I got an email from someone inquiring about my availability for a project yesterday. Another person asked me through New Tech Heroes' contact form about a job possibility last week. Both asked the same question: "Are you available for long-term work?" They enjoyed the blog, and got the idea that I have some idea what I'm talking about and can use the technologies involved (which is one of the reasons that anyone involved in new media should have a blog). They weren't sure, however, if I was actually available for work.

Let me clear this question up.

Yes, I am.

This is a fast-moving time in a fast-moving industry. Startups are launched and shut down in a matter of months. Anyone working in new media or social publishing should be open to new opportunities, and I certainly am. While I have a small list of ongoing clients' projects, I'm also living in Michigan, which a quick peek at the statistics will tell you isn't exactly a hotbed of economic growth in 2008.

So, yes, I am open to opportunities. Full-time or contract jobs, projects, you name it. If it's related to writing or web development, particularly using open source tools like Drupal or Joomla, please consider me if you like what you see here on New Tech Heroes. I have a wide range of media and communications experience, and I'm willing to relocate or travel as needed. My resume is available here.

Image source: Steve Woods (woodsy on sxc.hu), Colchester, Essex, U.K.

Outstanding post yesterday by Ann Handley on her Annarchy personal blog. I enjoyed it because she talks about two things near and dear to me: New Media and community theater. To be honest, I hadn't really thought about the parallels Ann describes, but I think she's right. Social publishing tools have made it much easier for anyone to publish their opinions. In the same way, community theater provides an outlet for non-professionals to express themselves as actors and technicians. As Ann says in her post:

Folks who previously didn’t have voice—or, more specifically, a platform—now do. In other words, like the community theater players, all kinds of people have a stage, if they want one. The “unbundling of all sources,” as Dave [Winer] calls it, has given voice to lots of folks previously shut out of the conversation.

and

Those who do climb up on the stage reveal themselves at a more fundamental level. Just like my acquaintance who risked showing a sassier, freer, funner side… bloggers can’t help but reveal themselves to their audiences.... Blogs are honest in a way that professionals aren’t.

Great stuff. Ann also discusses the ever-present professional versus amateur argument regarding social media. It's also present in theater, with a definite disdain by many professional theater artists toward their community theater brethren.

The point isn't replacing professionals with amateurs (although there are those on the amateur side who would perversely rejoice in the fall of professional media - or theater - despite the unlikelihood of that actually happening). The point is creating opportunities for those who don't otherwise have a voice to make themselves heard. And letting that person you "sort of know" from your community express herself on-stage for the first time.

• Drupal developer wanted. Must have 8 years experience with Drupal or similar Open Source CMS.
• Client needs a Workpress programmer. Required skills include C++ and/or Visual Basic.
• Social Media Manager. Looking for a Facebook and MySpace guru with 5+ years experience and a BS in Social Media. Master's preferred.

"New Media" jobs are hot. We've seen the power of connecting directly to our clients, constituents and pretty much everyone through blogging and social networking applications on the web. Now businesses and organizations are trying to figure out how to make effective use of these technologies to expand their reach, improve customer relations and take control of the online conversation.

Search the big job boards and you'll find plenty of postings seeking people with experience using online networking applications like Twitter or Facebook, or those who know how to install and customize a WordPress or Drupal site. It's a great time to be involved with new media.

So who's writing these ridiculous job descriptions? Excepts from three of them are above, and they'd be funny if they weren't also real. Eight years experience with Drupal? I think there's only one person on Earth with that qualification. Workpress? Is that another startup that sounds like WordPress, or was someone not listening very closely? C++ and VB are great, but what do they have to do with WordPress? And five years experience with Facebook and MySpace? Good luck with that, not to mention finding someone with a Master's in Social Media.

The HR departments that posted these jobs were faced with something new and strange, and apparently tried to apply existing requirements for "normal" jobs like Programmer or Network Administrator to these new positions. The problem is new media is developing so quickly, and the demand for professionals to work in the field so great, that old expectations don't apply. In some cases, the best qualified person for some of these jobs may not have graduated from high school. It's tough to get used to the idea you're going to have to pay someone under the age of twenty-five a wage approaching $50.00 an hour - and they may not even have a Bachelor's degree!

If you're hiring, flexibility and curiosity are keys to look for from applicants. The most important qualification anyone can demand from a new media hire is the ability to think creatively, because as the field continues to grow, the person you hire will have to be able to adapt to those changes. Having a genuine curiosity about other people and now they think and react is important, too (maybe a new use for a psychology or sociology degree?).

Companies that can think outside of the box when looking for new media candidates will be rewarded in the long run. Those that reject candidates for not matching unreasonable requirements may find it hard to find anyone to fit their needs, at a time when the potential benefits of new media and social networking is so great.

