Buzzing, tweeting, carping
THE ONLINE LIFE
Sameer Shisodia provides a primer that will help you find a job, friends and even extraterrestrials from the comfort of your home!
Long commutes, pollution, costs – the real world’s getting tougher to live in. Add to that the limitless opportunity of the places you cannot get to and experience and reality seems rather inadequate, doesn’t it? Fix it. Get a life – online! It’s possible. More of us are living more of our lives on the internet, and what you actually need to go offline is getting smaller, every day.
Earning from home
From basic data entry jobs, to offering high-end technology services, freelance writing, design, web marketing and even tutoring – there is no dearth of work that you have access to online. Commute time to your home-office is zero and you get paid through PayPal or a host of similar services. Even regular jobs now come with work-from-home only option. And of course, your bank went online years ago so managing the cash, investments, and bills is a breeze!
Resources you could use to find jobs:
Graphics Design: http://www.jademagnet.com/
Software: www.rentacoder.com
Teach students online: TutorVista.com
Accounting, Legal, Writing, Tutoring, practically anything: craigslist.com or www.odesk.com
Keep in touch with everyone you need to
By far the most impactful revolution is the one that’s happened to communication. Direct messages on Twitter, email, casual Facebook status updates, text and voice chats, make you always accessible, to friends and colleagues. Tools like Cisco’s Telepresence are starting to make virtual communication more like being there.
Tools – mostly free – that you can use:
E-Mail: gmail.com, hotmail.com
Text and Voice Chat: google.com/talk, skype.com
Collaborate with your team: google.com/a, yammer.com, zoho.com
Tools like www.skrbl.com/ and www.imaginationcubed.com/index.php
let you work on ideas with other people.
Get an education
Today’s workplace needs you to keep your skills and knowledge constantly updated. But going back to school isn’t what it used to be.
MIT has opened up its courseware online. Experts put in a lot of effort in helping netizens pick up a variety of skills. You can ask a question on a relevant forum and almost always get a solution. The internet has, in some sense, become the largest, friendliest and most useful university in the world. One in which you learn what you want to, and at the speed you’re comfortable with.
It’s not just professional skills – you can learn to cook, or dance, or even play the flute online!
Help yourself:
MIT’s Open Courseware: ocw.mit.edu/
Wikiversity: en.wikiversity.org
How To’s: www.ehow.com/
BBC’s Language Courses: www.bbc. co.uk/languages/
Indian Classical Music: www.pravingodkhindi.in/
And a hundred different skills at www.learnthat.com/
Find, research, buy
Over 70 per cent of train reservations in Indian cities are now done through IRCTC’s website.
Our malls are huge, but increasingly cannot beat the variety, convenience, and – delightfully for the deal-led Indian consumer – the competitive pricing available online. A trip to the stores invariably involves traffic agony, parking hassles, and sometimes unfulfilled needs. Online retail and commerce are here to stay.
The growth in this segment has been slow, but sure, in coming.
Airfares, bus tickets, grocery, books and even medicines are all available online. Indian online retail has rapidly learned the art of convenient delivery and innovated on payment mechanisms – the cash-on-delivery model, especially, helps make the transaction safer, more reliable for you.
Check out:
Airfares at Ixigo: http://ixigo.com
Books at Flipkart: http://flipkart.com
Deals at Open2Save: open2save.com
Food at HungryZone: hungryzone.com
And even order a dabba from Papa’s Tiffin www.papastiffin.com
Entertainment, news too
Going to the movies is no longer a picnic. Instead, rent a DVD online at a service such as SeventyMM (http://seventymm .com) or even download a movie from one of the many BitTorrent sites for free. The nature of entertainment itself is undergoing a dramatic change, with more and more user generated content shared via Facebook, and stored on individual blogs, YouTube, etc.
News is delivered online as it happens. Most major newspapers are already online. The print version is usually for commentary, and for something with your morning cuppa.
Travel at the speed of thought
The many sights, moods, and highlights of the best places to visit are yours, through the lenses and the words of travellers who’ve been there, uploaded that. Surprise yourself, go see a new, unexpected place today. Check out: www.lifeblob. com/topic/recommended_places
If you decide to actually go someplace, the web can help you decide if that’s really worth the effort, expense and time.
Travel Resources:
Literally fly over the globe and see places upclose: earth.google.com
Live: www.earthcam.com
Advice: wikitravel.org, thorntree.lonelyplanet.com, and getoffurass.com
Make a difference
Pick a cause that’s close to your heart, identify a worthy organisation. You can not only make a donation through their site, but also understand and follow what they do better through their Facebook updates, on Twitter and their blog, and even help spread the message.
It’s possible to make an impact right from your home office.
Many movements that start online and spread – for instance the Pink Chaddi campaign, and the http://JaagoRe.com effort to encourage voter participation for a more vibrant democracy – let you add your voice in helping spread a social message.
Resources:
n CRY: www.cry.org/index.html
nFind a worthy charity: www.give india.org
n The Midday Meal: www.midday meal.com
Look for the green men!
SETI – Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, is a set of related activities looking for other intelligent lifeforms in the vast expanses of outer space.
As part of one such volunteer project run by the University of California at Berkely, you can help analyse radio signals received from SETI Radio Telescopes by running a programme on your computer when it’s idle. Who knows, your humble home computer might just be the first one to make sense of messages from an intelligent alien lifeform!
Download the SETI@Home program from: setiathome.berkeley.edu
Does online life depress or distract?
Researchers at the University of Leeds recently published a paper claiming a positive correlation between depression and the amount of time spent online. Is it possible that even as our online communities grow, and we have more conversations with people from more places, we internalise the tragedies we come across, and the lack of face-to-face conversation leaves a void? Or is it just that like in the real world, a certain set of people will adapt well to certain modes of interaction, and others will not ? In any case, there’s always help available online – through support groups, free psychiatric advice and enough distractions to keep your mind off negativity. Like in the real world, it’s an art to manage the distractions and make what’s available work meaningfully for oneself.
The upside of online
For the last seven years Muki Regunathan, founder of a leading Bangalore-based, full-services interactive company, has been working with global, high profile clients in the IT, mobile, education and health care space. Here, Muki, who is exposed to an online life on a daily basis, gives us his expert view on why it works for him – and how it can for you.
I stopped standing in a boring teller line at my bank long ago. It gave me more time to spend over a leisurely lunch with friends. When I travel to new cities, I use Google maps and weather alerts to prepare myself and get around quickly. It has given me more time to be at art museums and enjoy rides at amusement parks with my wife and kids. I interact with all my clients online, ensuring that I have more time to spend with the interesting ones in face-to-face meetings over a good cup of coffee. By doing certain things online, I am actually trading time. It’s a good way to look at what you should do online and why.
Ironically, my focus is on creating time to enrich my offline life. I’ve grown a little sick of being poked on facebook, reading about what people are doing on their virtual farms and making supposedly interesting connections on Linkedin. Social networking tools are, doubtless, powerful. And they are the flavour of the century (so far).
And it is great to know what my friends are listening to, shopping for and the places they have been. But it has still to influence me enough to make a buy decision on anything. When I wanted to buy a new car, I went to the showrooms and took them out for a test drive. Can you see what is happening here? I am consciously separating knowledge and information from experience.
So my advice: seek information and do the mundane on the net. Use this intelligently to make time for deeper experiences in real life.Because experience is proprietary.
