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¹ She’s lovely, actually. Awesome talent available on Elance these days!

Welcome to Triond

Triond, the relatively new article directory in the same vein as Associated Content and Helium, has been having trouble recently. They used to operate a model with up-front payments and revenue share that ran alongside a very open “acceptable quality” policy.

Historically, this made the site very popular with non-native English writers who had trouble keeping up with a site like Helium’s stricter rules and provided them with a much-needed outlet and earning potential.

However, this year has already seen Triond remove their up-front payments and switch to a pure 50% advertising rev-share model wherein articles get half the revenue earned from ads placed on their page.

This is always a bad sign for a content directory that used to have up-front payments, as it generally signals a drop in company revenue being passed on to authors. It’s happened before and it’s bad news – if not for the company, for the people producing the content.

To put it simply, authors’ wallets are being hit:

In Triond’s case, it’s not a scam – they’re big enough to have sufficient traffic to keep revenue coming in – but it’s still a big hit to the average writer’s wallet.

However, to make matters even worse, Triond is using their newly-added “report” button (to flag low-quality, inappropriate or misplaced content to admin) in a truly horrific way.

Triond’s “August Special” offers a bonus for writing 5 articles, which is good, but also states that anyone who “also flags at least 15 articles will receive a 10% bonus“.

This is one of the worst business decisions I have ever seen. Not only is it inviting batch-flagging by their users, it encourages aggressive attacks between rival writers and dumping the competition.

Not only that, they’re giving flaggers a nice little medal for their work, which is rather inappropriately yellow. Shame it isn’t star-shaped, then that particular (inverse) analogy would be even easier.

In one fell swoop, Triond has created an atmosphere of dissent among their users which, from those I’ve heard talking about it, could spark a mass exodus from the site.

What do you think? Is this a sign of the end for Triond? Is it just bad implementation of a good idea? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Unfortunately, AC have now changed their rules: non-US publishers who are not a part of the Featured Contributors scheme will no longer get any kind of per-view payments.

Here’s the text of the email:

Important Announcement: As of May 1, 2010, Associated Content will be making changes to our payment system that significantly impact Contributors who are not United States taxpayers.

After evaluating our payment policies in regard to international Contributors, our legal team has determined that Associated Content must immediately start withholding a portion of all international Performance Payments pursuant to U.S. tax laws. Due to the cost involved in this process, we can only offer continued Performance Payments to international Contributors enrolled in Associated Content’s Featured Contributors program.

Contributors who are not enrolled as a Featured Contributor, or are not accepted into this program, will no longer be able to earn Performance Payments from Associated Content as of May 1, 2010. If this applies to you, you will receive a final Performance Payment on May 12, 2010 for your page views through April 30, 2010 (if your balance exceeds the current $1.50 payment threshold).

If you are not currently enrolled as a Featured Contributor, we encourage you to apply now. Please note that the program requires you to have top-notch writing skills, and a strong body of work in one of our featured topic areas. You can read all the details and apply to one of the programs here. Note: There is no deadline for applying to the program, but you will not be able to earn further payment until/unless you are accepted.

If you are accepted into the program, you will be asked to submit a United States W-8BEN tax form, enabling Associated Content to withhold earnings on Performance Payments pursuant to U.S. tax laws. In addition, your earning threshold will increase from $1.50 to $100, meaning Associated Content will only process Performance Payments when the total payment balance passes $100. The good news: As a Featured Contributor, you will receive high value assignme nts [sic] every month, and will continue earning Performance Payments on all content published.

That’s going to be a big hit for a lot of writers who used AC as a source of residual income outside the US.

AC will remove writers’ content if requested: contact them at community@associatedcontent.com

oDesk's Time Tracking

Over the weekend, I once again came into contact with one aspect of office life – be it online or bricks-and-mortar – that has always been contentious. It causes distrust and arguments. It causes bad feeling. It causes suspicion and paranoia. What is it?

Time tracking.

With the introduction of modern management and all its acronyms, the ability to track an employee’s day has grown in importance. In my experience, there are three main ways to deal with the subject:

Paranoid

Managers under pressure to meet KPIs and other goals frequently fall prey to a desire to track absolutely every moment. Tools are, of course, available to handle this, though many simply demand a list of hours worked and a task breakdown.

Working in such a dictatorial environment has the advantage of showing how efficient you can be, but it also comes with drawbacks. Not least of these is the feeling of being under surveillance: either an application sits in the background, logging every keystroke, every mouse click and every file or workers are expected to note everything they do in a spreadsheet.

In turn, this raises the issues of privacy (where logging is automatic) and of wasted effort (where a manual system is used).

Carefree

At the other extreme are the employers who don’t care about tracking. Either they arrange to pay per-task or they work out deadlines and leave their employees to do the job.

This kind of hands-off treatment can work very well, especially if your workers are honestly interested in what they’re doing, reasonably well organised and communicative when there are problems.

On the other hand, it can be a nightmare if people miss deadlines, don’t say anything when they hit a snag or don’t really care about the work. In that case, you’re just asking for trouble by giving them free rein.

Sensible

Between the two extremes is what, personally, I find to be the most sensible solution. A good manager discusses the projects and tasks with the workers, sets deadlines and then tracks the major steps (milestones, if you prefer).

By giving people freedom and space, respect and trust are encouraged. It shows that, as an employer, you don’t feel the need to stand behind your employees, looking over their shoulder and breathing down their neck.

