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A Word Before we get Started:

You lost your job. Its not your fault. Or maybe it is, but now that doesn’t matter. I heard on TV that in a crisis the reaction of 80% of victims is to freeze. This quick guide is designed to get you on the path back to employment during those first critical hours and days. With a plan, hopefully you won’t freeze up.

Day One: Collect Information

Before you sleep, there are a couple of important things to get done.

First collect contacts. When you leave your job, you can’t take any intellectual capital (or office supplies) but you can take the relationships you forged. Take your address book, or if that’s gone sit down and write down the names while they are still fresh in your memory.

Find your resume and update it. Refresh yourself on resume writing tips like including statistics and numbers and using action works. Update the details on your last job.

Finally pray to your diety of choice and get some rest.

Day Two: Get the Word Out

Think big. Good careers are stories. You story will be a combination of your past experience, present skills and future plans. Find two career directions and put together your story. How does the job fit what you’ve already done and learned?

Finish your resume. You’ve slept on it, now review your changes from yesterday. Split your resume into two – one catered to each career direction. Spell check, save it as plain text, PDF and maybe Word. Pick up some nice water-marked paper and print off a dozen or so. Upload them to at least two general job sites (Monster) and two more specific to your career area.

Write two cover letter templates. That’s one for each career direction. You’ll change these for each job you apply for. This is where you tell your story and connect your skills, experience and goals to the job you’re asking for.

Fire up the network. Email your professional contacts your resume. If you haven’t already, join a social network site like LinkedIn and post your resume there as well. Use these networks and the web to find contacts and companies that fit your plans and send them resumes.

Day Three: Dig in

Refine your strategy. Do some research on your competition. Lift phrases from job postings. Rewrite your resumes and cover letters as needed. As you learn, you may also change your career directions and stories.

Keep the money coming in. Taking on part-time work outside your career path isn’t admitting failure, its survival. If you can freelance in your field, do it. Otherwise, consider less glamorous part time and temp work.

Share your strategy. Be loud about what you are up to. Tell friends, family and neighbors what you are looking for. Everyone is a potential job contact.

Losing your job is hard. Finding a new one can be hard too. Whether you determined the situation your in or not is no longer important. What you do now will determine where you end up, so lets get to it.

What was the site? Yahoo! Answers. I had a gas answering, reading and answering questions. There has been lots of talk about how Yahoo! is putting the human back in the Internet, and I can see it working. I answered a few questions about software I was familiar with and got a question answered about some auto maintenance. Try it out, it’s a fabulous example of the value of a “live”, interactive web. The only question you won’t find the answer to is, “where did my afternoon go?”

Most of the attention offered the next step in web evolution is focued on websites. And rightly (or should I say Writely) so. New browser-based services are moving us from our PC’s to our Browsers. But that is only the top layer of the new Web 2.0 OS.

Services may come from the web, but User Scripts, via Grease Monkey, allow these services and their function to be customized at the user level. This provides a personalized web application experience.

Going down one more level, you reach the browser. For a complete Web 2.0 experience, your browser must be more than a window to the web, it must become your secure repository for account information and quick interaction with your services (think Firefox Gmail notifier).

One bunch that gets this is Flock, a new browser – based on Firefox – that integrates del.icio.us, Flickr and blog posting right into the browser. Check it out

But, after all my research I still came back hungry. And, after going over my expectations, I found out that maybe what I want isn’t a task list at all.

As I expect most of you do, I use my email inbox as a type of pending task list. When something comes in that requires action, I let it sit until I complete the task, then (as a Gmail user) I archive it. This works great for short-term tasks, but you can imagine if you sent your entire task list to your email, and let it clutter your inbox for weeks it would be quite a mess.

The solution? A “task boomerang” service. Here’s what I want to do: I have a task, say to write next week’s Freeloader Friday. But I don’t want to stare at it all week. So I send an email to the service, with a line specifying when I’d like the email sent back. So, then Thursday rolls around and I have completely forgotten to write my article, and email arrives in my inbox just in time to remind me.

Now, you could write a great web-based interface for managing all kinds of reminders – and Remember the Milk does this. BUT I don’t want to have to remember to go to a separate site to manage my tasks. I don’t want to take the time. Tasks happen in my inbox, so that’s where I want to stay.

Another must for a system like this is snooze. I want to get an email saying “Take out the Trash” from the system, but have a link in it that I can click to snooze it for 3 days. Given my sloppy knowledge of PHP and MySQL, I could hack something together, but I’d much rather a better programmer get it right without me having to butcher any code.

