If you’re trying to develop a consistent voice, brand or set of relationships across the social web, it’s very useful to choose a username that is available on all the major social networks and use that as your consistent handle online. (I’m awsamuel, everywhere.) But as much as I believe in using one username across the web, there are times when one username is not enough.

Here are six social web services where I hold multiple accounts:

1. Gmail. You need a new Gmail account every day. OK, not quite, but multiple Gmail accounts are really useful for creating multiple identities on other web sites: for example, both Facebook and Twitter limit you to one account per e-mail address. In a lot of cases you can use the trick of creating additional pseudo-addresses on Gmail by prefixing your real Gmail address with “label.” — for example, specialaddress.alexsamuel@gmail.com. But if you are setting up a bunch of social media accounts for a specific client or project, it’s best to start with a dedicated Gmail account that you can use to register all the social media identities you’ll need for that project (the Twitter account, Facebook page, Flickr account, etc.) so you can turn over the Gmail account to your client or collaborator and give them the keys to all their accounts at once.
2. OpenTable. Since OpenTable only lets you reserve one table for any given evening, it can be handy to have a second account so that you can reserve a couple of different options and make a final decision closer to the date when you will be dining. Just remember to cancel your unused reservation.
3. Delicious.You need separate delicious accounts for the 3 Cs: classes, clients and collaborative projects. If you’re teaching a class, creating a delicious account just for that class is a way of collecting all the resources you’re sharing with your students: for example, the Web 2 and You class I taught a few years ago. If you’re creating a collection of resources for a client, creating a separate delicious account for that client helps them get started with resources relevant to their work and keeps their initial collection confidential (as long as you save all their bookmarks as “do not share”). And if you’re working on a collaborative project with a bunch of colleagues, you could choose a tag to use in common, but if your colleagues are new to delicious it may be easier for them to get started if you set up an account you can all share.
4. Twitter. If you’re Guy Kawasaki or another mega-tweeter you might want a separate Twitter account just for your replies to other people’s tweets about/to you, so that you don’t have to clutter up your main Twitter feed with replies. If you’re me, you might want a separate Twitter account for each of your kids, which you can use as a kind of virtual baby book to track the HILARIOUS things they do or say, and which you only allow a small number of trusted friends and family to follow. You might also want the occasional special-purpose accounts for crank tweeting people.
5. Flickr. If you use Flickr to organize and share pictures of your kids, and to collect or share photos professionally, use separate accounts for each purpose.
6. Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg only wants you to have one Facebook account, as your own real self, but if you do any marketing or development work on Facebook you’ll need at least a couple of totally fake accounts to test out what kinds of context are visible to different kinds of connections. And even if you’re not doing testing for professional purposes, you may find it useful to have a couple of fake Facebook accounts: one that you friend and one that you don’t, so that you can periodically check out what your profile looks like to other people. Finally, even though Facebook lists make it possible to restrict specific content to specific lists of friends, you may find it easier to have an entirely separate account for sharing news and photos of your kids, with only a very limited number of friends.

What are other web services where it’s handy to hold multiple accounts? I’d love to hear your suggestions.

I recently sent one of those e-mails that leaves you feeling like a shmuck. Not because of anything I wrote, but because I knew I would be obsessively checking my inbox every five minutes until I got a response.

There are all kinds of reasons you might find yourself checking your e-mail for an eagerly awaited message. Maybe you’ve applied for a job and are waiting to be invited for an interview. You’ve just met a great guy and you gave him your e-mail address so he could ask you out. You’ve recorded a demo tape and you’re waiting to hear from the recording label you sent it to.

And so there you sit, trying to write a report, or a client proposal, or a blog post, and it’s all you can do to go five minutes before your next e-mail check-in. It’s the modern equivalent of waiting by the phone, and it feels just as pathetic. Worst of all, it gets you in the habit of compulsive e-mail check-ins that may persist even after you receive the e-mail you were waiting for…a habit that can be tough to break.

