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Selling Expertise on the Internet for Extra Cash Teresa Estes, a licensed mental-health counselor, watched as business at her private practice decreased last year. Then the single mother turned to her keyboard to boost her income. Ms. Estes applied to become an "expert" on Live Person Inc., a Web site where clients pay for online chat time with professionals and advisers of all fields. For $1.89 a minute—a rate she set—Estes dispenses advice to clients around the globe. She spends about four hours a day online, often at night, when her daughter has gone to bed. "It was the economy," she says of her move to take her skills online. "Live Person is more profitable than my private practice." Ms. Estes had charged her private clients up to $75 an hour. As the recession deepens, a small but growing number of people are taking their skills online, offering expertise or performing specified tasks for a fee. Labor-at-the-keyboard sites are gaining popularity as people increasingly turn to the Web in search of work. Internet job-search sites saw a 51% rise in traffic from January 2008 to January 2009, according to comScore Media Metrix, to 26.7 million unique visitors. Among the many fee-for-service Web sites out there, at least three arc attracting a significant number of users—though consumers should exercise a healthy degree of skepticism when consulting any of these sites. Live Person seeks out experts on a slew of topics, including mental health, financial services, shopping and fashion, as well as psychics and spiritual advisers. Mechanical Turk, a Web service run by Amazon. coin Inc., pays workers to perform tasks, such as cataloging products online. Associated Content pays contributors to write articles on a wide range of subjects, from organic flower gardening to how to apply for financial aid. Live Person went public in 2001 , and the current version of the site was launched in late 2007. Today, the site has 30,000 registered experts, attracting an average of 100,000 people a year who pay for the offered services, says Chief Executive Officer Robert LoCascio. Roughly 3,500 people have made contributing to the site their full-time job, he says. Live Person says it vets contributors’ qualifications, such as medical licenses or financial certification, through a third party, and relies heavily on its community reviews. Some 200 people a day apply to he Live Person experts, up from 120 a year ago, says Mr. LoCascio. Once cleared, advisers work with clients on a cost-per-minute basis set by the adviser. The site takes a commission of between 30% and 35%. Associated Content, by contrast, reviews submissions in house and then decides how much to pay for them. The site, which specializes in how-to pieces and feature stories on news topics, had 237,000 registered contributors and more than one million content pieces as of February, both about double from the same mouth a year ago. After posting the content, the site sells advertisements against it and distributes it to other companies, such as online shoe retailer Zappos, which use the content on their own Web sites. If Associated Content accepts a submission (it says it rejects about 25% of them) , the author gets between $5 and $30, plus $1.50 for each 1,000 page views. An ability to write "search-engine-optimized" content, an industry term for generating good Google results, helps, says site founder Luke Beatty. People are not only looking for payment but also establishing their credentials "as somebody with experience", he says. Writing about a specific profession, such as law or real estate, helps raise a person’s profile online, enhancing his job searches, says Mr. Beatty. Sabah Karimi, a 26-year-old from Orlando, Fla., left a career in marketing to become a full-time freelance writer and now spends between 8 and 10 hours a week writing for Associated Content. She has been at it for about three years and says she earns roughly $1,000 a month from her past and current submissions. Ms. Karimi cautions newcomers to Associated Content that it takes time to build up earnings. She says she learned how to write articles that would bring traffic and often looks for newsy ideas that will attract readers. Mechanical Turk, by contrast, is based on "crowd sourcing", or breaking a task into lots of tiny pieces and giving it to a big group of people to complete quickly. Most of these jobs—which the site calls HITs, for human intelligence tasks—pay just a few cents. Efficient MTurkers, as they call themselves, can make more than $100 a week doing things such as finding someone’s email address