As a longtime (now mostly recovered) reader of women's magazines, I have struggled with the ever-mounting list of feminine maintenance tasks. Leg shaving, nail filing, face cleansing, check. Hair deep conditioning, sunscreening, foot pumicing, ok. Lash tinting, brow shaping, lip conditioning (hey, I'm not naming it if I haven't done it)....well, it gets to be quite a bit of work. And then you get older and the list just gets longer: hair colouring, skin de-tagging, botoxing...where do we ladies find the time?

After a dozen years and many more magazine pages, I finally concluded that the only rational solution was to keep a set number of beautification slots. If Glamour tells me to add botox, I'm giving up deep conditioning. If Elle tells me it's time for eyebrow shaping, I'll have to jettison leg shaving. There is just only so much time I have available for physical perfection and I've got to put the minutes where they count.

I've now been a computer owner for almost as long as I've been a magazine reader, and I'm afraid the challenges of tech maintenance are even more relentless than the challenges of beauty maintenance. Back in the day (you know, when we used to walk a mile to school in our bare feet) I had all my files -- and I mean ALL my files -- on a single 5.25 inch floppy disk. These days, I not only have 84 gigs of data to keep (dis)organized, I have several dozen applications I need to keep updated and debugged. I have a blog to upgrade and tweak, and a personal web site to maintain (Or not. Why yes, those are straight HTML pages you see on http://www.samuel-cottingham.com.) I need to keep my iPhone working and synced. I need to make sure our BitTorrents are downloaded on time, converted to MPEG 4 and in the right directory for our Tivo to find them.

I realize that I may be stretching the definition of "need" here, but whether your technological frontline involves BitTorrent and Tivo or typewriters and telephones, every technology you take on carries an associated workload. We commit to a the latest version of our favourite word processor, or the contact management system our friend recommended, or the totally hot little smart phone, because they promise to make us more effective and more efficient. And along with the time saved, we get a whole new to-do list: Learn the software. Configure the software. Upgrade the software. Debug the software.

For a geek like me, that isn't all bad. Yeah, I spend more time checking MacFixit for tech tips, but better database reconstruction than data entry. I'll happily take on new tool after new tool....not just despite the maintenance footprint, but in some sense because of it. It's actually fun to get my Bittorrent search engine set up in a browser that's configured to open the torrent in a client that saves it to a place where it can drop into the mpeg converter and automatically appear in the episodes listed on my Tivo.

And so my list of tools to manage grows longer and longer, until managing my tech is a full-time job. In fact, that's my fantasy solution: find somebody to pay me to manage my own personal technology, full time. I figure if I had 40 hours a week I could probably keep my software up-to-date, my hard drive organized, my data backed up and uncorrupted, and my eighteen tech devices synced. Attention, reality TV producers: just let me know when you want to start taping Geek Family Robinson and I'll dedicate myself to the job of keeping our home technology fully and perpetually optimized.

But until the producer calls, I've got to fit the tech management effort into the margins of the work the technology is designed to support. And I'm forced to acknowledge that not everybody would regard my ideal solution of full-time tech optimization as a dream job. I am told there are thousands of people -- millions, even -- who would be delighted to spend exactly no time on their technology setup whatsoever.

For these folks, unlike geeks like me, the calculation of time saved versus effort expended is much more straightforward. Trading data entry for tech troubleshooting isn't any kind of bargain for them: a minute is a minute. For them -- and probably for me too -- the best solution is akin to my Iron Law of Beauty: define the envelope of time you're willing to spend on maintenance, and if you add one new technology to your repertoire, drop another.

Easier said than done. If you're a beauty queen, you'll do what the magazines prescribe, even if you have to wake up earlier to do it. If you're a techno-compulsive, you'll sign up for that latest web app, install the newest version of the design suite, automate every last task you can find a tool to automate. Adopt and adopt until the trade-offs you make are by default -- which glitchy bit of software is bugging you the most? which stray hairs are the most unwanted? -- rather than by design.

And if you're both a primper and a geek, your choices are more brutal still. When my friend and colleague Jason Mogus recently overheard me confessing that I keep tweezers in my purse, car and desk drawer -- so I never have to endure an egregiously misplaced eyebrow hair -- he laughingly observed that the time I'm spending on my brows, he's spending on his Blackberry. I may have a better arch, but he'll respond to your e-mail quicker. I laughed along with him, then started practicing tweezing with one hand and typing with the other.

So no, I don't entirely practice what I preach. When I read about the nifty new iPhone app, I install it...without deleting any of the three dozen I already have installed. And yes, when Elle told me that eyebrow shaping was de rigeur, I picked up some tweezers.

But am I still shaving my legs? You'll have to wait until spring to find out.

Today marks the eighth anniversary of our other founding partnership: our marriage. July 29th, 2000 was the Big Day not only for the two of us, but also for Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.

We know that popular opinion lays the blame for the Brad-Jen breakup at the feet of a certain Ms. Jolie, but we recognize a completely different kind of relationship pressure. With all the press coverage of their marriage, did you ever see them pictured with matching his 'n hers PowerBooks?