But there is a way out! The last time I found myself checking for that special e-mail I couldn’t wait to receive, I decided to implement a tech fix. I set up a Gmail filter that scanned for incoming mail from the person I couldn’t wait to hear from, and set it to forward any messages from that person to my cell phone as text messages.

You could use the same setup for any e-mail system that will let you forward e-mail based on rules (something you can do in Apple Mail). You’ll need to know what e-mail address to use to forward an e-mail to your cell phone as a text message; this list shows how to figure out the right email address to use for most major cell phone carriers. Or you can follow the step-by-step version of how I used Gmail to forward messages to my Fido phone; if new to Gmail filters, first read this article for the basics.

1. In Gmail, create a filter that looks for emails from the person you’re waiting to hear from — in this example, it’s Steve Jobs. (If I wanted to get an alert if I heard from anyone at Apple, I’d just enter @apple.com in this field.) Then click “next step”.

2. Set your filter to forward to your cell phone. The first time you forward e-mails to your phone, you’ll need to click “manage your forwarding addresses”.

3. The first time you forward messages to your phone, you’ll need to add your cell phone’s email address in this window. Choose “add new email address” from the dropdown menu that lists all the addresses your account can forward to. You can probably find the e-mail address for your carrier by looking at this list of e-mail-to-SMS gateways; if not, do a Google search for the name of your carrier plus the phrase “email to SMS”.

4. When you finally get the e-mail you’ve been waiting for, you’ll get a text notification that looks like this:

These four easy steps transformed the experience of waiting for a reply. Instead of checking my email compulsively, I put it out of my mind. When I heard the “message received” alert on my phone, I jumped on it: the reply had arrived! As delighted as I was to receive it, I was just as delighted to notice how relaxed I’d been while waiting. From now on, the filter-to-SMS trick will be my secret for handling any situation in which I don’t want to sit waiting by the inbox.

“It’s only for content consumers, not content creators.”

That charge was leveled at the iPad even before it hit the stores. Now that it’s in all our grubby little hands, there seems to be some truth to the argument. My husband has gotten great mileage out of his iPad as a content creation tool, using his Pogo Sketch stylus to create cartoons without having to schlepp his Cintiq.

In my own life, however, content creation is 98% about text, and only 2% about image, so trading a real keyboard for a touchscreen definitely sets me back as a creator. The iPad has its place in my life, I’ve found, but I didn’t think content creation would constitute much of a use case.

Until Popplet. Popplet is a mind mapping tool that has a very nice iPad app. And unlike text entry, mind mapping — which is a core part of my work process — actually does work better on a touchscreen. Being able to quickly create and link related ideas, or rearrange ideas on the screen,  is what makes mind mapping an effective technique. Popplet takes that to a new level of fluidity on the iPad’s screen.

And does it beautifully. Check out this screenshot of a Popplet I created in about 5 minutes:

The only downside is that Popplet is a little too much fun to use. I started jotting down a few ideas in Popplet during a meeting yesterday, and at first it seemed perfect — just the trick for illustrating the vision my colleague and I had arrived at. Then he pointed out that I’d become so absorbed in arranging and re-arranging my Popplet screen that I’d brought our conversation to a complete standstill.

Ah well. Just doing my part to provide a use case for paper now that it won’t be needed for the Yellow Pages.

While working my way through the consultation paper on Canada’s Digital Advantage, I found myself:

• investigating the best way to copy and paste text from a PDF to Evernote, leading to an open browser window with a series of tabs about various options for Mac/Evernote integration
• considering the best way to annotate the PDF on my own, leading me to email the maker of my favorite iPad PDF viewer to ask about annotation features
• looking for a way of collaboratively annotating the PDF, leading me to a series of browser tabs about setting up a hosted instance of ReframeIt
• stumbling across a funding opportunity, leading me to set up a series of deadline reminders in iCal
• discovering a news story that inspired another draft blog post

One of the joys of working in a webbed, windowed and tabbed world is that it enables this kind of serendipity. And one of the enormous liabilities of working in a webbed, windowed and tabbed world is that it enables this kind of task cascade.

