MSN:10 Careers That Didn't Exist 10 Years Ago

By Rachel Zupek, CareerBuilder.com writer

Every so often, you meet someone with a job title that makes you go, "Huh?" Either it's too technical to understand, too hard to describe or in some cases, people just may not have heard of it. But, why would someone not have heard about a job's existence?

Simple: All the changes that have come about in the past 10 years, from environmental policy to emerging technologies to the recession, have contributed to the creation of careers that never could have existed before.

Dom Sagolla, co-creator of Twitter, for example, recently made the switch from working in research and development at Adobe to creating iPhone applications with his company, DollarApp. Sagolla is also authoring a book, "140 Characters," which demonstrates the effect of hypertext on literature by redefining the concept of "the book" using Twitter and iPhone to start, he says. Could he have done this 10 years ago? Doubtful.

"I've noticed that the best-of-breed iPhone apps incorporate Twitter and social networks, and the best Twitter apps seem to be on iPhone," Sagolla says. "That is no coincidence: The two came to prominence at roughly the same time. I've worked hard to position myself at intersection of those two industries, which form a vortex of attention and zeal that is unmatched."

Here is a little information about 10 careers that didn't exist a decade ago:

1. Bloggers
What they do: Bloggers research and write blog posts in a conversational style to engage readers online. They work for themselves or for corporations, but their goal is the same: to develop and maintain blogs to promote a brand, mission or objective. Jimmy Moore, owner of "Livin La Vida Low-Carb," started his blog in April 2005 after losing 180 pounds. He wrote about it while still employed in a customer service position. He began blogging full time in October 2006.

"My annual income increased from about $25,000 a year to nearly $60,000 now. I get to work out of my home, I've written two books, host my twice-weekly health podcast show on iTunes, do YouTube videos and so much more. This is literally my dream job," he says. "[It] didn't even exist a decade ago."

2. Community managers or content managers
What they do: Community or content managers are an extension of a typical marketing role, but on a more personal level. They serve as a liaison between the company and the public, managing a Web site that allows them to engage with community members and spread the word about the company.

Erin Bury has been the community manager at Sprouter, a Toronto company that enables collaboration and networking among entrepreneurs, for almost one year. She says, "A community manager is a nontraditional role, so it requires some unique traits: the ability to adapt quickly, the ability to juggle a multitude of tasks while still keeping a smile on their face, and an innate passion for what they do. This isn't a 9-to-5 job; it's one that involves being an extension of the brand almost 24/7, which is why loving the company and the job is a prerequisite."

3. Green funeral directors
What they do: Green funeral directors incorporate environmentally friendly options to meet the needs of families who want a green service.

"A green funeral may include any or all of the following basic options: no embalming or embalming with formaldehyde-free products; the use of sustainable biodegradable clothing, shroud or casket; using recycled paper products, locally grown organic flowers, organic food; car pooling; arranging a small memorial gathering in a natural setting; [or a] natural or green burial," says Elizabeth Fournier, a funeral home owner who works as a green mortician. "It's a fabulous opening for an individual who is green-minded in all aspects of their work."

4. Interior redesigners
What they do: Instead of spending $500 on a new couch, why not use that money to hire an interior redesigner who will find new ways to decorate with items you already own? Interior redesigners remodel your home using the things you already have, either repurposing them for other uses or putting them in other rooms, etc.

Jennifer Schweikert, owner of Just My Style by JMS, says, "In a time of 'less is more,' people streamlining possessions, baby boomers and seniors downsizing, and the green movement of reduce, reuse and recycle, interior redesign is an up-and-coming field of work that addresses these needs in today's lifestyle and economy."

5. Patient advocates
What they do: There are several types of patient advocates, and although their services vary, all of them want to make sure that the patient and family are informed and to make things easier on everyone. Advocates can go with patients to appointments; ensure they're visiting with the right specialists and taking the right medicines; sort through medical bills and negotiate fees with health-care providers and insurance companies; they can even educate family members on proper care for their sick loved one.

6. Senior move management
What they do: Senior move management companies help older adults and families with the physical and emotional demands of downsizing, relocating or modifying their homes.

