Thursday, January 31, 2008

Employee Benefits for Peer to Peer businesses?

Etsy's First Five Years

Etsy just raised a startling ammount of investment, which makes me very happy. They do so much right.

There's a very interesting post on their site about what their intentions are. This in particular caught my eye
It is immensely important to me that all Etsy workers are paid a good salary, provided with full benefits (medical, dental, vision) by the company. Many companies, far too many companies, underpay their employees, don't make workers employees at all ("permalancers" and "permatemp" are the new words for this), and provide few if any benefits. (We also know that many of the sellers on Etsy lack access to such benefits as health insurance, and we want to work to change this.)

Emphasis mine, there.

That's a game changer. A community marketplace that also acts as a kind of international, distributed trade union come employee benefit scheme? Visionary stuff.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Epigrams through the Ether

/blows dust off the top of her blog, and waits for the valves to warm up

Twitter / oscarwilde

The other day, I was sitting in Monmouth Coffee in Borough Market. They do very fine 'macaroons' - actually, coconut pyramids.

They also do a startling line in braying middle class idiots, like what I am.

Anyway, a conversation between two actresses was so tooth-grindingly comic, I twittered it. It set me off thinking about the uses of twitter, and why I prefer the mundane, silly and epigrammatic posts over the 'I've updated my blog, here's the URL' or the '@someblokewhoknowsaboutmacs yes, saint steves shiny robot turds are amazing' tweets that pop up from my contacts. One of my favourite people there is David, who posts rarely, but beautifully.

To cut a long story short, it got me thinking, and inspired partly by Matt's Presence Machine, I have decided to give Oscar Wilde a life on twitter. Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young is the perfect work to consume via twitter - it's shallow, vain and a tiny bit self obsessed. Also, it comes in nice short lines, which are (I hope) mostly under 140 characters.








    That's all, really...