learnandteachonline.com

Has LookSmart's Find Articles service been adding lots of older articles from print magazines to the online collection? I have a Google alert on my name, which usually doesn't tell me much I don't already know, but today it gave me search results on my name, which took me down memory lane to two articles I wrote in the early 90s.

As this proves, I don't have much of a "book" when it comes to mass market consumer magazines -- at least not that I ever got a byline for. When I worked in PR I did an awful lot of ghosting. Now if somebody starts putting lots of verticals online, I can throw away that heavy box of writing samples. Actually, I've been thinking about doing that anyway. What do I have to prove, and to whom do I have to prove it anymore?

These are pretty rough scans. It looks like they have copyedited OCR glitches, but nobody's read for sense to pull out sidebars from the features. It's just all text on a page, then all text on another page. You know, the same thing you get when you try to export text or HTML from Quark or PDF.

Oh, and the answer to the question posed 14 years ago, "Has telecommuting's time come?" No, and I don't think it's much further along than it was when Helen La Van and I conducted that survey, at least not when it comes to supervisors' and HR folks' attitudes. I think in most quarters it's still all about control and mistrust and surveillance and "What if everybody wanted to do this?"