Here’s great video that presents a ton of statistics about the remarkable changes taking place in our world, namely from an information and globalization standpoint. I believe we’re in the midst of a paradigm shift, and this video presents some great information.

I say great because all the statistics are apparently backed up with their sources. Good amalgamation of relevant fact.

Given the nature of our work here at Woven, I read a number of blogs and other publications having to do with collaboration. One of these, Collaboration Loop, profiles collaboration technologies in the enterprise space. They usually focus on enterprise grade offerings from the larger commercial players, but they just featured a short article on the open source Drupal platform. Coincidentally, it’s the very platform we’re basing our work on. I thought the article nicely relayed some of the very reasons we chose to make Drupal a crucial part of our strategy, and it presents a good case for why Drupal may give some of the enterprise offerings a run for their money.

IBM recently announced its Lotus Connections suite of products, touted as “Social Software for Business”, and I wanted to share a quick word.

Lotus Connections has five Web 2.0-based components — Activities, Communities, Dogear, Profiles and Blogs — that help business people quickly connect and build new relationships based on their individual needs. […] Lotus Connections helps organizations foster a sense of community, especially among geographically dispersed teams, helping employees come together to share their knowledge and collaborate on a project.

This announcement by a technology giant gives further credibility to those of us innovating in the team collaboration space. The market is forming, awareness is spreading, and it’s only a matter of time before team collaboration tools like these become commonplace. It underscores that these tools will be leveraged even across conventional enterprises (not just for loosely formed distributed teams) and affirms my belief that these tools will in fact be the catalyst for evolutionary change in the very structure and model of these organizations.

Freelancers Union is an organization that aims to represent America’s growing independent workforce. Focusing first on New York, the organization primarily offers group-rate health insurance (as it has done for years now) and is expanding with other kinds of coverage across the US. They also advocate for political change, focusing on issues of concern to independent workers — issues like double taxation (when you’re both an employer and an employee), limited access to health insurance, retirement savings options, employment laws, and legal redress for non-paying clients. They provide important information and facts about New York’s independent workforce, publishing frequent reports and studies. They’ve started a number of educational events and networking opportunities catered to freelancers. They operate a basic, free community web site that lets members post and search for freelance gigs, share information amongst each other, and generally interact.

I first discovered Freelancers Union via their advertising campaign on the New York City subway system. “Member profiles, post gigs, find jobs”, the wall ads announced. “It’s like one, giant octopus”, one of the ads proclaimed, and I took to the message. I immediately recognized it as something in the same vein as what I’m doing here. Woven is all about supporting the geographically distributed workforce, while Freelancers Union seemed to be addressing the “independent” workforce locally in New York.

Every year since 1927, Time Magazine has dedicated an issue to profiling the man, woman, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that “for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year.”

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Web Worker Daily is a new blog which I came across recently via the excellent TechCrunch site. With its tagline “Rebooting the Workforce”, it’s dedicated to those operating outside of the conventional workplace paradigm. The virtual worker — often referred to by the site’s authors as “bedouins” after the desert-dwelling nomadic tribes — is one whose primary tool is a laptop, who works wherever there’s a WiFi connection and a coffee, out of bistros and bars, even on the beach. Virtual workers freelance, have flexible schedules, and can show up to work in pajamas. The site aims to explore this phenomenon and provide a forum for these workers to come together and share.

Yesterday marked Labor Day in the United States. It’s a day many people regard as a last chance for leisure before being plunged back into the regular work cycle and the colder, shorter, darker days ahead.

The day itself was founded as a celebration of the American worker, and, ironically, we celebrate by not working. We light up the backyard BBQ and kick back with some steaks and beer instead.

It all seems very appropriate to me. After all, many of us see our work as the daily grind — a monotonous, but necessary, cycle of struggle to bring home the cash to support you and yours. It’s no wonder Monday is traditionally dreaded and Friday is looked forward to. Makes sense that Labor Day is always the first Monday of September then, doesn’t it? It’s good to stop, relax, and put labor into context.

Ben Bernanke is Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the quasi-governmental central banking system here in the United States, which has tremendous influence over the monetary and credit conditions in the economy. In a recent speech, he talked about global economic integration.

As Bernanke spelled out, when economists measure the earth in “distance”, they’re referring not just to the physical distance, but to other factors as well. Things like the cost of shipping goods, the time it takes for a message to travel, and the cost of sending and receiving that message are all important. They also factor in what they call the “width of the border”, which are the costs associated with tariffs and other rules imposed at a border, as well as costs that arise from differences in language, culture, legal traditions, and political systems.