It finally got hot here in Rochester and we actually had 3 days in a row without rain. Woot! I spent most of July building a wiki site about Rochester’s hopping entertainment district, quite a good project and one that really got me excited about how well some of the online content management systems work. Though I haven’t been doing the social media thing as frequently lately, I count building 120 pages of original content as a social media activity.

The CMS I’m using is Wetpaint and I’m becoming a default power-user. I highly recommend this platform. It has pretty powerful photo-editing software built-in (Picnic), supports widgets for things like slideshows, makes internal linking really fast and easy and makes SEO a snap with constant reminders to add tags. When I launched the site on its own URL it only took two weeks to get to 55% of visitors coming from organic searches. My SEO peeps will appreciate what this means- basically that Google likes the site!

I’m already building another site on the platform that will soon reside at WaterfrontRochester.com. It features all of Rochester’s varied waterfront neighborhoods- we have a lot of water: Lake Ontario, Irondequoit Bay, the Erie Canal, the Genesee River. When I’m done some lucky Realtor will be invited to sponsor this thing. Then I’m on to WaterfrontFingerLakes.com. If you’ve never been to the Finger Lakes you have to go- absolutely spectacular wine country, beautiful properties, rolling hills with vineyards, boating, skiiing, all within 60 miles of our airport. People from Napa have been buying up acreage at quite a clip with prices quadrupling in the past few years.

That’s my summer activity- tomorrow I get on a train and go to visit the girl in Albany!

No, that title is not a vacuous tweet. Sometimes you just have to stay inside and crank it out even though the air is warm, the sun is out, the clouds are cumulus and the lake is not far away. Right now I’m in a bit of a lull as far as project work having just finished up a big web/wiki project. So the temptation is there but I can’t. I have to work on a site that won’t make me money for months but may have a longer term financial impact than any of my paid projects. In other words it’s my own business I’m building.

The last company I worked for as an employee, Techrigy, got acquired last week. It was interesting assessing my response to their apparent good fortune because I think they are geniuses and built a really great product (social media monitoring software). On the one hand my stock options hadn’t vested when I left so I didn’t participate in the largess, which isn’t actually that large and will take quite a while to become real. On the other hand I feel good about marketing them from 1 customer to 30+ customers in less than 10 months with no budget. If you’ve been in a start-up you know how important this is. They spent nearly three years working without salaries to get to the point where they are now.

So I guess me working for a few months on my little project makes sense!

Back to work.

Looking for jobs, having a career, job security- these things are no longer the way we are working. The average college grad today will have 15 ‘jobs’ by age 35- which means redefining the meaning of what we do for a living. Everyone is, in essence, a freelancer and a lot of people are struggling with this. Freelancing is an entirely different thing than having a job.

Fortunately Seth Godin has taken his usual way of changing perception and applied it to the work model. Work is going to mean assembling your skills, experience and connections and creating a package that others will pay for. For example I’m building (on a wiki platform) a site that contains everything in Rochester’s waterfront neighborhoods: Real estate, parks, shopping, sights, restaurants, services- everything. When I’m done I’m going to invite residents of these neighborhoods to write about their area.

Once this ‘package’ is complete I’m going to sell exclusive access to it to an area real estate firm or broker. They’ll appear on all the pages as a link to learn more about buying or selling a waterfront property in our area. Leads for these properties are worth a lot of money. You’ll be able to find it at WaterfrontRochester.com. I also own WaterfrontFingerLakes.com and several other cities. They’ll get packaged up too.

The Recession and its downsizings have forced all of us to think differently about work. Those who understand this change and jump right in will do very well. Those who cling to the idea that their old jobs will somehow come back will not.