It used to be a common and simple question to ask “where do you work?” — but not anymore.
These days “where” you work really has little significance to “what” you do. Increasingly, each of us faces no boundaries, whether they are geographic, physical or time-related. It’s life in the connected era and, quite frankly, it’s a lot more fun.
Today’s laptop is often our place of business and the location might be the local Starbucks or Peet’s coffee shop,your work space at the office or even your family room at home. Our mobile devices define how efficiently we can work. Bandwidth trumps office space. Conference rooms aren’t where we get most of our work done. For me, I often can’t get anything done in the office because of distractions — I’m far more efficient getting away from the office and wireless access allows me to do that.
We’re all becoming digital nomads. And nomads want to know how to use their technology in the most productive way every day. So, we decided to create a site dedicated to Digital Nomads — a community where you can network with others, learn and share ideas, and hear from some of the best who are doing exactly what you do.
When we set out to create this site, we came across lots of different experts that were offering different perspectives on the nomadic life. Earlier this month, Steve Rubel discussed digital nomads in a post on the recession. Many of you probably already know Luis Suarez, a remote knowledge worker with IBM who increasingly uses social networks in lieu of e-mail and blogs from The Canary Islands. Last November, Chris Brogan wrote a blog post on planning for a digital nomadic life with tips of what one needed to do in advance of “going nomad”. And then, there are all sorts of media outlets and books that have been written on the topic including Web Worker Daily, 43 Folders and many others. Our intent was not to duplicate the great work being done there but to provide one place where all of that information was aggregated so you can find the latest and coolest insights.
There are many types of nomads, ranging from the café nomad to the jet-set nomad and we all share one goal — our desire to be connected when we want to have conversations or do work.
We want to be connected, both to the world and to individuals. We want our devices connected everywhere we go. We’re no longer huddled in a conference room or tethered to our Ethernet connection under our desk at home.
A long time ago, we were hunters and gatherers. Today, we actually do the same thing, but instead we are hunting for information and data, and gathering knowledge. We seek relationships, extended families, connect with friends we lost touch with, meet people in nations and cultures all over the world and decide which communities are right for us. It is this phenomenon that makes social networking so explosive and cool. We tweet on Twitter, we share our digital journey on Plurk. We are on Facebook, Orkut, Hi5, Bebo and LinkedIn, to name just a few.
So here we go. We’ve designed this site for you. It’s your community. We’ve established a Digital Nomads group on Facebook where you can learn of upcoming ‘nomadic’ events. For those of you looking to network, you’ll want to join the Digital Nomads group on LinkedIn. Occasionally, we’ll throw out nomadic questions to the community there. You’ll also see here what we think is a first-ever in the industry: a crowd-sourced whitepaper on issues related to digital nomads. I encourage you to register on this site and add your thoughts to that whitepaper and see what your peers and colleagues have to say.
For our customers, you’ll see along the right-hand side links to Digital Nomad categories we have created on Dell Community Forums and Dell’s IdeaStorm. You’ll also see on this site, a link to our Digital Nomads del.icio.us account where you can share best practice resources for others. If you’ve got digital photographs, we encourage you to upload those to our photo gallery. Right now, you’ll see photos of our new Latitude products to get us started.
Tell us what you want to discuss. Offer your own blog posts. Add your insights to the community. And tell us what is missing so we can make this the site that is most helpful to Digital Nomads. I can tell you that we won’t huddle in a conference room to decide what to do next. We’ll simply listen to you wherever we are at that moment and make the calls on what we can do together.
Let the conversations begin.
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Comments (18)
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[...] interesting bit of messaging came from the initial post on the Digital Nomads blog: We’re all becoming digital nomads. And nomads want to know how to use their technology in the [...]
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[...] muse on Thu 18-12-2008 OpenOffice.org writes to Michael Dell Saved by DCook on Sun 14-12-2008 Where Do You work? I Work Everywhere. Saved by jliverman on Sat 13-12-2008 #706: The "How To Do Ultra-Easy Research" Issue [...]
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[...] The term doesn’t really matter as many of them overlap each other. As I wrote in my first post on this site one thing we all have in common is this: “These days ‘where’ you work really has [...]
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IdeaStorm Fortnightly Recap 8-22-08…
It’s been a busy couple of weeks since my last update. As promised , I’ll be back every 2…
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Nomad Contributors
by Houdini / August 14, 2008
Mate, don’t take this the wrong way as it’s not meant to be an attack (he says which will guarantee you start off thinking it is :)), but are you truly a digital nomad or do you just work in marketing and promotions for Dell? I don’t know your work type or how much you travel so I’m not discounting the fact you may be but rather starting a dialogue.
I guess this also goes to the definition of a Digital Nomad but to me it’s more than just working sometimes from your desk and sometimes from home. This is a great marketing idea from Dell to launch this site and obviously as they’re trying to sell a range of mobile laptops and possibly an ultra-portable soon it makes sense to market to the target audience but I’d argue that this target audience is tech savvy, alert to being marketed to and just downright smart when it comes to seeing through marketese.
I’m thinking a Digital Nomad is gong to be someone for whom the workspace is perhaps changing constantly but moreso someone who can work just about anywhere, be it on the road, plane, train, office - yours or a clients or storeroom(?), workshop or hangar. Ultra mobile, connected and capable with the gear to suit, and not wedded to a Company or manufacturer.
My $0.02’s.
by MktMan / August 14, 2008
I agree with Houdini. Is this just another gimmick site to pitch Dell products or is it really dedicated to helping the connect people that aren’t tied to brick and mortar offices? How many of the Nomad Contributors are on the payroll either as full/part time bloggers or as paid guests?
