Work at home, home business, and freelance job news for the week ending March 3, 2008.

The problem with rural Britain BBC News, UK - March 3, 2008 The social implications of telecommuting could also be dramatic. If more people stay in rural areas during the day, rather than traveling into town for …

Striking A Balance Worcester Business Journal, MA - March 3, 2008 Qualifying employees can tweak their work schedules by taking extended lunches, telecommuting or compressing their work weeks. And as Hirsch noted, …

First woman managing partner at Ernst & Young’s local office knows … Pittsburgh Post Gazette, PA - Mar 1, 2008 And I telecommute from home a lot. I typically go home at 6 pm and I’ll be with my family until they go to bed at 8:30 pm And then I’ll get online at 9 pm …

You know it’s time to consider working from home or telecommuting when you feel like this guy.

Nobody ever died wishing they’d spent more time at the office.

Craigslist, with a personality all its own, is a great place to look for work at home jobs if you have the patience.

The website is visited by more than 30 million people every month where they can view pages with 8 billion free classified ads, job posts, and service listings including 1.5 million new job listings. Despite selling 25% of its soul to Ebay in 2004, Craigslist has maintained a cult-like aversion to corporate falderol and greed. World headquarters in San Francisco is in a Victorian Era mansion, home for its 25 employees.

Job listings are free in all but 7 of the largest cities. Even paid listings in the large metro areas are substantially cheaper for employers to post compared to what they would pay in other media with similar “circulation.”

Craigslist does not accept job posts for business opportunities, multilevel marketing scams, positions that require upfront fees, or referral/network marketing. If you see such listings be sure to report the listers as companies that don’t play well with others.

Job searches are free on Craigslist, but there are two serious drawbacks when it comes to looking for telework on their site. The web site is organized geographically so if you’re searching for a telework job in San Francisco, you’ll miss one that’s posted in New York. There’s no way to search both cities at once. This doesn’t matter much when you’re looking for a traditional job, but a telework job could be anywhere. The second drawback is that no one policing the listings—there’s a lot of spam and other junk, and you have no idea who’s offering the work. You want to be extra careful evaluating the individual or company offering to pay you . . . if for no other reason so you know for sure you’ll get paid after you do the work.

Still, there’s telework to be had on Craigslist, and employers have “telecommuting is ok” as one of the parameters when they post a job., so you do too when you search. Take note, you will not get valid results if you type the word telecommute in the keyword box on the home page. You need to first go to the jobs page, and then either click the “telecommute” box or type the word “telecommuting” (not telecommute) in the keyword box. (If you do type “telecommute” in the keyword box on the jobs page, you may find some listings that include telecommute as a possible employee benefit.) Craigslist also offers a page for Gigs. If you’re seeking work as a freelancer or contractor, be sure to search there too.

Here’s a tip that will save you time dealing with the issue that Craigslist searches are limited to only one city. A site called CrazedList, allows you search across multiple cities, regions, or the whole country. Before you get too excited, it’s not the solution it could be. The interface at CrazedList is the same as Craigslist, but when you do your search for telecommute jobs, what will come back is a long page with a mini-window for each of the cities that falls within the region you specified. You’ll then have to go to each mini-window and choose “jobs,” which will take you to a mini-window of jobs for that city. It’s not a terrific fix, but it is better than having to open a new window for each city.

Happy hunting, and remember—be especially wary of scams and low lifes that are attracted by the free listings

Telecommuters are being taxed by states where they don’t live, vote or use schools, libraries, fire departments and other services. That’s because their employers are based in states that assess income tax on nonresident employees, regardless of how often they visit the office.

States are waking up to the idea that nonresident telecommuters are an untapped revenue stream. This can be a nightmare for peope who work from home.

Courts have upheld this treatment of nonresident telecommuters, at least in New York. And other states are jumping on the bandwagon thanks to New York State’s success.

The rule is that if employees of a New York company are required to work outside the state as a job requirement, they’re subject to income tax only for those days that they work in New York. But if the same workers choose to work outside New York for their own convenience, they’re subject to income tax on they’re full income—unless the workers never work in New York during the tax year, then the taxman makes an exception.

Congress has sopme bill pending to address this. But they completed their last session without taking up the Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act which would require states to apply income taxes to nonresidents only for the days they show up in the office, preventing the double tax.

Moral of the story? Until Congress straightens this out, and because telecommuting is unquestionably good for your employer, get a letter that says you’re working from home for their benefit.

What happens when IT departments switch from in-house networked services to utility services? There’s going to be a lot of IT people looking for work. At least that’s what Nicholas Carr predicts, in his latest book, The Big Switch. According to Carr, computing power is undergoing a transformation, moving off desktops and into massive data centers, where it’s cheaper and more efficient.

Companies used to produce their own electricity, but eventually power generation and transmission technology advanced to the point that they all joined the grid. According to Carr this is about to happen with computing power too. Larry Ellison and Oracle have promoted the idea for ages, and Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) and S3 (Simple Storage) services already provide a centralized utility users can tap in to rapidly and cheaply develop scalable applications.

One development that will help make the transformation to utility computing happen is Cisco’s new Nexus 7000, a network switch that can route 15 terabits of data per second, 20 times more than any switch currently available. Especially significant, the new switch will handle short-haul Fibre Channel and Infiniband cables plus Ethernet, allowing servers and drives to talk to each other hundreds or thousands of miles apart, and allowing multipurpose ‘virtual systems’ implemented entirely in software to cooperate across the country.

What does all this mean for work at home jobs and freelance home businesses? As companies move to the grid, their IT departments will drastically downsize according to Carr. He forecasts the day will come when there will be just one person sitting at a PC issuing commands over the Internet to a distant utility much as Craigslist, YouTube, and Flickr do today—minimal staff making maximum use of the infogrid.

Work at home programmers and content producers such as writers, artists, reviewers, and editors will become the virtual workforce supporting the virtual systems. Given that 66% of workers say they’d rather work from home, and given increasing gas prices and traffic snarls your opportunity to undress for success may be just around the corner.