Start on one task and you’re just a set of right-clicks away from two new ideas, four new tasks, eight new projects. Hyperlinking leads to hyperthinking: to taking the current task at hand as the site of inspiration for a series of new possibilities, each one represented in a new window or tab or e-mail.

If you’re an expansive thinker, it’s delightful to explore these forking paths, to pop up each new window and travel as far along that mental road as your interest or time allows. You follow the train of thought, enjoy the experience of feeling a rush of inspiration or your neurons firing, and as the rush tapers off you close the window and return to your primary task.

Right?

Well, just take a look:

Does that look like the computer of a woman who closes each window when a thought loses momentum?

The net effect of hyperthinking is, as you can see, hypertasking: each task undertaken inspires a new set of possibilities, a set of branching tasks that promise fresh excitement. That’s terrific if you have a personal staff of 100. But if you’re relying on yourself or perhaps a small team, then it’s easy for a week that began with 3 items on your to-do list to end with a to-do list of 50 possibilities.

One solution would be to turn off tabs and windows: to force yourself to live in a single window environment rather than follow the branching paths. And there are apps that can help you do exactly that, as a way of maintaining your focus.

What you miss is the joy and potential of finding those new forks in the road. That’s why I prefer to indulge the hyperthinking, but tame it with a bunch of practices to help me refocus. These include:

1. Using delicious religiously to bookmark all my interesting finds, so that I know that all my online discoveries are easily rediscoverable.
2. Quitting my browser if it has more than 10 open windows (which can represent many more tabs). If something was that important I’ve bookmarked. If not, I’m clearing my mental cache by letting go of some of my explorations in progress.
3. Using Evernote to capture all my thoughts in one place, however half-baked.
4. Once or twice a year, making an Excel of all the projects I’m working on (even if “working on” just means stewing over). Seeing the 100+ tasks and projects I’m trying to move forward (no exaggeration!) forces me to make choices and let things go.
5. Maintaining a Google spreadsheet of my top 4-8 priorities for the year, and checking in monthly (or failing that, quarterly) to update the spreadsheet with my progress and next steps on each one.

Of course, these practices are not a cure. That consultation paper on Canada’s Digital Advantage? I actually wrote this entire blog post — the one you’re reading now — before I got to the end of it.  But that’s one more up side to hyperthinking: it’s a great way to catch up on your blogging.

Read Gillian Shaw’s story about my social media methodology in the Vancouver Sun.

Is social media something you have to cope with? Or is social media something that can help you cope?

In my talk today at the Northern Voice blogging conference, I made my best case for social media as a coping mechanism. Yes, social media can be overwhelming and crazy-making. But I was crazy long before social media came along, so I can hardly blame Twitter and Facebook for my feelings of anxiety and insecurity.

Nonetheless, social media sometimes leaves me feeling crazier than ever. So many people blogging more often I do! So many people twittering about conferences I’m not attending, parties I’m not invited to, accomplishments I’m not accomplishing. The only way to cope with the insanity of social media is to use social media to make yourself more sane.

And as it turns out,the strategies that harness social media to making yourself saner also make social media itself a hell of a lot more manageable.

Today I shared some of my greatest weaknesses, and the ways I use social media to address them.

1. Cure anxiety with Twitter lists. I’m sure there were parties I wasn’t invited to ten years ago, but thanks to Twitter, I now know exactly which parties I’m missing. It’s easy to obsess over all that missing out — and to get so caught up in the accomplishments of the people who fill you with envy that you miss the news from people who fill you with love.  If I were a better person, I’d stop feeling so damn envious, but until I achieve that level of equanimity, I solve the problem by using Tweetdeck‘s columns to view only the tweets from a relatively small number of people I love or feel inspired by. I’ve documented this approach in a blog post about using groups in Nambu; I now use Tweetdeck and Twitter lists, but the basic approach is the same.
    