We don't want our own marriage to fall victim to the specter of insufficient technology. And yet the traditional roster of anniversary gifts is still geared towards the analog lifestyle.

To celebrate our half-hex anniversary, we're proud to present a new, geek-friendly set of recommended anniversary gifts. Do note that the recommended 8th anniversary gift is a nice, fresh web link...hint, hint.

Just how much should you fear the Social Signal vendetta of the weekâ„¢? Not that much, it turns out: no sooner had I written my tirade against LinkedIn Answers than I spent the evening answering them. The key to my change-of-heart? The discovery of a groundbreaking technology known as cutting and pasting. Sure, I'd rather have pulled my LinkedIn Answer with the miracle of RSS, but this is a decent plan B.

So, without further ado, here is my answer of the day, in response to the following question from Seth Rosen:

Which nonprofits are using Web 2.0 technology in an innovative way to listen and talk with their clients and constituents and further their missions?
A lot has been written about Web 2.0, or the social web, to communicate and share information. Have you seen nonprofits do this effectively? How are they using the power of the web to spread information and have virtual conversations with their supporters?

We work with a wide range of non-profit and change-oriented for-profit organizations who are using the web to deliver their message, but more crucially, to engage audiences in a conversation. Some of the best practices we note:

1. Focus your site on a particular goal or conversation, rather than a general mandate. For example, the UN Foundation has had a dazzling success with its Nothing But Nets site, which focuses specifically on providing malaria nets to kids in the developing world.
2. Invite your community to make contributions other than money. Non-profits often experience "donor fatigue" because so much of their public interactions hinge on asking for money. The web is a great place to ask for other kinds of contributions -- whether that means connecting people directly with people who need their expertise or services (as in Nabuur) or asking them to share their personal experiences (as with the March of Dimes' Share your Story project).
3. Play nicely with other non-profit (and for-profit) organizations. The web is just that: a web of interconnections. Succeeding in an internetworked environment means working effectively with others, colllaborating, and interacting -- it's not just about getting your own message out there. So being a good 2.0 non-profit means engaging with conversations and ideas on other blogs. Change Everything, a project of the Vancity credit union, is in the middle of a contest that will award $1,000 to a non-profit organization -- and the contest has fuelled a great deal of interest and awareness of non-profit activities in British Columbia.
4. Don't feel that web 2.0 means building your own online community. In fact, it's a lot easier to ease into the web 2.0 culture by making effective use of existing web tools -- whether that means fostering internal collaboration by choosing a common del.icio.us tag to use when storing your favorite web sites, or creating an iGoogle page that lets you constantly see the latest news in your key issue areas, or creating a photo-based petition on Flickr (check out the Oxfam example). Or try setting up a Facebook group -- we attracted 1300 people to a Flickr group within 3 weeks of launch. Once you're comfortable with the idea of web 2.0, you can starting thinking about whether it makes sense to build some community features into your own site.
5. Be gentle with yourself, and your colleagues. It's a big challenge for most non-profits to shift from message delivery to conversation, or from approaching your members as donors to seeing them as content contributors. For organizations that have been all about the message, and have approached that for decades from a paradigm of message control and careful rollout, it is a genuine (and at times frightening) adventure to bring your audience into the conversation in public, and before you've got everybody lined up to stay "on message". Be patient with colleagues who need to get comfortable with this new approach.
   
6. Stay current with how other non-profits are using web 2.0, and learn from their experiences. A great way of doing that is to track the "nptech" tag on del.ici.ous, where people from all across the nonprofit sector share the latest resources on nonprofit technology activities; it's a great place to find blog posts or tech developments to comment on. And Compumentor's NetSquared project is dedicated to helping non-profits make the most of web 2.0.

Our headboard needs an ICANN-accredited domain registrar. We always come up with the best domain names as we’re falling asleep, and forget them by the morning.

No godaddy jokes, please.

As promised, I’m picking 10 sites for my bookmark bar; in fact they’re pretty much there already. Here’s what I’m going to try to live off of for the next week, with no search and no typing addresses into the address bar:

1. My blog’s admin page
2. My del.icio.us page
3. My Bloglines page (with links to all my blog and news sources)
4. My web banking login
5. My Yahoo groups page
6. My spurls
7. MyTelus
8. The admin page for You’re It
9. Omidyar
10. MacFixit

I can already tell this is going to be annoying, despite the fact that I can reach about 98% of my web destinations via the first 3 links in my list alone. I suspect that the value of this exercise is going to turn out to be the discipline it imposes on my bookmarking. While I tend to use del.icio.us a lot for things that I want to read, I tend not to bookmark sites that I actually want to use — like my bank, my local movie info (via MyTelus), and Omidyar. This week may push me into bookmarking more sites and learning how to use my bookmarks more effectively.

And the tagging obsession continues. Thanks to Travis Smith for pointing me towards Larry Borsato’s comments on why we don’t tag our desktop. His post is a response to Kevin Briody’s call to tag your desktop. Kevin asks:

Why can’t we tag documents? And file shares? And intranet sites? Then tag communications: emails, Messenger contacts, and address book contacts?

