something for every part of the job description. Now, you’re ready for your close-up.

Author, Donna Monday of Get A Job Interview- Quick Tips

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Sometimes, when flocking to the big boards, job seekers overlook the niche job listings which might be a perfect fit and have just the right job for you. Niche job boards focus on a specific industry or demographic. Careers.AdvancingWomen.com, our job board, for example, is a diversity job board where employers seek women and minorities, the disabled or other diverse groups.  But there are plenty of niche job sites out there, one of which may be right for you.

Interested in Anthropology / Archeology Jobs?  How about Dance Jobs, Environmental Jobs ,Equine Jobs (that’s horses)?  Yep, all of them have niche job boards.  Even Retirement Jobs, Winery Jobs ( sign me up!) and  Zoo Jobs have their own boards. How cool is that?

Want more niche job sites to pore over?  Look up Niche Job Sites Directory

Another source not to overlook is job aggregators like Indeed.com. Companies like Indeed.com scrape jobs from a variety of sources and describe themselves as “a search engine for jobs;  jobs that are listed on job boards, newspaper sites, and niche sites. In one simple search, you can find the very latest job listings throughout the web – one search. all jobs.”  Well, not quite.  Although job aggregators, like Indeed.com, are another tool in your job searching tool box, there are more.

Don’t forget the jobs sites of big corporations. Although they may be advertising in many job boards on the web and in news papers there, there’s a good chance they have three to ten times that many jobs advertised on their own corporate career site.

So, here’s the strategy.  Go to the big boards like Monster.  Go to the niche sites in your industry or your demographic. Identify some corporations you’d like to work for.  Then go to all of them, and, if you don’t see what you want on first visit, set up an rss feed or an alert so that you don’t go looking for the jobs, the jobs come to you.  And we invite you to go post your resume and get an alert from our diversity niche board, Careers.AdvancingWomen.com

You may wonder why I write so much about bootstrapping and entrepreneuring?

I’m passionate about jobs and careers as well.  But I think we can all agree, jobs are dependent on someone giving you one.  And also, keeping you in it.  What I want you to realize is that you can create a job for yourself that no one can take away from you.  You can start your own business and employ yourself.

We all have to agree the job news is bleak and appears to be darkening:

New York based Employment Trends Index reports:“The U.S. economy has lost 1.9 million job and the declines in the index suggest job losses could very well surpass 3 million by mid-2009.” Business Journal adds “The report comes on the heels of Friday’s report from the Labor Department that said the economy shed 533,000 jobs in November — the largest monthly decline since December 1974. That brought the year’s total job losses to 1.9 million.” Economists also predict a decline in job pay.

Given the state of the economy, we all know some things we should be doing or trying to do: paying down our credit card debt; building a cash cushion. Although, for some of us, stretched like a rubber band to the breaking point as it is, that may be easier said than done.

But there are other alternatives:  I’ve heard of some people taking on other, easier to get 2nd, part time jobs like delivery services or even throwing newspapers ( make that last a really short term fix as newspapers themselves are shrinking daily.)

Now, however, might be the perfect moment to start your own business.  It can be after hours, after your day job, to start out.  Think of it as a life raft, in case your boat ( your main day job) sinks.

We wrote about this cross roads before in A Fork In The Road: Career Path Or Entrepreneurship. One of the things we mentioned was how this could be such a wrenching decision, as you would be giving up so much security.  Forget that.  At this moment, everyone’s job outside of civil service, possibly teaching and a few other fields is about as stable as a slinky, headed down 5 flights of stairs…. you never know where it might land up, or when it will either cascade or fall to the bottom.  So there really may not be much holding you back from starting up a 2nd revenue producing machine, in the form of your own business.

We’ve already reviewed with you how you can do this.  I’ve done it.  Many times.  So can you.

How to Start an Online Business for $100 – Ramp Up As Needed Or Just For Surges

Start Your Own Small Business Using More Ingenuity, Less Cash

But, what I would like you to take away from this is that you have the power to create your own work situation, one that no one can take away from you.  You can do this in a way that you have several streams of income. ( This blog for example, and the website it’s on, have income from advertising, from a job board and from advising other companies and associations about setting up their websites and online businesses and helping them execute on them.)  That way, for example, if jobs are down, ads may be maintaining steady.  If both are down, and you’ve established an expertise, you can sell that as a service.  A going website has many potential ways to produce revenue.  And so does a going business.  You may have to take off the blinders, use your imagination and ingenuity, shift with the times and sell apple butter instead of apples, but that’s part of life as well as business.  At least you will have a platform from which to maintain your revenues, in one form or another.

Think about it.  Think of it as a life raft which you can build in your after hours time. You may need it sooner than you hope.

If you have work survival stories you’ve like to share, we’d love to hear them. Comment, please.

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It is true, unfortunately, that the United States needs its roads and bridges rebuilt before any more disasters befall families just trying to get from one side of a river to another.  But it is equally true that infants and toddlers need care and nurturing; children’s hearts and minds need to be developed in schools so they can become responsible and innovative adults who can create and contribute to a green economy, while, at the same time, having the good sense to maintain their roads and bridges.

In the NYTimes.com piece, Where Are the New Jobs for Women? , Linda R. Hirshman examines the Obama administration’s proposed stimulus package and women’s place in it:

“BARACK OBAMA has announced a plan to stimulate the economy by creating 2.5 million jobs over the next two years…but there are almost no women on this road to recovery.

The bulk of the stimulus program will provide jobs for men, because building projects generate jobs in construction, where women make up only 9 percent of the work force.