or labeling images of a particular animal in a photograph. Amazon says that MTurk now has 200,000 workers from 100 different countries, but it doesn’t keep track of past figures. The site—named for an 18th-century stunt involving a turbaned chess-playing "machine" with an actual chess master hidden within—began as a way to help Amazon manage its product database. Amazon uses the site to help sort images and content, paying people a few cents a task. Mechanical Turk also serves a variety of companies who need Web tasks performed, especially those that require a human element. Knewton Inc., for example, uses it extensively for focus-group-type tasks, as well as enlisting people to take its practice tests. Keri Knutson, a mother of five, discovered Mechanical Turk when her eldest son was headed for college. Ms. Knutson, now 45, needed money for his tuition and fees. She took on all kinds of low-paying but easy tasks at the beginning, from finding a place to purchase a specific item to identifying the name of a street in a photograph. People looking to make money online as fee-afor-service experts should read the fine print. Live Person has one of the more formal payment systems, requiring users to sign up for an account before talking with an expert. Some sites, including Associated Content and Mechanical Turk, reserve the right to refuse payment if a task is not completed satisfactorily. Most sites have a robust community of workers who regularly offer one another tips on which tasks pay the best. Mechanical Turk users have an independent site called Turker Nation (turkers. proboards80, com), which reviews the companies that solicit (索求) and pay for tasks so that workers can check a company’s record before taking on a task. Consumers who use these sites also need to exercise caution. Relying on legal or medical advice from an unknown online source has obvious drawbacks, and the Web sites acknowledge that some users have registered complaints about the advice offered on the sites. Live Person warns consumers to offer their financial and personal details with care. For the workers on these sites, even incremental sources of income are helpful these days. Ms. Knutson now spends the majority of her time transcribing Web audio and video for clients, earning about $250 a week for 30 hours of work. She says she has seen more competition lately but is determined to keep up her weekly pace. "If I didn’t have this money," she says, "we’d be struggling to find what to eat every week.\ What does Ms. Knutson spend the majority of her time doing
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Everyone knows hand washing is important. But a new study shows how washing yore" hands (67) , and at the right time, can have a big impact on your family’s risk of getting sick. Most studies on hand washing focus on (68) and food service workers. But this month’s American Journal of Infection Control focuses on washing hands at (69) as a way to stop infections from (70) Several studies show hands are the single most important (71) route for all types of infections. Even though most people know to wash their hands after using the toilet or handling a diaper (尿布), studies (72) many people are still ending up with germs on their hands. One study looked in homes of (73) recently vaccinated against polio (脊髓灰质炎). After vaccination, the virus is (74) to be shed in the baby’s feces (粪便). Researchers found the virus on 13 percent of bathroom, living room and kitchen surfaces. (75) the virus from the vaccine didn’t pose a health risk, feces-borne viruses can (76) through the home. Doorknobs and toilet flush handles are key (77) of germ transmission in the home. That’s why people should focus on cleaning such surfaces (78) and always wash their hands after touching them. In one study, a (79) touched a door handle contaminated with a virus. He then shook hands (80) other volunteers, and spread the virus to six people. The study authors note that the timing of hand washing is key. It’s (81) to wash hands after using the toilet, before eating or handling food. Other crucial times for hand washing are after (82) a diaper or cleaning up after a pet, or after touching garbage cans, dish rags and utensils that may have come (83) contact with raw food. While it may be hard to (84) that something as simple as regular hand washing can make a difference in your family’s health, consider what happened during the 2003 outbreak of SARS. The outbreak (85) extensive public and community health measures, including regular hand washing. Not only was the SARS outbreak contained, (86) other cases of illnesses dropped sharply.