In return for the trust you show, you can also reasonably expect your workers to track what they do. Not down to the minute, as that takes far too much effort and is very intrusive, but at least the number of hours on each task.

Online Freelancing

Some would say that fussing about the minutiae of a person’s work is pedantic and annoying. I’d normally agree with them, but I can also see that working with online freelancers who you can’t see is a difficult situation. How do you know they’re actually working and not just playing Call of Duty?

Most of the big online sites provide tools to manage this. For instance, I’ve begun using oDesk’s tracker to keep tabs on my hours for a client. Before this, we worked on trust – but his accountants don’t like that and I can see their point.

The majority tools generally have a start/stop button that you control yourself and – in the case of the one I’m using – take a screenshot a few times every hour just as “proof” that you’re working. If you happen to be visiting Playboy‘s web site when the shot is taken (not that I do), you can cancel the upload – and lose 10 minutes or so of logged time (and stop the clock). Some also allow for web cam pictures to be taken (which is a horrible thought).

These tools also record activity levels – by counting key-presses and mouse clicks – but not what’s being typed or clicked. As a writer and editor, this part is less useful as a good deal of time is spent researching or reading, without any physical activity other than eye movement and the mouse’s scroll wheel.

The good news? It seems I mostly underestimate how long it takes me to do things, so I shall end up better-paid than I was without the tracking.

How do you feel about having your time tracked? Do you consider it rude and invasive or a necessary part of the employer-employee relationship?

Please click here to go straight to the post.

Here’s the text, minus the graphics and footer stuff, but otherwise unchanged:

Dear SpikeTheLobster,

As you no doubt already know, in the past 24 hours we inadvertently sent you as many as 73 copies of the “Daily Summary” email notifications from Workrooms that are not associated with your Elance account.

This is an embarrassing mistake. Please accept my personal apology for the inconvenience, confusion and disruption these emails may have caused you.

We hope that if you haven’t already, that you will promptly discard these emails so as to preserve the integrity of the communications that have been mistakenly sent to you.

Thank you for your ongoing support of Elance, for your understanding and for your cooperation.

Respectfully yours,

Maurizio Gianola
VP, Engineering

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed the distinct lack of understanding on the part of Elance regarding the potential impact of this error?

This is not “an embarrassing mistake” – it’s an extremely incompetent breach of client trust and security. I may have received up to 73 emails that I should not have seen – seventy-three private messages. Just imagine what could have been in those emails and what damage I could do with that information.

Complete descriptions of products, confidential innovations for website design, discussions of bank account details or phone numbers… anything could have been in them.

The announcement email has “We respect your right to privacy” in the standard footer. Perhaps, but not enough. I have, of course, replied and invited them to drop in and comment.

The one good thing is that the VP of Engineering is apparently a geek: anyone who’s more concerned with the “inconvenience, confusion and disruption” extra emails cause, rather than the legal and financial implications for the company as a whole is definitely a tech-head and gets my vote. Yay, Elance.

I’m not working on the projects.

Yes, that’s right: I have received private messages sent from within existing, ongoing projects but I’m not a part of the team. I have no idea why their system sent me copies.

Fortunately for the individuals involved, none of their personal information was included (and I’m an honest chap, anyway, so wouldn’t have used it for the purpose of advancing my plans for world domination).

Obviously, I’ve contacted the Elance support people and told them what’s going on. I’ll keep you updated on anything I hear.

In the meantime, be careful what you type on your workroom message boards.

Update (28 Aug, 11:11 GMT) – I’m now being flooded with private messages. Thankfully, those that say they have attachments do not. It appears only message text is being misdirected, rather than (potentially very confidential) documents. No guarantees, though.

Update (28 Aug 20:35 GMT) – Elance have sorted their problem out. Apparently one of their engineers changed the daily update script and caused the breach.

Quite how someone manages to make a script change with such a massive, glaring error in it and it isn’t spotted before going into production is beyond me. I mean, it’s not like we’re talking about a tiny thing here. This is sending confidential information to people not involved in the jobs. The error is huge.

It’s also a glaring error: how is the fact of sending emails from a workroom to people not in that workroom overlooked? How does that get into the production environment? How many people were affected? How many will be filing law suits over disclosed information? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Here’s the text of the email I received:

Thank you for your email.

Here is what we know so far about the Daily Summary emails that many have reported receiving earlier today, Friday, August 28.

Once a day, Elance sends an email (to those who elect to receive them) that summarizes the previous 5 messages that have occurred inside the digital Workrooms that facilitate collaboration between service providers and their clients. Such communications are typically messages that occur either in real-time between parties or are left in a bulletin board format.

Yesterday, one of our engineers made a change to the script that initiates this nightly process. The changes were tested, but the errors were not identified. As a result, last night’s batch of such Daily Summary emails were initiated at 1:30am Pacific time, and unfortunately an unknown number were erroneously sent to Elance members that were neither the provider nor the client. The error was discovered at 2:30am and the process was halted by 2:50am.

We apologize for this error and any inconvenience that this issue might have caused. We will be reaching out directly to all parties affected with additional information shortly.

Additionally, for ongoing updates to the situation, please refer to this page: http://www.elance.com/p/trust/daily_email_update.html.

Best regards,
Steve Holm
Director, Customer Relations