• The Freelancer’s Toolset: 100 Web Apps for Everything You Will Possibly Need
• MindMapPedia is a library of publicly available mind maps.
• BookSpoke is a social network for readers and writers.
• Brijit: Content with 100 words or less.
• Catalog your books at Library Thing.
• Get the skinny on your zip code.
• Blog of quotation marks abuse.
• Periodic Table of Comic Books.
• Cup stacking caught on with my son and his friends. But dice stacking? Whoa.
• Three geeky goodies from TechRepublic:
  • Dirty Computers
  • Endangered Computers
  • Vintage Computer Festival

  Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate!

• SalesDogs Diagnostics: What type of salesdog breed are you? What kind of team do you have?
• Stationery Movie Quiz: Guess the movie from office supplies.
• Good Keywords: Free software for finding the right keywords. Also has a keyword primer for beginners.
• Get kid gift ideas by checking out Dr. Toy’s Best Products of 2007.
• We keep our lawn (front and back) as simple as possible. That way we don’t use up much water or resources to keep it in good shape. LessLawn provides tips on building a low-maintenance lawn.
• The 100 Tools Freelancers Can’t Live Without

• But they did not give up lists successful people who were told they would not succeed. [Thanks, Lifehack]
• Designing Sidekicks for Fashion Target Breast Cancer. A little wild for my taste, but a great idea and cause.
• 6 Lies about Creative Writing.
• 5 tips for giving feedback on creative work
• 101 reasons freelancers do it better. [Thanks, Freelance Folder]

Yuwanda Black wrote a two part (scroll down in both links) article sharing her 19 years of experience as a freelance writer. She shares wonderful insight that I’ve discovered in the past few years. Here is her list with my comments on some items:

1. Staying abreast of technology is crucial: Lucky this isn’t an issue with me.
2. Writing is a skill: I hear those “Duhs!” But we all write. We learned to write stories and reports in school, so that makes us a writer by profession? Sorry. No. It took me five years to get where I am today. Practice, study, learn, practice.
3. Freelancing full-time is not hard: Start doing freelance work on the side — don’t just quit your day job cold. Instead, build up your business on the side. I did that for five years before I went full-time freelancing.
4. Marketing is a skill that must be developed: This is where working on the side helps. I slowly added more clients without the pressure of wondering where my next pay check would come. I always keep my eyes open for opportunities even though I hardly have room to take on more. Things fall through. Projects end. You may want to drop a client that’s more trouble than it’s worth. I believe that freelancers who cut the difficult or incompatible clients are happier and end up with more assignments though it means losing some.
5. Employers don’t like to hire freelancers for full-time jobs: No thoughts here. Makes sense in some cases.
6. You can’t change your rates every year: Guilty. Not of changing rates, but my inability to quote projects. Some clients don’t have all the information or details of what they need me to do. I explain to them that since we can’t see exactly the work involved that I’ll have to quote by the hour. The problem is they can’t side aside a budget for writing work since hourly is ongoing. I’m still developing my skills in this area.
7. You must develop a niche: I believe this is true and spent a lot of time thinking about this. But I’m happy with my variety and lucky I have a nice amount of work though it’s not in a specific niche. Sure, I cover a lot of tech, but I also cover B2B, web design, newsletters and online marketing, education (not from a writing perspective) and games. Maybe it’s my nature not to fall into one thing. Since it’s working, I’m not going to go crazy working my way to a niche. If it happens, it happens.
8. Patience is a virtue: Definitely. Five years before I left corporate America for Meryl Co.
9. Retirement is not planned for: I’m working to change this. Investing in an IRA can help with taxes, too.
10. Longevity pays: “The longer you freelance, the easier it gets,” writes Black. I find this work easier than I did as little as one year ago. Practice, practice, practice.

Blurbs, testimonials, and quotes are a great way to promote yourself or your book as you let the clients and readers do the talking. No worries about sounding like a braggart. But there are good, bad, and tricky testimonials.

“This is a great book!”

“Joe did an excellent job on the project!”

Do these tell you anything? These are empty and generic quotes. Here’s one that’s an example of a tricky testimonial, but you wouldn’t know it:

“Jane is very reliable.”

This tells part of the story. The rest of the story… “Jane is very reliable in arriving late for work every day.” Makes it easy for someone who didn’t like the person’s work to avoid saying something bad. But in most cases, the employee wouldn’t use such a person as a referral. So referrals can’t be trusted 100% — another problem with the traditional job search process.

When reading book reviews in Amazon or elsewhere, you can tell which ones are the author’s friends. They’re short and empty. They tell you nothing about the book. It’s better not to have a testimonial than one like this, I think. What if a big name wrote this kind of blurb? The blurb is useless in terms of convincing you to buy the book, but the author’s association with the person could convince some people to buy it (that old “It’s who you know.”).

When asking for a testimonial after the person agreed to supply one, ask the person to answer this results-oriented question and the testimonial will more likely be valuable.

“What has [product or service] helped you achieve?”

The latest article from Roy Peter Clark of Poynter.com and author of Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer says it’s the 100th anniversary of the “blurb.” Since when do words get their own anniversaries? How do we know which ones deserve an anniversary?

A reader responding to Clark’s article wrote a great comment and an excellent example of a tricky blurb:

My all-time favorite came from a soft-hearted sportswriter who was asked to provide a blurb for a memoir by a washed-up and nearly illiterate professional boxer. His contribution: “Obviously a labor of love.”

You can make your testimonials more credible if you include one that’s not positive. Why would you want to include that? It shows you’re honest and human. But why would we want to show our weaknesses? C’mon. Everyone has weak areas and we might as well as be up front about them and earn credibility points.

I tried to get one from an editor on an assignment that didn’t work out. Even told the editor that I fully expected a testimonial that wasn’t positive. No luck. But then again, I understand because it would be difficult for me to point out something negative about a person’s work and then let it get published for all the world to see.