Its not that I don’t like the nice interfaces that come with these new task managers, its just that I’d rather be getting things done that enjoying slick AJAX.

OpenOffice.org is finally interesting. The Mac version is actually almost on-par with the Windows and Linux versions. The suites interface and features are standard on all three, provided you’re not afraid to use a developers’ release of version 2.0.

With speed improvements and near feature-parity with Office, there has never been an easier time to ditch MS for an Open alternative. While this Office replacement has a traditional approach, OpenOffice isn’t the only one making MS Office irrelevant.

ThinkFree has introduced a very interesting web-based alternative that is surprisingly feature-complete. Universal access, and no locally installed software make this a very interesting idea. ThinkFree’s imagination didn’t stop there either – you can embed fully editable office documents in your blog.

And lets not forget the AJAX crowd. While ThinkFree’s online office is Java-based, and requires some loading time new contenders like Writely and NumSum have word processing and spreadsheets (respectively) at your fingertips in fast AJAX.

Whatever your flavor or alternative, its becoming obvious that Microsoft Office is no more of a must buy than a giant pizza costume. And, with the office suite finally seeing some innovation, expect the replacements to be around for a while.

If you want to see an excellent implementation of AJAX in an online feed reader, take a look at the Gregarius project. It supports themes, plugins and runs on your server. Best of all, tagging and saving are done via elegant AJAX controls. It took me ten minutes of testing before I moved from Bloglines for good.

On a related note, I’ve also been using RoundCube webmail, a brilliant AJAX web interface for IMAP mail accounts. Drag and drop is supported, as well as instant deleting. With an interface as snappy as Thunderbird all I need is draft support and I’ll have a new mail client.

That makes it a perfect time to take a look at this pattern, and gather a couple pointers. As near as I can tell, this pattern consists of three cyclical events:

• a Disruptive Technology emerges. This technology changes behavior and attracts a user base
• Irrational Exuberance follows. Investors and acquisitions drown the new technology makers with money.
• finally, a Natural Purge determines the ‘winners’ and a new standard and market leader is established.

So now, what are the keys to becoming a winner? I think this boils down to two keys. First, you must get in quick. As fever grows and knock-offs spawn the value of the technology plummets. Grab the early and original, you’ll need the user base. Next, something more often overlooked (Skype, I’m looking at you) you need a valid business plan. Specifically you must align your businesses cost drivers with realizable cash-flows.

Now, who’s up for an IPO?

Something I’ve brought up several times is the power of platform independence. That is, the most powerful solution to bring about an end to Windows dominance (an unstated goal of much of the Open Source movement) isn’t to replace it, but to render it irrelevant.

By exterminating the difference between platforms, you give people no reason to pay for Windows. What’s more, you give a new freedom to users with investments in any platform (be it in experience, purchased softare or hardware). This is where the new free somes in.

It is one thing to burn your Windows EULA in effigy, but if you truly want a cause worth winning, why not make it universal access to software regardless of platform? Surely there are plenty of users incapable or uninclined to change operating systems that deserve access to software.

Thus, we really have three kinds of “free” softwares:

• Freeware – free as in beer
• Open Source – free as in freedom (to modify)
• Platform Universal – free as in air (accessible to all)

And to support my case, you’ll find that the best Open Source software is Platform Universal: Firefox, Gimp, Open Office. Even Linux (the largest distros) is hardware universal. Of course, for practicallity’s sake I’m only looking at Mac/Lin/Win compatibilty.

Most of the benefits of free as in freedom software resides with the developers and power users. To reach everyone, platform independence is the way to go. Maybe it’s better called Free for All.

Microsoft is in a problematic position. Until this strategy shift, buying out your competition, they relied on bundling – neither of which indicate a strong business model. And the products support this. Think Longhorn/Vista versus Tiger, IE versus Firefox, Opera and Safari, MSN web services versus Yahoo! and Google. With the exception of gaming (which I don’t know enough about) and Office suites, no expert would argue that Microsoft is leading in quality in any of these categories.

To figure out how we got here, we have only to look at the first strategy in place at M$: charge for something that used to be free and then eliminate alternatives. Once that worked for them, it was on to bundling and now acquisition. There’s no part of that equation that requires quality – their business model never has. Quality is as foreign a concept as innovation at Microsoft, despite how often they rattle them as buzz-words.

Belligerency as the third leg of World Domination also explains Baller’s embarrassing remarks toward Google. For those who have believed that Microsoft was the evil villain, Redmond seems bent on fulfilling their expectation. So how far can money get you? I guess we’ll see.