Web workers of the world united with Anne 

Anne Zelenka has joined the GigaOm "mall," writing for Web Worker Daily, a blog launched a few weeks ago for people who work away from an office. I'd been skimming it; now I'm subscribed.

Her first post is about paper to-do lists. Great start! And a signal that the content won't skew to startup vendors wanting to cash in on the humble Bedouin? I use a notebook -- Moleskine when I'm feeling flush, a comp book when I'm broke, and I keep them all, so I have a collection of to-do lists for the past 10 years.

But I also love index cards, and write on them as vertical pages. Levenger's makes some lovely ones. (Did she just call index cards "lovely?" Yes I did.) Just a slave to beauty, I'd much prefer to pen my errand list on a grid printed in a nice light grey with a white margin but an ever-so-much-larger top margin. I also have an old library card box, not a horizontal card catalog drawer, but the kind that holds cards sitting upright. You know, the kind librarians used to store the checkout cards, but that's probably not what those cards were called. What were they called?

I'm looking forward to what else Anne comes up with. I wonder if the target audience includes occasional telecommuters. Seems like it could, if it doesn't. I did a survey for Home Office Computing magazine about 15 years ago, and I heard the same arguments in the workplace in 2004 that I heard from the survey respondents in 1990. Day job supervisors and HR types were unable to budge on control issues, and of course the ever-popular "opening the floodgates" concern. But recently, in just the last couple of years, I think something changed because I felt a big click in the cosmic tumblers.