Have you heard of the new buzzword in outsourcing: microwork? It’s the act of outsourcing pieces of work over the Internet to those who need jobs, often to disadvantaged youth, women, and refugees in developing countries.

In a few years, microwork is predicted to turn into a global phenomenon. It supports sustainable development and helps people find their income in challenging circumstances. The idea is to empower the poor: “give jobs, not aid”.

Outsourced tasks vary a lot. Microwork was used, for example, in crisis communication during the earthquake catastrophe in Haiti for translating emergency text messages. Other examples are creating digital handicrafts, such as online greeting cards, Google map analysis, and transcriptions.¹ In one of the most popular microwork services, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, typical tasks are short translations and finding information on the web.

Unfortunately, microwork can also be misused to manipulate surveys and polls, or to spam. Some use it for buying likes on Facebook and followers on Twitter. Over the years, we have witnessed several cases where microworkers were hired to rate sites in WOT.

Our tip to site owners who are planning on doing this: Hiring microworkers to rate your website does not improve your site’s reputation.

Why? The WOT rating system is designed to detect manipulation attempts: Each user has to earn the system’s trust before it gives weight to their ratings. The rating behavior in these cases is highly unusual and easy to detect.

An example of a microwork assignment recruiting people to rate a site. Click to enlarge.

WOT tells how much users trust your site, and the best way to improve the rating is to find out what causes the lack of trust and solve the issues. Below some tips that you might find useful.

Tips to improve your site's reputation

1. You can reply to comments on the scorecard and request a review on our forum by claiming the site. You can claim your site by following the "Click here if you own this site" link on your site's scorecard and completing the verification process.
2. Contact the users who left comments through their boards and ask them to review or explain their comment and rating. Try to find out if there are some issues to be solved.
3. Ask you friends and customers to rate your site. This means people who really know that your site can be trusted, not people who are paid to do so.

¹To learn how microwork can be used well, read this inspiring article Microwork is the new, new buzzword in global outsourcing.

Thanks to your nominations, WOT made it to the finals in About.com’s 2012 Readers' Choice Awards in the best privacy/security add-on category!

Now it's your time to have your say again by voting for your favorite add-on. The voting takes place from February 22 through March 21, but of course it's best to do it right away. Please cast your vote for WOT and help us win!

If you’ve followed us on Facebook, you’ve probably noticed that we have loads of little friends helping us in our daily tasks.

Which of them is your favorite? Vote in our poll!

Candidate 1: Shakira and Alejandro

Shakira and Alejandro, our lovely dogs always look a bit sad, no matter how much we try to cheer them up. If you wonder where their names come from, the answer is that someone in the team really likes Latin music.

Candidate 2: Rats who took over the office

Rats like dirt, we all know that. That's why you need to keep your desk clean. Someone at our office didn't, and a bunch of rats took over his place. The rats still live in the office.

Candidate 3: Chief Cat Officer Jasmine

Chief Cat Officer Jasmine's job was to check all marketing materials and make sure there's no spelling mistakes. Unfortunately, she has now retired from WOT and enjoys the sun in Florida.

Candidate 4: Mr. Snowman

This handsome but a bit cold personality only joined us for a moment for a hat raffle last January. He then moved to Alaska.

Candidate 6: Herman the Lemur

Herman is the newest member of our team. His job is to supervise everything that happens in the office. He has very big eyes, which is why he's talented at keeping an eye on things.

Which of these is your favorite? Cast a vote in our poll!

Safer Internet Day is organized each year in February to promote safer and more responsible use of the Internet, especially amongst children and young people. This year the event is organized for the ninth year, and is held in more than 70 countries worldwide.

This year the theme of the day is “Connect generations and discover the digital world together… safely!” The theme encourages people of all ages to work together to stay safe online.

Clearly, this is a topic very close to us at WOT. Here's some practical tips what you can do to guide kids around you to use the web safely (source):

• Talk about the internet and dedicate time to explore it together with the child. Ask the child to show them what he or she likes to do online, and try not to be shocked or overreact if they do not share the same interests.
• Stimulate the child's creativity. Point them in the direction of the best online content to explore for their development (or just for fun). The child can learn and discover new sites, play games, write blogs, create websites. Stretch his or her imagination.
• Set up rules or boundaries together. When\Where\Why and for how long can the child use their mobile phone or computer? If you listen to the child and establish fair rules, then he or she is more likely to stick to them.
• Protect personal data and help the child understand that information or photos they put online can remain visible to everybody forever. Help them set up the highest level of privacy settings on social networks.
• Think about using parental control tools to automatically filter certain topics (e.g. violence, porn) and limit the time the child will be able to navigate the web.
  (You can use WOT for this purpose: Use the Child Safety settings and the add-on will warn of sites that are rated poor in child safety.)
• Avoid having a computer in the child's bedroom. Put it in the living room instead. It will make it easier to follow the child's web-surfing habits on a daily basis.

What other tips do you have to help kids surf safe?

Read more about the Safer Internet Day and see the video below.