Over at WordPressPhilippines, Ia writes:

The New York Times reports that “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop“. Drop dead, that is. They consider professional blogging a “digital-era sweatshop”, referring to a factory where its workers are sorely underpaid and unprotected.

It’s an interesting analysis of how Filipino bloggers, unlike their American counterparts, are not getting proper benefits or even proper compensation. I like how this article tries to make a point to a very specific outsourcing niche, but I do think that it’s pretty much just describing the nature of outsourcing in any industry.

Let’s not forget that the Internet is a free market just like most other offline industries, and that the main reason why Filipinos are getting paid peanuts to blog professionally is because they accept peanuts. Let’s disassemble that notion briefly.

If Filipino bloggers are not getting paid enough, what will happen to the local professional blogging industry? The answer is really simple: either 1) blogging as a profession will cease to exist locally or 2) the market will readjust its prices to support a smaller number of higher-quality bloggers, essentially locking out the lower-end suppliers. Now because I don’t think people will ever stop trying to make bucks from blogging, let’s talk about option number 2.

Notice that I said the market will "readjust its prices," and not "the market will increase its prices." To illustrate, here’s a really simple economic thought experiment:

Sam in the US is paid $100 per post. Pedro in the Philippines is paid $20 per post. Using these numbers we can make the erroneous, simplistic comparison that Sam is 5 times more valued than Pedro, which is the mistake that most people make when they talk about outsourcing. We can, however, say that for every 1 Sam, a company hiring professional bloggers could alternatively look for 5 Pedros instead.

Now let’s say Pedro decides that he’s not getting paid enough, and starts charging $50 per post (a huge, earth-shaking increase in any industry). Now the company looks at the numbers and thinks, "Hmm, so we can either hire 1 Sam, or 2 Pedros. Which option should we go with?"

The answer will almost always be "Sam," and the reason for that is that there are issues intrinsic in outsourcing that make having two Pedros less appealing than just having one Sam. As a US company, outsourcing your writing to the Philippines carries with it many pitfalls: cultural differences are the biggest one, but you must also contend with incompatible work ethics, timezone differences, geographical costs, etc. The only way you can justifiably accept all of these problems is if you can get 5 Pedros for the price of your 1 Sam. At 2 Pedros for 1 Sam, however, that arrangement ceases to become cost-effective, and the correct thing to do is to either go back to Sam, or wait for China to start blogging in English and outsource your requirements there.

Now, this thought experiment kind of sounds like I’m saying that Pedro is forever stuck at $20/post, but that’s not necessarily true in practical terms. If Pedro’s overall quality and work ethic improved, you might only need 4 Pedros to accomplish the work of 5, meaning they can now all get $25 per post, a 25% increase. (What happens to the 5th Pedro however? Well, he loses his job most likely. Creative Destruction is a powerful force indeed.)

The lesson here is that you should never, ever forget that outsourcing is forever a price war, and will never be anything other than a price war. The reason why Filipino bloggers don’t have health benefits is because the added cost of health benefits will result in some Filipino bloggers losing their jobs, and at the moment, the market requires a certain number of available bloggers to fulfill the requirements of various businesses.

The other thing to consider here is that as we become more progressively globalized, the costs of maintaining Sams and Pedros will become more and more similar (so it is totally possible — although I personally think it’s unlikely — to have Pedro earning a very similar amount of cash as Sam). However, remember that the available funds have not changed in this scenario. If 1 Pedro is making $80-100 per post, that means that 4 other Pedros will no longer be able to find work, and will either switch industries, or try to undercut that 1 brilliant Pedro. The former action just shifts the burden to somebody else, and the latter restarts the whole price-war process.

Erwin Oliva at the Inquirer writes:

IMAGINE a large group of users who write stories together one phrase at a time. That is actually the simple and yet brilliant idea from a startup simply called Octales.

Unanimously, the panel of experts said Octales is a “refreshing” idea after an afternoon of elevator pitches.