   The happy result: I’m less neurotic, and feel closer to the friends in my “love” list.
2. Treat forgetfulness with Facebook lists. I meet a lot of people, and a lot of them go on to friend me on Facebook. I’m not shy about ignoring Facebook friend requests from people I’ve never heard of, but I often get friend requests from people I know I know, but can’t remember how I know. I recently created a new Facebook list to deal with the problem: if I get a friend request from someone and I can’t remember who the fuck they are, they go on my WTF list.
    
   And I’ve developed a related discipline for all the people I can place, but don’t necessarily want to track on an hour-by-hour basis. Twitter is my professional community; I want to use Facebook for my personal relationships. But as a social media professional I still need to be accessible and visible on Facebook, so I can’t just unfriend people. What I can do is take control of my news feed, so it only shows me news from my close friends and family. If news pops up from a colleague or someone I don’t know well, I hide them from my news feed — permanently.
    
   The happy result: I love Facebook again! It’s a great way to keep up on the news from the people I love moth.
3. Stop listening with iGoogle. I like talking a lot more than I like listening. And as much as I love reading, the part of social media that most renews me is not all the reading of blog posts and tweets — it’s my own writing. So my Google Reader account is usually stuffed to the brim with unread posts, and I miss key news stories that can be downright embarrassing not to know about.
    
   Instead of trying to keep up with my reader, I use iGoogle as a very streamlined RSS reader. It has three columns: one for searches on me (so I know if people have blogged or tweeted about me), one for mainstream news stories, and one for professional news. It’s my browser’s default homepage so I load this page many many times every day. As a result, I’m on top of the headlines, and can read more about anything that looks important. I can also read and respond to any blog posts about my work.
    
   The happy result: Less listening online has produced more conversation offline, because what I do follow are those stories that are most likely to pop up at meetings or over dinner.
4. Cure messy handwriting with Evernote. I have the world’s most terrible handwriting, which is why I made the life-changing switch to taking all my notes on my computer. And not just on my computer, but in a single program so that I can find everything in one place. That program is Evernote, which stays in sync across a Macbook Pro, a netbook, an iPad and an iPhone. I use it to take notes in every meeting and every phone call, and to keep a running file of blogging ideas and half-written blog posts. For more ideas on how to use Evernote, read my overview of Evernote here and my recent interview with Evernote CEO Phil Libin for HBR.
    
   The happy result: I blog more because I always have a story idea ready to go…and the more I write, the saner and happier I feel.
5. Cure Beta Addiction Disorder with Gmail filters. I can’t resist a beta signup. What if it’s the beta for The Web App That Will Solve All My Problems?Unfortunately, the signups have become a problem in their own right. A year ago I had 2,500 emails in my inbox, many of them confirmations, notifications, updates or newsletters from one of the hundreds (thousands?) of sites I’ve now joined. Thanks to the healing powers of Gmail labels and filters, I fought my way down to an empty inbox, and over the past year, I’ve been able to get to inbox zero every 2-4 weeks. You can read my blog post about how I got there, or jump straight to the 10 steps that can get your e-mail inbox to zero.
    
   The happy result: The same discipline that gets me to finally answer the last handful of emails every month has also helped me become a more decisive person, on-and offline.

You can find more resources on how to cope with social media on my blog’s productivity page.

You can find more resources on how to use social media as a coping mechanism in a crazy world on my blog’s soul page.

And for more on the big picture of coping with social media, check out this recent interview with me on the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast.

What are your best tricks for coping with — and through — social media? I’d love to hear them.

Twitter is a social network that lets you post short messages to share with just your friends or the world. A Twitter message—a “tweet”—is the equivalent of a Facebook status update. But you only have 140 characters to get your point across!

Even if you hate the idea of sharing your own ideas or news online, you can still enjoy Twitter as a voyeur. Lots of people check Twitter every day without posting a single update themselves. So, let’s get started!

Sign Up for an Account
My advice would be to choose the shortest username you can: Most people like to use a version of their real name. For example, my Twitter handle is “awsamuel.”