Borsato thinks he has the answer:

The reason desktop search is so useful and necessary is because it helps us find the stuff we lost. Any usable system will required both the ability to categorize, and the ability to search across categories. The folders we are already comfortable with address all of Kevin’s requirements. They can aggregate documents, contacts, other folders, and links or shortcuts to other information.

But Larry is missing the three laws of tagging that make it not just desirable, but indispensable to the future of the desktop:

1. Choices suck.
   I’m often working on documents or files that belong in more than one place in the haphazard taxonomy that is my computer. I save a file to whichever folder seems to make sense at the time, but that’s no guarantee I’ll be able to guess that location when I go looking. (What can I say? I am mysterious and enigmatic, even to myself). And since today’s long filenames still impose some choices about what words to include or leave out of a filename, you can’t count on search to bail you out. With tags, you don’t have to make those tough choices…just slap on all the keywords you think you might ever need.
2. Flat is better than pointy.
   The beauty of tagging is that it’s a totally flat system…no nested folders or hierarchical categories to worry about. Folder-based desktops, on the other hand, are very very pointy, digging deep into the bowels of your hard drive and spiking up here and there as top-level folders. And like any pointy thing, they require a lot of pruning. I for one am sick of continually pruning my desktop folders back into some kind of coherent order.
3. Many is better than one.
   And if it isn’t enough that tagging can save you from your own leaky memory and desktop disarray, think about what it can do when combined with the rest of the big world. Anyone who has checked out a Technorati tag page has discovered the joys of converged tagging. Just imagine being able to combine all the junk roaming around your desktop with all the related material on del.icio.us, furl, flickr et al.

In fact, why stop at the desktop? I want a labelmaker that will generate text/UPC tags so I can tag objects around them house and retrieve them using our in-home laser-guided Universal Locator System. Oh wait…that’s the future. Why isn’t it here yet?

I’m trying a new tool that automatically adds my latest bookmarks to this blog via del.icio.us. (I’m user Alexandra Samuel.) I actually manage my bookmarks with Spurl, a terrific social bookmark system that integrates nicely with del.icio.us but has a more user-friendly interface.

• LazyWeb:
  Here’s a neat tool for fans of online collaboration and spontaneous problem-solving: the Lazy Web, a place to post all your wishes and requests, in the hope that some benevolent web surfer will stumble along to offer a solution.

Friends Ben Banky and Linda Rae pointed me to a web site with amazing panoramas of Vancouver’s changing urban landscape, 1978 to 2003. It’s a terrific example of how somewhat abstract issues like urban planning can be given an immediate and apprehensible visual meaning.

It’s also a great example of the wealth of resources that can be used to enhance public consultation — if they’re effectively deployed. This set of images could be a great tool for stimulating public discussion of the city’s plans. And implicitly, that’s the goal: after all, they were put online by the city’s planning department. But all that’s offered as a feedback mechanism is an e-mail address at the bottom of the page — without any questions or context for giving feedback.

I’d love to see a resource like this one harnessed to a more concerted consultation effort. It could be a great catalyst for debate and discussion on the city’s future.

I have a story in today’s Toronto Star on Leapfrogging the Technology Gap. The story looks at

communities or even whole countries in the developing world that are using information and communication technologies to leapfrog directly from being an agricultural to an information economy. It’s a phenomenon that combines technology high and low in innovative ways, and is generating not only economic benefits but a new world of educational, social and political opportunities.

It’s accompanied by a second story, Tsunami a setback for e-Sri Lanka, which looks at Sri Lanka’s aspirations for technological leapfrogging in light of last month’s Indian Ocean disaster.

As part of my ongoing love-in with 43 Things, I looked into its development environment, something called Ruby on Rails. Ruby is a programming language that claims to be easy for even a new programmer to learn. Rails is a web application framework for Ruby; it sounds like it may make the process of developing web applications much faster and more efficient.

I gather than Ruby on Rails was developed simultaneously and symbiotically with Basecamp, a very intriguing web-based project management tool. It looks like a very usable, economic tool for managing internal communications, project timelines, and task allocation and completion.

My new favourite web site is something called 43 Things, which I discovered through Nancy White’s blog.

You can’t find out what 43 Things is if you don’ t have an account, and you can’t get an account without an invitation. No wonder I just HAD to get in. Happily Nancy White invited me to join her in exploring how 43 Things can be a social change tool. If you want to join the exploration, ask me for an invitation.

Like anyone whose work not only uses the Internet, but actually concerns the Internet itself, I am really dependent on bookmark management to keep track of my work and resources. As a Mac user I’ve recently returned to using URL Manager Pro, a client-side tool that does a very nice job of organizing bookmarks in a flexible, accessible, annotateable form. While that addresses my own bookmark management needs, it doesn’t provide a way of sharing my bookmarks with colleagues and collaborators.

For that job, I’m exploring a new tool: del.icio.us, which bills itself as a social bookmarks manager. Andy Budd has a nice explanation of its virtues.

Part of the appeal of the social bookmarking idea is that it’s not just a productivity app; it actually has some value added for those of us working in the field of online collaboration and cooperation. Social bookmarking is still relatively new, so I’ve yet to hear of anyone using it as a civic engagement or collaboration tool. But it won’t be long.