Although it’s not immediately obvious from the writeup, that was syndeomedia’s pitch he was talking about. I twittered a little bit during the elevator pitch sessions yesterday, and one of the things I said was that I was beginning to feel like a rock guitarist at a jazz recital. The 14 other groups before us each had very revenue-focused business concepts, with copious amounts of market research to back up everything they said. We were the only group with a concept that was purely for entertainment, didn’t do any market research, had only the barest idea of a revenue model, and didn’t fall into any of the three general categories for the sessions (E-learning, E-Government or E-Health).

As it turned out, the fact that we stuck out like a sore thumb was a good thing, and the fact that we were the very last group to pitch helped make it really memorable. To be honest, it was really surprising (to me, at least) how easily everybody got it. I’d run the Octales idea by dozens of people prior to this presentation, and all I’ve ever gotten was polite nods. (Ok, maybe the fact that I’d been practicing the pitch over and over while driving to work everyday for the past week had something to do with the clarity of the message.)

After it was all over, I had quite a few people come up and congratulate me, saying that they thought the idea was really elegant and original, and that the presentation was the best one they’d seen that day. I honestly couldn’t have hoped for a better result. (Well, ok, that’s a lie; the best possible result would be if people started whipping out their checkbooks right then and there, the odds of which are probably slim to none, but you never know.)

All that’s left for us to do now is wait and see if this materializes into what I’m hoping for.

(Slight digression: I had a conversation with one of my friends earlier today about it and she asked if I was nervous. I was like, jesus, of course I was nervous. If I screwed this up, I wouldn’t just be letting myself down, I’d be letting the team down as well. So yeah, wow. I think I really lucked out there.)

Here’s an interesting bit of kit that we just released an hour ago on moomai: mood timelines. A user picks a general emotion from a dropdown (i.e., angry, sad, happy, worried, etc.), adds a description and we blast that "emotional status" message to their friends on the site. Over time, we compile these messages into a timeline so users can have great fun seeing how sad their online lives generally are.

I spent some time over the weekend polishing up ol’ Moomai and have finally gotten around to writing some proper Help pages. Still far from complete, but at least the ratings system is finally explained a little. The important snippet:

In their most simple form, moomai ratings are simply a compilation of all the ratings you’ve received from other members. The moomai grammar engine looks at your numbers, and generates a sentence describing you by combining words from our phrase library. As you can imagine, the sentence generated depends greatly on what kind of numbers you receive; if your wealth rating is below 5, you won’t ever see words like "billionaire" or "oil tycoon." The rating system is friendly enough that, without knowing anything more about how moomai ratings work, you could simply sign in, have your friends rate you, and end up with a reasonably accurate sentence describing yourself.

Of course, because the hamsters at syndeo::media never stop working, there’s a bit more to the rating system than just that. In real life, after all, not all opinions are created equal; you’d care a lot more about your best friend’s opinion of you than the opinion of some random guy you just met the other day. And since moomai tries to simulate real life, it should work that way here as well, right? As it turns out, it does, and we call that concept "Intimacy."

On your friends page, there’s a scale beside each friend that defines how close (or more specifically, how "intimate") you are with that particular person. The scale ranges from 1 (Introduced) to 10 (True Love), and the way you set this value will define how significantly that person’s rating of you will impact your overall rating.

The Intimacy concept is something I’m really interested in, as I think it has the potential to solve a lot of the signal-vs-noise issues that more established social networks tend to have. I’m one of those people who blindly accept any friend invites I receive, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that respect. So because I’m "overly-friendly" online, the value of being called my "friend" has diminished to almost nothing, simply because I’m friends with practically anyone. The Intimacy idea allows you to define the degrees by which all of these random friends can actually involve themselves in your online life, so you could continue friending everyone you like, but they’d all still just be acquaintances.

In real life, the average person will probably only have a handful of close friends, and potentially hundreds of acquaintances and associates and the like. The Intimacy concept actually allows him to represent his online friends in that same manner. Practically every module in moomai is built around this notion. For example, you can restrict contributrions made to your photo gallery to just "buddies" (intimacy level 5), but accept stories from "acquaintances" (intimacy level 2). Essentially, if we do our job right, Intimacy can become both a solution for profile-privacy and a means by which to better manage our online relationships.