Find and Follow Twitter Users
An easy way to get started is to click Find People and then use the Find Friends option to scan for anyone in your Gmail, AOL or Yahoo address book who is already on Twitter. Just click Follow next to anyone who is already on Twitter, but don’t click Send Request for those who aren’t—you’ll just end up spamming your friends. You can also find people to follow by browsing Twitter’s suggestions or by following lists of Twitter users (more on that below). It’s fine to follow a few celebrities, but be sure to follow at least some regular people so that you’ll see how other people use Twitter.

Log In
Log in to Twitter.com to see what your friends are tweeting about anytime. Try looking at Twitter while you’re watching your favorite sports event or TV show (your friends might be watching too), if you’ve just heard about a breaking news story (people will be sharing their reactions) or just want to find something interesting to look at (people tend to share lots of links to interesting websites, videos and news stories).

Post a Tweet
Once you’ve been reading other people’s tweets for a few days or weeks, maybe it will be time to try posting a tweet yourself. There’s no right or wrong way to tweet, though some people do get obsessed with how many followers they have and post tweets that they hope will attract more followers. I recommend focusing on using Twitter to connect with the people you care about. Think about your tweets as a way of sharing whatever you want your friends to know about you. Just remember that because Twitter moves so fast, your friends may miss your tweets (people who follow hundreds of people typically see only a tiny fraction of what all those people are posting) and whatever you post will be permanently visible unless you delete it.

Twitter has its own lingo. Here’s a guide to help you make the most of it!

Become a Follower
These are the people you follow on Twitter—your friends, colleagues, favorite companies and organizations. You’ll see their latest status updates whenever you log in to Twitter.com or check your Twitter client. There will also be people who sign up to read your Twitter updates. You will be notified when someone is following you. If you don’t like the idea of strangers reading your updates, you can check the option to “Protect my tweets” on the account settings page.

Use a Twitter Client
A software program or website that you can use to view, organize or post tweets. Most people find Twitter much more useful and enjoyable if they use a client program like Tweetdeck, which is free for download to PC, Mac or iPhone.

Search Twitter
One way to discover what’s happening on Twitter and find exactly what interests you is to use Twitter’s built-in search engine. Just type in “Red Sox” to see who is tweeting about the big game or “prayer” to see what others have to say.

Make a Mention
A mention is a tweet that references a specific Twitter user or user’s comment by referring to their username, beginning with the @ sign. For example, you’d mention Oprah on Twitter by typing “I am so excited to check out the new @Oprah network.” Or you could send me a public message my mentioning me in your tweet: “Hi @awsamuel, I am trying out Twitter using your tips!”

Send Direct Messages
You can also send messages privately to another Twitter user, though you can’t send a direct message until that person is following you. Just begin your tweet with “D username” (no @ sign). For example, if I follow you, you can send me a direct message by typing “D awsamuel This is a private hello!”

Use Hashtags
Twitter users use hashtags (descriptive keywords that begin with the “#” sign) to categorize tweets and to follow or contribute to conversations on particular topics. You’ll see the hashtag #knit included in tweets about knitting, #oscar used by Oscar® fans exchanging observations during the Academy Awards®. The hashtags #FF and #FollowFriday are used on Fridays, when many people tweet a list of their favorite people to follow. Some conferences and public events even create a special hashtag so you can keep up with news updates and your fellow attendees.

Follow Lists
If you want to know more about a specific topic—say, organic gardening, minor league baseball or photography—Twitter lists are a great way to start. A list of Twitter users is compiled by a Twitter user, usually related to a particular topic. Some of my favorites are gastrobuzz (food), molfamily/green (green living) and anndouglas (I love her parent and parenting list). You can also follow (and unfollow) an entire Twitter list with a single click. Be sure to check out the directory of Twitter lists at Listorious.com.