I like the concept of a digital nomad from so many directions. Maybe it will be up to the community members to make it work.
@Houdini, @MktMan – good points from both of you. I take your comments as healthy dialogue on the whole concept of what makes one a digital nomad. I absolutely consider myself a digital nomad, even though today I don’t fly frequently across the country or around the world. I’ve had more than my fill of traveling in the past and now with a family at home am glad to be more office-bound but still have the flexibility to do what I do from wherever. Perhaps you could call me today more of a ‘corridor nomad’.
My role and presence on digitalnomads.com will become less over time as more of you come on as guest bloggers, add to the whitepaper, contribute thoughts and comments (the latter being a great point made by @MktMan).
@LionelatDell and I, or any other Dell employee, are the only ones who are paid to contribute to this site — though our intent is to make this less about Dell and more about the concept of digital nomads. Thanks for your comments.
Bruce Eric Anderson
by Paul / August 17, 2008
Good luck with the new venture. I’ve been looking for something like this the last few years… the help needed to construct the ultimate freedom machine.
by arthuro ramz sanchez / August 18, 2008
ok
by Jake Edwards / October 3, 2008
Just love the cynicism exhibited by houdini at top:
this site functions as social object, conversation generator, point of interest, dialogue etc.
The technology created the new topology and that forced us towards the edges.
The essential point being THERE IS NO CENTRE.
by Mackie Bobo / October 7, 2008
Jake, please lay off the pipe.
by Buddy / October 22, 2008
OK……….. Without reading all day long, what is a digital nomad ?
by Jonathan Follett / October 22, 2008
I tend to agree with Houdini and MktMan, in regards to questioning Dell’s purposes behind the Digital Nomads site. Of course, it’s pretty clear that at its core, the site is a marketing ploy, since social media of this sort and the efforts to stimulate customer conversation are essentially soft sell advertising for the Web age. But, at the same time, the site has the potential to be much more than that. Who cares how the community starts, so long as it has value? The professional associations of the 20th century, like the IDSA, all came together because manufacturers, business people and industrialists wanted to propel their professions forward, raise their own profile, and ultimately sell products. Dell wants to sell to the Digital Nomad community too. Who can blame them? But I like the idea for the site and the community and will be watching it closely to see how it evolves. Good luck with it.
by Michael Viljoen / November 17, 2008
Dig it, great idea! I am very keen to hear how others who work similarly to me are getting on and what we can learn from each other.
by paul.an / November 18, 2008
Domain name & Internet keyword
Nov 18th, 2008
Digitalnomads
Domain name & Internet keyword Registration notice
Dear Sir/Madam,
We are Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited which is the domain name register center in Asia. We received a formal application from a company who is applying to register “digitaljourna” as their domain name and Internet keyword on Nov 17th, 2008. Because this involves your company name or trade mark so we inform you in no time. we would like to confirm if this company is your partner, subsection or some one you authorized, if it is not, pls inform us if these domain names and internet keyword are important to you and it is necessary to protect them by registering them first or not, thanks for your cooperation, looking forward to your reply..
Kind Regards,
Paul.an
Call me naive or uninformed, but when I first started reading this blog, I didn’t realize it was a Dell sponsored website. I did notice the “powered by Dell” in the footer, and thought it a bit strange, but until I read this post I wasn’t aware. Point is… the site seems to be doing a good job of being just about digital nomads, and not being about digital nomads and how they use their Dell computer, or some similar typical corporate marketing fare.
@Houdini I’m late the dance but want to echo your comment:
>>> I’m thinking a Digital Nomad is gong to be someone for whom the workspace is perhaps changing constantly but moreso someone who can work just about anywhere, be it on the road, plane, train, office - yours or a clients or storeroom(?), workshop or hangar. Ultra mobile, connected and capable with the gear to suit, and not wedded to a Company or manufacturer. << C/S Computing > Web Apps (HTML) > Web Apps (Java) > Web Apps (AJAX) > RIA & Mobile
RIA - Adobe has a huge stake in getting developers to build on Air. Microsoft is working the RIA angle with Silverlight. Apple uses Sproutcore but I don’t believe they own them. And Google has not only Chrome but Gears so the seems to be focusing on both browser-based rich applications and RIA-based via gears.
MOBILE - The war is on with iPhone, G1, Palm Pre, and MS, RIMM. In this graph you’ll STILL see the Search Volume Index showing that iPhone is searched on more frequently than the other smartphone products.
Quoting from the Fortune article where I found this …
“What you’re looking at is a snapshot of a Google Trends chart comparing the number of times the word “iPhone” appears in a Google search request with the words “Palm” (PALM), Research in Motion’s (RIMM) “BlackBerry,” Microsoft’s (MSFT) “Windows Mobile” and Google’s (GOOG) “Android.” ”
What does this all mean? To me, this means that digital nomads will increasingly make use of RIA-based computing and Mobile-based computing. Picking a winner (ie - one horse to ride) will be challenging for software vendors and maybe even hardware vendors. In the RIA space there is no web top/cloud standard, yet. Will it be MS again with Silverlight? How about Adobe with Air? Or Google? And for smartphones, will Apple overtake RIM? What about the rest of world?
I am in no way associated with DELL, but must admit, thanks to my DELL ATG I evolved to a digital nomad, I can read my display ANYWHERE, even in the full sun. During the summer months, I spend more time working from picnic tables than I do from the home office. My only gripe about working outside, is that I can’t utilize 4 monitors.