7. Social media strategists
What they do: Social media strategists use social media tools to help companies interact with customers, increase brand awareness, create buzz, increase traffic and provide information.

8. User experience analyst
What they do: User experience analysts look for ways to make using a Web site easier, more pleasant and more engaging for consumers. They want to figure out how to keep you on their site and how to make your experience while you're there memorable and useful.

9. Video journalists
What they do: In the 1960s, reporters had to shoot and edit their own stories because of lack of manpower and resources. Now, almost 50 years later, this role is back, but now it's called video journalism. To save money, large-market news groups hire small-market reporters as video journalists at a fraction of the cost. They are usually assigned stories to produce for the station Web site, finding content to drive Web traffic.

10. Virtual business service providers
What they do: Many people are forming their own companies by way of telecommuting, offering such virtual services as customer service, concierge services or even public relations from their homes.

"Thanks to the birth of the Internet and the rise of new industries because of it, my company was born. The rise of virtual companies like ours has provided jobs for lots of people," says Deborah Sittig, owner of Green Room Public Relations.

Rachel Zupek is a writer and blogger for CareerBuilder.com and its job blog, The Work Buzz. She researches and writes about job search strategy, career management, hiring trends and workplace issues. Follow her on Twitter: http://twitter.com/CBwriterRZ.

15 Life-Changing Trips - MSN

We reached out to our network of trusted tour operators to create custom itineraries for T+L readers that promise to transform travelers and destinations alike. They’ll have you seeing the globe in a whole new way.

By Yolanda Crous, Jaime Gross, and Darrell Hartman, Travel+Leisure

Volunteering: Rio De Janeiro

Why Go: Few travelers get to do more than scratch the surface of this city of disorienting contrasts, where a golden coastline and buzzing night-life districts abut gritty, overcrowded favelas—home to about 20 percent of Rio’s 6 million residents. This 10-day trip from U.K.-based operator Hands Up Holidays gives volunteers a deeper look at the city and a chance to make a difference.

The Trip: An experienced voluntourism outfitter, Hands Up Holidays excels at balancing unexpected sightseeing expeditions (sunset on Arpoador Beach; hiking in the wetlands of Marapendí; Portuguese-architecture walks) with four days of volunteering in the city’s favelas. Tours of the popular nightlife district Lapa and the bohemian Santa Teresa neighborhood, where a boutique hotel of the same name is your base, add a level of luxury to days spent in the favelas of Vila Canoas, Pereirão, and Rocinha. There, you’ll help residents paint street murals, or spend your time teaching English, art, and soccer (depending on your skills). Hands Up also takes volunteers to visit Project Morrinho, an arts and culture nonprofit, to see a replica of the famous “mini favela” that was built from bricks and other recycled materials by local youth and displayed at the 2007 Venice Biennale as a way to raise awareness of the city’s impoverished districts.

The Details: T+L Transformation Vacation by Hands Up Holidays; 201/984-5372; http://www.handsupholidays.com; Dec. 9–18, 2009, March 3–12 and June 9–18, 2010; from $3,250, double, excluding airfare.

4 More Trip Ideas

Volunteering: Hawaii

The Operator: Habitat for Humanity (10 days)

The Trip: Build a house for a family in Kauai.

Highlight: Cabin accommodations in lush Kahili Mountain Park. 800/422-4828; http://www.habitat.org; Dec. 6–15, 2009; $1,510 per person.

Volunteering: Mexico

The Operator: Ritz-Carlton, Cancún (1 day)

The Trip: Restore furniture and a garden at a school in a Mayan pueblito.

Highlight: Intro Mayan language lessons are included. 52-998/881-0808; http://www.ritz-carlton.com; Year-round; $115 per Ritz-Carlton, Cancún hotel guest.

Volunteering: Cambodia

The Operator: Pepy Tours (7 days)

The Trip: This itinerary (by tuk-tuk and bicycle) pairs voluntourism with stays at inns and lodges.