The big question right now is whether people will use it, and if they’ll use it in the manner that we’re hoping they will. If it takes off, there are a dozen other related areas to apply the idea; consumer product recommendations would be enriched significantly if you could combine the ratings of the reviewers you trusted, with each rating properly weighted based on how much you trusted each reviewer. And try to imagine how that would work when applied to a social-news site like digg, or a massive content site like YouTube. Something to think about, definitely.

Moomai’s almost-beta testing phase is moving along at a friendly pace, and I thought I’d share this really great bit of community-powered pixel art that our tiny population of about 5 dozen testers have put together over the past month or so.

The pixel-quilt concept was something I came up with years ago back when I was spending every waking moment coming up with weird crap to throw on highfiber. Originally, it was supposed to be a huge shared image that everybody could work on, an idea which was quaint and just barely feasible back in 2002. In this AJAX-powered day and age though, it’s hard not to run into major concurrency issues when you’ve got multiple users trying to push the same pixels at the same time. In the current incarnation, everybody gets to manage their own quilt by drawing individual patches and laying them out any way they want. Yes, believe it or not, all this artwork was created by hand by some fairly dedicated members, using moomai’s in-browser pixel-art editor. (As you can probably guess, I’m pretty proud of this bit of javascript; even got to learn a little bit of ImageMagick while I was at it.)

We aggregate everybody’s patches on the fly into a single massive community quilt, which is what you’re looking at here. (You can also grab and remix patches created by other users, just to add to the creative chaos.)

Moomai is still invitation-only, but I’m trying to build up the testing population quickly so we can start really stressing the server and see where the (inevitable) holes are. If you want to help out, invitations can be requested here.

Ridiculously busy again the past two weeks, so just a quick post to point out a (lengthy, and altogether rather self-indulgent, I’m afraid) email interview I did with PinoyWebStartup.com, a TechCrunch-esque blog about the local tech entrepreneurship landscape by pigmata media. People who read gv regularly will probably not see anything new, but otherwise, check it out and send the pigmata guys some love.

I was listening to an interesting CrankyGeeks episode earlier today on the drive to work — the whole show was a rather lively discussion on the current mindset regarding the dreaded Office Romance, and how to handle it, both from an employee-perspective and a management-perspective.

I actually have some very strong feelings about office romances, and essentially they boil down to: "Don’t do it." This is more of a personal rule though, and not something I enforce as a matter of company policy. There are obvious reasons why. The first (and possibly most important) is that you lose your objectivity when the person you are working with is also the person you happen to be sharing a bed with. I consider myself to be a pretty rational person, but I cannot bring myself to openly criticize the work of someone I am intimately involved with.

The second is that you lose flexibility in both professional and romantic capacities; you cannot fire that person without inevitably breaking up with him/her, and vice versa. Similarly, rewarding that person in the workplace becomes an act loaded with symbolism, regardless of whether that was your intention.

And lastly, my personal relationships are the only remaining part of my life that I can still separate from work. Even my hobbies (blogging, watching movies, listening to music) are work-related to some degree. I’d like to keep it that way, if at all possible.

… This isn’t a rant btw (or even a mild complaint), it’s just me being truthy.

A lot of old-school CEOs have much the same thoughts on this, and for the same reasons. However, one of the things I’ve been realizing over the past year or so is that it’s impossible to enforce a "no-dating" policy because of the way people tend to look at their jobs these days. We’re spending larger and larger chunks of our lives in the workplace. If you can’t date someone in your office, then who can you date? You don’t have the time to meet anyone else. This is especially true in large companies, where the dating pool is bigger and thus more likely to yield a potential match. Thus, office-dating becomes both the reason to stay at work longer, and a consequence of staying at work longer.

At syndeo::media, the solution was a bit simpler. Instead of trying to create an atmosphere in the workplace where the team can feel comfortable to interact socially (which may or may not backfire; hell I’m no a party liaison), we’ve chosen to decouple the "work" from the "workplace." Because you’re only required to be in the office 20 hours a week, you’re a lot more flexible with the relationships you develop outside of the work environment. That’s not to say that we don’t all work 40+ hours a week; we still do of course. The difference is that we don’t limit the time and place where those 40-hours worth of work are supposed to occur.

