Outsourced My Life

Here is a video created by the team at oDesk.

Here are a few of my thoughts while watching it: (more…)

Anytime I begin a relationship with a virtual assistant I enjoy hearing about their background.  I ask them why they are working as a virtual assistant, what they like and don’t like about providing remote assistant services, and where they see themselves in 3 – 5 years.   I’ve also found that most of the stories about outsourcing internationally that I’ve read are from the perspective of the buyer of virtual assistant services (people like me), but few are from their perspective.

A few weeks ago I dipped my toe into, and wrote about my first experience with the Amazon Mechanical Turk system.   Compared to my normal virtual assistant projects I never had a single conversation with the provider.  I didn’t know their name, skill-set, background, geo location, nothing.    Well, for fun I decided I’d post a “HIT” (project on “MTurk”) asking for a provider to write about their background and experience working with this system.   Below is what I received, and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the writing (more…)