Highlight: A field trip to Angkor Wat with schoolchildren. 914/458-4262; http://www.pepytours.com; Dec. 27–Jan. 2, 2010; from $100 per person per day.

Volunteering: Kenya

The Operator: Micato Safaris (12–18 days)

The Trip: Spot lions, then plant trees at a community center in Nairobi.

Highlight: Learn how the center’s advisers save lives through AIDS education. 800/642-2861; http://www.micato.com; Year-round; from $7,670 per person.

Cultural Odyssey: Vietnam

Why Go: More than two decades after Vietnam embraced free-market principles, the pace of development here is dramatic. But even as new stores and restaurants open in the cities and luxury resorts line the coast, traditional Vietnamese culture remains just beneath the surface. Asia Transpacific Journeys, a 2009 T+L Global Vision Awards winner with over 20 years experience in the region, is the ultimate guide to the country’s history and culture.

The Trip: This journey takes you to some of Vietnam’s greatest landmarks—old Hanoi; the Perfume River—along with lesser-known places such as the hill-tribe villages and markets of the northern highlands. From exploring the royal palaces of Hue, the former imperial capital, to venturing into the Viet Cong tunnels of Cu Chi, Asia Transpacific will give you the full historical tour. But what makes this trip truly extraordinary is the opportunity to engage with residents and hear their perspective on the country: you’ll meet artisans and relatives of the former royal family, participate in a cooking class with local chefs, spend time with an American Vietnam War vet who has dedicated his life to removing land mines, and attend dinners and recitals in private houses. After 17 days in Vietnam, you can opt to continue to Rangoon, Burma, and the village of Twante to see the Asia Transpacific Foundation’s award-winning clay water-filter project first-hand.

The Details: T+L Transformation Vacation by Asia Transpacific Journeys; 800/642-2742; http://www.asiatranspacific.com; March 5–21, 2010; $5,395 per person, excluding airfare; $300 per day for Burma extension.

Cultural Odyssey: Santa Fe and Taos

The Operator: Classic Journeys (5 days)

The Trip: An exploration of the pueblos in the American Southwest.

Highlight: See Anasazi cliff dwellings and adobe architecture. 800/200-3887; http://www.classicjourneys.com; May 30–June 4 and Sept. 19–24, 2010; $2,595 per person.

Cultural Odyssey: Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize

The Operator: MesoAmerica Travel (14 days)

The Trip: Trek through national parks and pre-Columbian sites.

Highlight: See Mayan hieroglyphs at the Copán ruins in Honduras. 504/557-8447; http://www.mesoamericatravel.com; year-round; $2,550 per person.

Cultural Odyssey: Provence

The Operator: Tauck Culturious (8 days)

The Trip: Southern France through the eyes of Cézanne and van Gogh.

Highlights: The Mediterranean views and a chance to sketch a masterpiece. 888/840-1852; http://www.culturious.com; year-round; $3,490 per person.

Cultural Odyssey: Japan

The Operator: Butterfield & Robinson (8 days)

The Trip: Bike rural Japan and meet bonsai tenders and kimono makers.

Highlights: Drink with a tea master and relax in an onsen. 866/551-9090; http://www.butterfield.com; May 12–19, May 26–June 2, and Sept. 30–Oct. 7, 2010; $9,459 per person.

Eco Escape: Glacier National Park

Why Go: Next year, America’s fourth-largest national park—more than 1 million acres running along the Canadian border—celebrates its 100th anniversary. But this milestone isn’t the only reason to head there now: it’s estimated that the park’s glaciers will vanish by 2030 because of climate change. Austin-Lehman Adventures, voted the top tour operator by T+L readers in our 2009 World’s Best Awards, guides travelers through this evolving landscape—and helps them better understand the forces altering it.

The Trip: Accompanied by Austin-Lehman’s expert wilderness guides, you’ll spend six days in the park hiking through cedar forests, biking alongside alpine meadows and 10,000-foot-high mountains, and sleeping in timber lodges that date to 1913. Half-day walks pass through the Two Medicine area (site of the 30-foot-high Twin Falls and mountain-shadowed Two Medicine Lake) and the North Fork area, home to mountain lions, bighorn sheep, black bears, and moose. Austin-Lehman guides will teach you about the local ecosystem and how to travel light, while professional outdoor photographer Dennis Coello, who also joins the trip, will instruct you on how to shoot both the park’s wildlife and its panoramic vistas, including those iconic, millennia-old glaciers.