It turns out that green jobs are almost entirely male as well, especially in the alternative energy area…Fortunately, jobs for women can be created by concentrating on professions that build the most important infrastructure — human capital. In 2007, women were 83 percent of social workers, 94 percent of child care workers, 74 percent of education, training and library workers (including 98 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers and 92 percent of teachers’ assistants).

Obama’s Campaign Promised Jobs Which Include Women

Women are teachers, and the campaign promised to provide support for families with children up to the age of 5, increase Head Start financing and quadruple the money spent on Early Head Start to include a quarter-million infants and toddlers. Special education, including arts education, is heavily female as well. Mr. Obama promised to increase financing for arts education and for the National Endowment for the Arts, which supports many school programs.

.. Mr. Obama also promised that the first part of his plan to combat urban poverty would be to replicate a nonprofit organization in New York called the Harlem Children’s Zone in 20 cities across the country. The group, which works to improve the quality of life for children and families in the Harlem neighborhood, employs several hundred people in full- and part-time jobs. By making good on this promise, Mr. Obama could create thousands of jobs for women in social work, teaching and child care.

Women represent almost half the work force — not exactly a marginal special interest group. By adding a program for jobs in libraries, schools and children’s programs, the new administration can create jobs for them, too.”

It is unfortunate that this blind spot about women is so ancient and systemic that many, and certainly those in Obama’s job stimulus planning team, seem to be unaware of it. Ive mentioned before that during the Clinton administration, I went to a conference at the White House where the focus was about creating work for women in the Americas.  The consensus was that if you want to help a country, help the women in it. The result of that thinking was that, through training and micro-loans, a woman who was ebabled to buy an industrial strength sewing machine, grew her tiny business into a small factory that employed most of a village. That is only one of countless stories of what women in remote Latin American villages achieved with some intelligent intervention and support.

Women, in fact, have the drive and ability to change the entire social and economic ecosystem around them, if given some support.  Let us hope that Obama’s team recognizes their oversight and has the political courage to reconfigure their job stimulus proposal accordingly.

Linda R. Hirshman, author of the NY Times article is also author of “Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World.”

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• A public works push

Create a Plan and Lay Out Milestones

Rule #1: Set your own goals.

Don’t wait for someone to tell you what to do. Analyze your company carefully, and try to understand what you can do which will make a significant difference. Get a handle on the problem, develop a solution, and a consensus around it, lobby for approval, then execute better and faster than anyone else.

This is accomplished most effectively by breaking down big projects into small, realistic and manageable daily goals. When you focus on your career, think in terms of concrete, realistic steps: gaining experience in a different area by taking on a new assignment; taking short courses or attending seminars in cutting edge topics; improving your performance by 20%; decreasing by 20% the time it takes you to accomplish a task.

From those incremental improvements, you can begin to lay out significant milestones, such as moving from middle to upper management.

Develop an “Advisory Board”

To keep your career going strong and achieving its full potential, you will need a sounding board, someone who can provide you with an objective judgment of how you’re performing. This can be a trusted mentor, or a group of professional friends, who are willing to meet with you occasionally and review the milestones you’ve set for your career. And don’t forget your significant other. A spouse or partner will usually give you an honest appraisal…mine does….of whether you’re setting your goals too high or too low.

Frequently, changes take place in an industry or pay scales change, and, if you been putting in long hours, you can miss them or fail to realize their significance or how they can impact your own career. To gain perspective and an objective viewpoint, it’s invaluable to be able to turn to trusted advisers.

Take on Public Speaking

It’s impossible to overemphasize the value of being a good communicator. What all leaders share is the ability to articulate and communicate their goals with such passion or eloquence that others are motivated to share those goals and join together to achieve them.

Regardless of whether you are an eloquent speaker, you can at least bring interesting news to an audience, in a fresh and organized way. Since most people in a general audience are not as up to date on your field as you are, you should be able to convey something to them which is of interest and which they didn’t know before.

If you are able to display a mastery of a subject, and keep your presentation brief and to the point, you will make an impression. And public speaking is one of the best ways to raise your profile in the community and in your professional circle.

Create A Skills Inventory and Continue to Expand

Whether your skills are based on your ability with graphics, or your talent for getting an office organized or inspiring people to join your project, you have a set of skills to track and build on. Create your own “portfolio” which identifies and documents those areas you have developed the most and have the greatest competitive advantage in, as measured against your peers, and make its continuous expansion an ongoing priority.

Remember – It’s Still About People: Develop A System to Leverage Your Contacts

Take a hard look at how you are networking and make some basic decisions about how to develop a system to make personal contacts and extended networks work better to advance your career.  Sometimes it takes a little effort.  In the web business, I am finding that I can meet as many influential decision makers and thought leaders at the right tech networking event in Austin as I can in…. let’s say a month of Sundays… in my city.  The downside: It’s an hour and 15 minute drive.  The upside: the contacts and business potential, not to mention the learning experience are well worth it.

To extract and build on the value of your contact, it is important that you be able to recall the details of your meeting and the specifics of the other person’s job and your conversation. My tech buddy drives up to Austin with me and we both collect business cards, sometimes jotting notes on the back of them about details we particularly want to recall.  When we get back we scan them and exchange them by email.  Voila! Twice the new leads, prospects and contacts, and, at the same time, someone to share the drive and dish about industry trends or whatever projects we’re working on.

Once you have developed a system to track your contacts, and all your contact information is recorded and organized, then you should develop a system for communicating on a regular basis with people you’ve met. Communication can be something as simple as sending an email with a web reference or a reminder of an upcoming meeting or a Facebook notice about a new project. Do this regularly and you will build a network which will be there when you need them.

Creating a career plan with milestones, gathering support, continuing to expand both our career skills and our networks, if executed faithfully,  is not only energizing and enjoyable in and of itself, but definitely will  lead to success