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Do I Look Like an Idiot?
(Article Contributed By Marie, of Sex Story Text - Posted on January 15th, 2010)
If you've ever been over to Rated Hot you may have come across some of my stories of our less than stellar experiences on oDesk. If you haven't heard of oDesk before then the best way I can describe it is to suggest that it's a huge online clearing house where people with coding, design and other Net related needs can be put in touch with people who can perform the work that needs to be done.
In theory it's a great idea and there are literally dozens of service providers there who will bid for your work. Lots of people have very positive outcomes from oDesk ... but sadly Steve and I aren't among them. In fact I sometimes think that there's some sort of hidden grading system on oDesk that has labeled us as absolute idiots who will believe anything we're told.
We've now had eight attempts at having work completed on oDesk and only two successful outcomes. One of those successful outcomes involved some fairly minor work that was done really quickly and very competently by one of the service providers. We were so impressed with the work that we went back to him a few weeks ago when Steve needed some work done on one of his blogs.
He'd done the first lot of work without any problems and had charged us a very reasonable amount so what could go wrong if we went back to him? Well we never did find out if anything could go wrong because we never got beyond talking to him about the time it would take to do the job.
We knew that the job would take five or ten minutes at the most. It's was really very simple but it was something Steve had never done before so he wanted to get someone with experience to do the job. The provider who had done such good work before must have come across that ‘idiot' label I mentioned a moment ago because he told Steve that it would take 10 hours to complete the work.
Ten minutes later Steve had done the work himself.
Yesterday I went to oDesk again ... I know ... it was silly of me ... I should have learnt my lesson but I'm an eternal optimist and I thought that this time we might find someone we could rely on.
So I posted the job ... installation of three Joomla extensions ... and I got a whole bunch of replies. The guy I chose to do the work looked very competent, he had some great feedback from other people who had used his services and he also happened to have the skills we needed for another job that's coming up so I sent him all the details and asked him for an indication of how long the work would take.
Remember, this was just to install three Joomla extensions ... you need to know that because, like me, you won't believe how long he said it would take.
He claimed that it would take him 37 hours ... yes, that's right ... 37 hours to install three Joomla extensions! In 37 hours you could design and build a Joomla site from scratch so how he ever expected me to believe that it would take 37 hours to install three extensions is completely beyond me.
Needless to say he is definitely not getting the job and now, more than ever, I'm beginning to wonder if many of the service providers on oDesk have discovered how to game the system and give themselves feedback that's far more positive than their real clients would ever provide.
What about Caffeine
Looking around the web today I've noticed a few people beginning to wonder about what might have happened to Google's Caffeine update. It was supposed to go live soon after the holidays but so far nothing seems to have happened.
Well ... maybe that should read ... Google hasn't said anything more about the Caffeine update. They were certainly open about it back in December so you may reasonably expect that Google would have announced it when it went live but so far nothing has been said.
So could the Caffeine update been released at some time since the holidays without any public fanfare? Some people are quite sure that it has been released while others are equally sure that nothing has happened.
What Steve and I are seeing does make us wonder if Caffeine really has been released but we can't be sure. There seems to have been some changes in some of the verticals that we watch for our clients and some sites that were buried back on page two or three of Google's search results are now appearing down the bottom of page one.
And in one of those verticals where competition is fierce and a lot of the top places were once taken by some large Australia-wide sites there's been quite a change. One or two of those big sites that once did so well, and caused our clients some angst, have dropped off the first page.
Another of our sites that relies heavily on search engine traffic and was seeing quite a drop in traffic as far back as December has suddenly seen that traffic come back so something is happening but whether we're seeing the effects of Caffeine or something else is anybody's guess.
But right now I'm in need of my caffeine fix for the morning so I'm off to fire up the espresso machine and I'll leave you to look at your own stats and make your own decision about whether Caffeine is live or not.
Maybe I should also adjust that ‘idiot' label so it's not so prominent while I'm waiting for the coffee machine to fire up.
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