The Details: T+L Transformation Vacation by Austin-Lehman Adventures; 800/575-1540; http://www.austinlehman.com; July 25–30, Aug. 1–6, Aug. 8–13, and Aug. 15–20, 2010; $2,498 per person, excluding airfare.

4 More Trip Ideas

Eco Escape: Western Canada

The Operator: GAP Adventures (14 days)

The Trip: Take a greatest-hits tour of British Columbia and Alberta’s rugged wilderness.

Highlights: Stay in a tepee and a mountain lodge. 800/708-7761; http://www.gapadventures.com; July 11–24, Aug. 8–21, and Sept. 12–25, 2010; $2,699 per person.

Eco Escape: Peru’s Amazon River

The Operator: Earthwatch (15 days)

The Trip: Help scientists gather data via riverboat.

Highlight: Play researcher for a real-life conservation effort. 800/776-0188; http://www.earthwatch.org; Nov. 16–30, Dec. 4–18, 2009, and Jan. 1–23, 2010; from $3,750 per person.

Eco Escape: Madagascar

The Operator: Geographic Expeditions (13 days)

The Trip: Journey to the world’s fourth-largest island for wildlife seen nowhere else.
Highlight: One word: lemurs. 800/777-8183; http://www.geoex.com; June–Oct., 2010; $7,300 per person.

Eco Escape: South India

The Operator: Sierra Club (15 days)

The Trip: Spend time birding and searching for the Bengal tiger.

Highlight: Talk tigers (and elephants and leopards) with Indian environmentalists. 415/977-5522; http://www.sierraclub.org; Jan. 10–25, 2010; from $4,975 per person.

Minority Report in real life

Minority Report. The movie that had touch screen technology, before there was touch screen technology. I said "it's coming, it's kind of cool" - some scoffed. And hey, here it is.

Minority Report. Eye recognition as you walk through your life, marketing on the side as the recognition technology identifies you and markets to your personal choice. You still don't think that's happening? Cameras are starting to be placed in towns with face recognition software for "security" (yea, right...). Facebook and all it's little cute tests & quizzes that asks to access not only your information but the information of your friends - profiling. We are inundated with information gathering technology everywhere. Phone number in the Safeway line, for your club card discounts...social networking... (sometimes I feel like they are cloning me somewhere and I've got to stop answering all those nonsense questions!).

Matt Fitzgerald - predicted 20 years ago that Pete Chadwell would one day use a computer for his drawings (how's that MAC working Pete?) and that music, all our media data would be held on a tiny chip (IPod) and he has told me, a few years ago that he can see a time where a chip will be implanted into our heads and we will simply receive our calls, our media data through that chip...

So it chills my blood a bit when I read something like this...and I dare say, it's a few more then a "smattering" of religious fundamentalist that have a problem with this.

Pay with a wave of your hand?

By CreditCards.com (NEED I SAY MORE?)

It's a simple concept, really: You inject a miniature radio frequency identifier the size of a grain of rice between your thumb and forefinger and, with a wave of your hand, unlock doors, turn on lights, start your car or pay for your drinks at an ultrachic nightspot.

The problem is, the whole concept is a little geeky for most of us, nauseating for some, Orwellian for a few and even apocalyptic for a smattering of religious fundamentalists.

Forget the science of it -- and yes, it does work remarkably well. Forget the convenience of it. Forget that similar identifying technologies, from bar codes to mag stripes, overcame similar obstacles and are now ubiquitous.

Radio frequency ID implants face a hurdle the others did not: ickiness.

"There is sort of an icky quality to implanting something," says Rome Jette, the vice president for smart cards at Versatile Card Technology, a Downers Grove, Ill., card manufacturer that ships 1.5 billion cards worldwide a year.