Everyone knows hand washing is important. But a new study shows how washing yore" hands (67) , and at the right time, can have a big impact on your family’s risk of getting sick. Most studies on hand washing focus on (68) and food service workers. But this month’s American Journal of Infection Control focuses on washing hands at (69) as a way to stop infections from (70) Several studies show hands are the single most important (71) route for all types of infections. Even though most people know to wash their hands after using the toilet or handling a diaper (尿布), studies (72) many people are still ending up with germs on their hands. One study looked in homes of (73) recently vaccinated against polio (脊髓灰质炎). After vaccination, the virus is (74) to be shed in the baby’s feces (粪便). Researchers found the virus on 13 percent of bathroom, living room and kitchen surfaces. (75) the virus from the vaccine didn’t pose a health risk, feces-borne viruses can (76) through the home. Doorknobs and toilet flush handles are key (77) of germ transmission in the home. That’s why people should focus on cleaning such surfaces (78) and always wash their hands after touching them. In one study, a (79) touched a door handle contaminated with a virus. He then shook hands (80) other volunteers, and spread the virus to six people. The study authors note that the timing of hand washing is key. It’s (81) to wash hands after using the toilet, before eating or handling food. Other crucial times for hand washing are after (82) a diaper or cleaning up after a pet, or after touching garbage cans, dish rags and utensils that may have come (83) contact with raw food. While it may be hard to (84) that something as simple as regular hand washing can make a difference in your family’s health, consider what happened during the 2003 outbreak of SARS. The outbreak (85) extensive public and community health measures, including regular hand washing. Not only was the SARS outbreak contained, (86) other cases of illnesses dropped sharply.
Everyone knows hand washing is important. But a new study shows how washing yore" hands (67) , and at the right time, can have a big impact on your family’s risk of getting sick. Most studies on hand washing focus on (68) and food service workers. But this month’s American Journal of Infection Control focuses on washing hands at (69) as a way to stop infections from (70) Several studies show hands are the single most important (71) route for all types of infections. Even though most people know to wash their hands after using the toilet or handling a diaper (尿布), studies (72) many people are still ending up with germs on their hands. One study looked in homes of (73) recently vaccinated against polio (脊髓灰质炎). After vaccination, the virus is (74) to be shed in the baby’s feces (粪便). Researchers found the virus on 13 percent of bathroom, living room and kitchen surfaces. (75) the virus from the vaccine didn’t pose a health risk, feces-borne viruses can (76) through the home. Doorknobs and toilet flush handles are key (77) of germ transmission in the home. That’s why people should focus on cleaning such surfaces (78) and always wash their hands after touching them. In one study, a (79) touched a door handle contaminated with a virus. He then shook hands (80) other volunteers, and spread the virus to six people. The study authors note that the timing of hand washing is key. It’s (81) to wash hands after using the toilet, before eating or handling food. Other crucial times for hand washing are after (82) a diaper or cleaning up after a pet, or after touching garbage cans, dish rags and utensils that may have come (83) contact with raw food. While it may be hard to (84) that something as simple as regular hand washing can make a difference in your family’s health, consider what happened during the 2003 outbreak of SARS. The outbreak (85) extensive public and community health measures, including regular hand washing. Not only was the SARS outbreak contained, (86) other cases of illnesses dropped sharply.
There is a new type of small advertisement becoming increasingly common in newspaper classified columns. It is sometimes placed among "situations vacant", although it does not offer anyone a job, and sometimes it appears among "situations wanted", although it is not placed by someone looking for a job, either. What it does is to offer help in applying for a job. "Contact us before writing your application", or "Make use of our long experience in preparing your curriculum vitae or job history" is how it is usually expressed. The growth and apparent success of such a specialized service is, of course, a reflection on the current high levels of unemployment. It is also an indication of the growing importance of the curriculum vitae( or job history), with the suggestion that it may now qualify as an art form in its own right. There was a time when job seekers simply wrote letters of application. "Just put down your name, address, age and whether you have passed any exams," was about the average level of advice offered to young people applying for their first jobs when I left school. The letter was really just for openers, it was explained, and everything else could and should be saved for the interview. And in those days of full employment the technique worked. The letter proved that you could write and were available for work. Your eager face and intelligent replies did the rest. Later, as you moved up the ladder, something slightly more sophisticated was called for. The advice then was to put something in the letter which would distinguish you from the rest. It might be the aggressive approach. "Your search is over. I am the person you are looking for." was a widely used trick that occasionally succeeded. Or it might be some special feature specially designed for the job interview. There is no doubt, however, that it is increasing number of applicants with university education at all points in the process of engaging staff that has led to the greater importance of the curriculum vitae. In the past it was expected that first job hunters would ______.
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