Whether or not this will turn out to be a good solution is largely dependent on the members of the team. What I tend to look for in new hires is a kind of passion that is wholly internal; meaning, you care about the work first and foremost. This is especially important in our particular line because you are often working by yourself for long stretches (say, a day or two at a time) with very little supervision. How you manage your time during that stretch should be completely up to you. 

I’ve been musing recently, about using your cellphone while driving. A lot of people agree that this is generally a dangerous thing to do, and in other countries there is legislation against this (i.e., if a cop saw you yakking away on the road, he could pull you over and give you a ticket). The main reason behind this legislation is that you supposedly can’t focus on driving while talking. This is, of course, patently ludicrous and people pushing for this law clearly do not drive themselves to work. Either that or, they care about the driving experience so much that they treat it with the same respect as going to the theater, or church.

Anyone who spends a certain amount of time on the road everyday (my daily average is about 2.5 hours) knows that boredom and ennui can set in fairly quickly, especially when the traffic is crawling and the radio is gurgling the usual commercial nonsense. It is during these periods that we start to zone out, daydream or become drowsy. This is, I believe, the precise moment that performing some other activity is particularly helpful, as your brain is shaken out of Standby and forced to keep alert. These activities include talking on the phone, listening to podcasts, eating, or taking photos of the cars next to you in a jam.

Because of the inordinate amount of time I spend in my car, I’ve found that I can make the most efficient use of my day by transplanting some of my office tasks into my travel time. Holding brief conversations with the team or our clients while on the road means I can actually start acting on the results of those conversations as soon as I get to the office. And listening to a handful of regular podcasts (Buzz Out Loud, IT Conversations, Cranky Geeks, The Movie Blog, etc.) means that I’m reasonably informed on the industry without spending the time to read blogs or magazines. And, of course, having breakfast (or lunch) in the car means I’ve saved a good 30 minutes of my day.

It’s ridiculous to posit that introducing a little bit of creativity into an otherwise utterly droll, repetitive routine would be dangerous, particularly when driving to Makati essentially boils down to knowing how to nudge your car forward in 2- or 3-foot increments every 15 seconds. A collision at that speed wouldn’t even scratch your paint job. And honestly, if I didn’t manage my time this way, I would have to cut in on my sleep time instead, and that’s the one chunk of my day that I haven’t figured out how to multi-task around yet.

One of the nice things about startups is that you can pretty much make up your own rules and come up with your own unique way of doing things. This can be as trivial as the particular color of whiteboard markers you choose to use (traditional black, red and blue in our case) or as important as the CRM solution you’re running (37signal’s HighRise, mostly). Our entire communications and office suite is Google-powered (Gmail, GCal, and GDocs & Spreadsheets … every one of them free-of-charge), and our project-management solution is of course, BasecampHQ.

My personal favorite bit of frivolity is being able to get away with firstname-only email addresses (luis AT syndeomedia DOT com, e.g.) — I have a pretty unwieldy last name, and I don’t especially like typing all 12 characters into every textfield I’m confronted with.

If you’re in a similarly small company, you ordinarily can give out firstname-only addresses for quite some time before you start running into name conflicts. Unfortunately for syndeo::media though, we’ve somehow managed to have not one, not two but THREE name conflicts within our tiny 15-person population. We started with 3 Jenny variants back in May (Jenny, Jennie and Jennifer), and 2 Raymonds the following month. And today I just found out that we would be hiring our second Mae, as well.

I’ve considered giving everyone unique homo-sapien-superior names (RailsJumper, SequelDaemon, Cascader, Ajaxx, et al), but X-men-inspired nomenclature doesn’t really work very well on business cards. Realistically speaking, there’s not much else for us to do but start adding lastnames (or initials) to the new teammembers’ addresses. So much for consistency.

(I have since rewritten the company by-laws to prohibit the hiring of a second Luis, which is I guess one of the perks of being the guy with the fountain pen. Sorry, namesakes. Feel free to pick a different industry.)