How RFID devices work
The RFID technology is un-yucky, however. The implanted tag -- a passive RFID device consisting of a miniature antenna and chip containing a 16-digit identification number -- is scanned by an RFID reader. Once verified, the number is used to unlock a database file, be it a medical record or payment information. Depending upon the application, a reader may verify tags at a distance of 4 inches up to about 30 feet. The RFID implant has been around for more than 20 years. In its earliest iteration, it provided a convenient way to keep track of dogs, cats and prized racehorses. Few took note or voiced much concern.

Then, in 2002, Applied Digital Solutions (now Digital Angel) of Delray Beach, Fla., deployed to its foreign distributors a beta version of its patented VeriChip technology for human use. Two years later, the VeriChip became the first subcutaneous RFID chip to receive FDA approval as a Class 2 medical device.

One VeriChip distributor in Spain sold the concept to the ultratrendy Baja Beach Club, which offered its patrons in Barcelona and Amsterdam the option of having an implant inserted in their upper arms to pay for their drinks without having to carry wallets in their swimsuits.

Judging by the ensuing outrage, you would think VeriChip had given the pope a wedgie.

'Mark of the beast'?
Web sites sprouted like mushrooms, accusing VeriChip of being the biblical "mark of the beast" predicted in the Book of Revelations as a foreshadowing of the end of the world.

Video: Protect yourself against credit, debit card hackers

CEO Scott Silverman was equally vilified as being tied to Satan or, worse, Wall Street. Big Brother was surely coming, though he'd have to get pretty close to read your implant. Claims that the tags cause cancer based on lab rat tests upped the amps of outrage.

Were people suddenly curious about RFID implants?

Continued: Reaction to the product mixed

"Curiosity is probably an understatement," Silverman concedes. "People have always taken interest in VeriChip. Part of the lore and part of the trouble of this company over the past five years has been just that."

Though VeriChip played no part in using its implant as a payment device, the company quickly moved to calmer waters. Today, it markets its VeriMed Health Link patient identification system to help hospitals treat noncommunicative patients in an emergency. Its future may include more advanced medical applications, including a biosensor system to detect glucose levels.

"A lot of the negative press that we received was a direct result of people having a misconception of what this technology is all about," says Silverman. "We believe that the medical application was and still is the best application for this technology.

"That said, if and when it does become mainstream and more patients are utilizing it for their medical records or for diagnostic purposes, if they want to elect to use it for other applications, certainly they'll be able to do that. But it's going to take a company much larger than us to distribute the retail reader end of it into the Wal-Marts of the world." Versatile's Jette has watched contactless RFID battle for acceptance in the credit card arena. Just as Silverman suggests, the dynamics and scale of the payment industry tends to work against widespread deployment.

"Mobil Speedpass tried to do it; they got some traction and decided to see if there was any mileage to take this to a Walgreens or McDonald's. You used to be able to use your Speedpass at McDonald's, but that ended because, at the end of the day, you still only have two gigantic payment processors out there, Visa and MasterCard," he says. "To me, the idea of any kind of payment device having ubiquity requires an awful lot of back-end cooperation, of people willing to say, 'I don't need my brand in the customer's wallet.'"

Although the coolness factor is effective from a marketing standpoint -- American Express Blue with its smart (if largely unused) chip is a good example -- Jette says most cardholders would balk at the very thought of a needle.

"With the implanting in the nightclubs, there is (some) cachet of exclusivity there, especially among a certain demographic where people are piercing themselves and getting tattoos. But those are things that really only 20-somethings do a lot. I really doubt that there will be any market for injectable RFID tags or even any single point-of-sale payment device."

Video: Protect yourself against credit, debit card hackers

"A lot of times, the technology is a solution looking for a problem. Sometimes people fall in love with the technology for its own sake and then try to evangelize a home for it. My business group is just smart cards, and I never forget that although we make money with smart cards, the bills are paid with mag stripe cards. As backwards and old-fashioned as they are, that is still the bulk of what the transactions are going to be in America for a very long time."

This article was reported by Jay MacDonald for CreditCards.com.