Photo credit: Maare Liiv, Estonia (www.sxc.hu)

Newspapers' New Owners Turn Grim - by David Carr from The New York Times - "Critics of newspapers say that part of the problem is that the industry has lost its ability to surprise. Tell that to the guys who have just bought in.... These are all smart businesspeople, with significant success in other endeavors, who took a hard look at the wave-tossed publishing sector and appointed themselves as life savers. And very soon after jumping in, they too began foundering in the tall waves."

Moving from WordPress.com to Self-Hosted WordPress in Plain English - by Michael Martine from Remarkablogger - "Sooner or later, you find out that out of all five billion themes available, you don’t really like any of them, but you have little to no say (or skill) in customizing all but a very few of them. Sooner or later, you discover that all the cool functionality other blogs have from something called plugins is verboten to you on WordPress.com."

Mozilla CEO says Apple's Safari auto-update 'wrong' - by Martin LaMonica from CNET News.com - "A lot of people appear to be bent out of shape about Apple using its auto-update service to distribute the Safari Web browser on Windows. The CEO of Mozilla, which makes the rival Firefox browser, calls it bad business."

Revisiting a topic I covered last week, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania released an excellent article yesterday on "The Experts vs. the Amateurs: A Tug of War over the Future of Media" on their Knowledge@Wharton web site. A few insights from the article:

Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader and Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach say fears about user-generated content are misplaced. "It's absurd to say the pendulum is swinging back to professional content. User-generated content has just been born," says Fader. There is little evidence to suggest that it takes market share from the professional variety, he adds.

and

The mergers between traditional media companies and user-generated sites are indications of where Internet content is headed, say experts at Wharton. Despite hand wringing over professional and amateur content, the reality is that consumers will use and appreciate both.

"Pitting amateur and professional content against each other makes a good storyline, but it's misleading to see them as fundamentally opposed," says Werbach. "User-generated content will never match The New York Times for the overall quality of coverage of the Iraq war, for example, but reading Iraqi blogs, or political blogs about the war, provides some perspectives you won't get from any newspaper." And, he adds, "There's no way a traditional encyclopedia will ever match the coverage of Wikipedia, because there are so many more contributors. On the other hand, while the quality of most Wikipedia entries is surprisingly good, there are times you want the certainty of a reference work that is professionally edited and vetted, or a smaller set of resources that have been pre-selected by experts."

Worth a full read.

Move Over - This Is Radio 2.0 - by Raghav "Rags" Gupta from GigaOM - "Radio, while still powerful, is no longer perceived as the vibrant marketing channel for music it once was. MTV certainly isn’t. They’ve been replaced by the web — in particular, by social networking communities and blogs. This is Radio 2.0."

The Lycos 50^TM for Week Ending March 8, 2008 - Barack Obama leads Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Elliott Spitzer searches are way up, as is Justin Timberlake. In other news, Lycos apparently still has a search engine. Film at eleven.

Iger: New Media Can Complement Old - by Mike Farrell from Multichannel News - "Disney CEO Robert Iger touted the entertainment giant’s aggressive stance on the Web, but added that online distribution can actually enhance the value of more traditional media outlets like television and movie theaters."

Drupal Economic Indicators Mashup v1.0 - by Jeff Whatcott from @FIRST_LIGHT - "Drupal mentions in job postings look really strong relative to other social publishing technologies. But there still aren’t as many postings as I would like to see. If you dig into the data, only hundreds of job postings actually mention Drupal whereas thousands of job postings mention PHP. But at least Drupal is a specific skill that people are willing to pay for."

Citizen media and the Beijing Olympics - by Hugh R. Macdonald from New Media Mogul - "[The IOC plans] to let athletes maintain personal blogs surrounding the games, provided they don’t comment on the performances of other athletes or upload audiovisual content they have created of an Olympic event. Speaking more generally, it would appear that the IOC considers blogging to be ‘a legitimate form of personal expression’ rather than journalism."

New Media: an Important Place to Be - by Luke Armour from blogtalkradio - "Let’s look at the reported Percent of Media Influence on Electronics and Year over Year Growth for Web Radio: up 14.4%, Satellite Radio: down 6.9%, Radio: up a tiny 0.8%, Newspaper down 1.2%, Magazines down 3.7%, TV/Broadcast down 13.9% and Cable down a whopping 14.4%. And we don’t expect the trend to slow down any time soon."

Will new media breed new artists? - by Scott Kirsner from CinemaTech - "The first movies shown in the first Kinetoscope Parlor (it opened in 1894 on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan) were amateurish compared to the sophisticated theatrical offerings of the day.... I submit that we're at a similar moment with visual storytelling on cell phones, iPods, and the Web."

The geeks shall inherit the earth - by David Jenkinson from C21Media - "It's strange there aren't more people [at SXSW] from television, if just to see what's rising up in the homelands of digital media that may challenge traditional business models in the comfortable world of linear entertainment."

New Media Continues to Grow in Influence; Further Fragments Influence of Traditional Media - from New Communications Review - "While traditional media still rank on top, many are declining in influence and some are showing double digit losses over the previous year; whereas, many new media options are showing double digit growth."