I am going to file this one under, “Yikes!”

AOL recently released three months worth of search data to researchers. To “protect the privacy” of the searchers, their names were replaced by identifying numbers. Of course it isn’t too difficult to narrow down the identity of an “anonymous” searcher by looking at what they searched for. The author of this article in the New York Times did exactly that.

AOL has since taken down the data and apologized, but the damage has already been done. It has been copied and spread all over the internet now.

The point is that our privacy is slipping away. There are records of everything you do and it doesn’t take much for these records to get out. Be careful. Be outraged.

For those who don’t know, I work in a home office in my basement in Maryland. I telecommute for a company in California and I manage projects with people from three continents. I am one of the 2% of the American workforce that is a full time teleworker.

Telecommuting full time is not easy. You have to communicate better and perform better than your office bound counterparts to get the same amount of recognition and career advancement potential.

I have a family to support, so career advancement is an important issue for me. So you may be wondering why I would want to make it more difficult to get a promotion.

One reason is lunch. Yes, Lunch.

I save $7-$10 a day by going upstairs for lunch rather than to the local greasy spoon for my mid-day meal. Of course that $1600 a year is not the reason I like lunch at home. I like it because I get to eat lunch with my two-year old son.

Yesterday, I gave him chicken nuggets for lunch. He ate all but two and then said, “Daddy’s nuggets” and began rotating the plate so that the nuggets were closer to me. Whether this was generosity, a lesson in sharing, or a clever ploy to get out of eating the last two nuggets was anyone’s guess.

In any case when he completed the 180 degree rotation, he stopped, got a funny look on his face, giggled, pointed at the nuggets and then said, “Eyes!” He realized that the 2 nuggets at the top of a blue plate looked like a funny face and was amazed by the discovery.

So there it is. In 30 seconds, I got to see my son plot, plan, execute, use his imagination, discover, and communicate his creative discovery with glee.

This is remarkable to me because last month I was amazed when he started putting together words into sentences that made sense. The month before that I was amazed when he started saying, “Yes” to things instead of the ubiquitous “No, no, no!” that was his response to nearly every previous question or request.

By eating lunch at home, I get to watch my son grow, learn, and discover. I don’t miss out on the mischief, plots and bursts of creativity that only happen in the middle of mundane tasks like eating lunch.

Watching your kid grow up is an amazing thing that I get to do more often because I am not sitting in traffic for two hours day. I know through the little things discovered over lunch that he is smart and becoming more clever everyday. This is a great thing to see, because it let’s me know that the extra $1600 a year I am putting into his college fund will not go to waste.

The Baltimore Business Journal made a shocking claim. It says that employees’ reluctance to telecommute costs them a lot of time and money.

They gleaned this information from the 2005/2006 National Technology Readiness Survey.

Of the survey respondents, 25% had employers that supported telecommuting or jobs that were conducive to telecommuting, but only 11% actually took advantage of telecommuting.

If the folks that could telecommute managed to do it once or twice a week, they would save a collective $3.9 billion in gas alone. This number doesn’t count wear and tear on the roads or pollution.

The median commute found in the study was 10 miles and 20 minutes each way.

The survey was prepared by Rockbridge Associates and sponsored by the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland.

What is telecommuting? What is telework? Lately we have had a number of visitors searching for the answer to these questions and I realized that I haven’t answered them directly before, so here goes…

Telecommuting or telework is an arrangement where some or all of an employees tasks can be done at a location other than the designated central office or worksite.

Traditionally the home is generally used as the “other” location but it can be a hotel room, a customer site, a coffee shop, the back yard, or anywhere that the environment allows the employee to complete their tasks or projects.

Both terms “telecommute” and “telework” were coined in 1973 by Jack Nilles, a rocket scientist that became known as the father of telecommuting. Both words are now used interchangeably, but the original use of the term telecommute referred to the ability of telecommunications technology to eliminate the need to travel or commute physically to a central location.

Telework is made possible by technology, but it is the very human qualities and specific skillsets of the teleworker and the manager that make teleworking arrangements successful or not.