Avoid Annoying Twitter Spam
Just like email, Twitter now has its share of spammers, so never click on a link from someone you don’t know. Twitter spammers use mentions to lure people in and hack their Twitter accounts. If you get a tweet that seems like spam, just ignore it; client programs like Tweetdeck may also offer you a button to trash or report it as spam.
Overall, Twitter is a fun way to keep up with friends, stay on top of current events and add a little zest to your day. How you use it and how much you use it is up to you. You can follow and stop following anyone at any time—so get out there and make Twitter what you want it to be.

This blog post originally appeared on Oprah.com.

One of the best side effects of my recent contact management overhaul was the discovery of Gist. Gist is essentially the mutant offspring of CRM (customer relationship management) and RSS aggregation/social media monitoring. It’s one of those tools you never thought to look for, but once you discover, can’t live without.

Essentially, Gist rounds up all the online information you have on each person or company in your rolodex, and presents it to you in one handy web page. Of course, to do this nicely, Gist needs to know who you know, so you’ll want to begin by connecting Gist to your Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and/or LinkedIn profiles. Yes, that is a HELL of a lot of information to share with one company, but in this case, you’ll find that Gist offers a lot more useful information if you give it a high degree of access.

Here’s why: your profiles tell Gist who you know. But if you use Gmail the way I use Gmail (for email, calendaring and document sharing) Gist becomes infinitely more powerful. Based on my e-mail, it knows who I’m in touch with the most, and assigns an adjustable “importance” to the people I contact the most. The latest tweets and posts from these people automatically show up on my dashboard when I log in:

Gist dashboard

But it gets better. Gist uses my calendar to figure out who I’m meeting with this week. My dashboard can show me the latest on the people I’m seeing — and lets me click through to the profile Gist creates. So let’s imagine that I’m meeting with one Rob Cottingham, and I want to know what he’s up to before we meet: I just visit his profile page on Gist.

At first it looks like any other CRM: contact information,  a notes field, and (circled in red) a summary of our latest e-mail correspondence:

Gist also shows me a summary of the Google docs we share and the attachments we’ve exchanged by e-mail. I can even see the contacts we have in common:

Gist social media profile

Gist flips the social network model on its head, allowing us to put individuals back at the center. Most of us now flit from network to network. We experience Twitter or Facebook as a community (or more accurately, a collection of people), in which our various friends and acquaintances sporadically pop up like sitcom neighbors. (“Hey, it’s Tom! Hello, Tom!”) That made some sense when were were participating in small affinity groups — in which seeing the community as a whole allowed us to feel like we were part of something larger than ourselves.

But now it’s easy to lose sight of the people that matter to you. If there are a dozen people whose tweets and updates and photos and emails you REALLY want to see, you’re likely to miss them amongst the deluge of data from people you marginally know or actively dislike.

Gist can help put the people you care about back at the center of your online experience. You can look at the profiles of the dozen people who are most “important” (and I urge you to recalibrate Gist’s assessment of who is important, or you’ll only read about your boss and office mates) and see the full context of your conversations with them, and what they’re sharing and posting about online.

Best of all, this information is targeted not so much at generating more online conversation, but at enriching your next face-to-face meeting. You can sit down for that monthly lunch with an old colleague, and you’ll know to jump in by asking her about that conference she just tweeted about.

If you’re feeling creeped out by the idea that Gist can pull all this information together, simply based on your existing social network contacts, this probably isn’t the tool for you. Because it is all a bit Big Brother: the single, all-knowing application that turns all the bits of data you’ve scattered across the social web, and turns them into a coherent (and remarkably insightful) profile of each person you know.

But of course, that’s what makes it so supremely useful. All Gist is doing is pointing out the trade-off that most of us are already making, albeit often inefficiently and unconsciously. We’re generating context so that more people know more about what we are doing and thinking. We’re building networks so we can know more about the people who intersect with our personal and professional lives. And we’re giving up our privacy and anonymity in favour of context and connection.

By doing such a good job of providing the context that, at its best, enables deeper connection, Gist may find itself in the uncanny valley of social media. Just like the robots that is too human for our comfort, but not so human that we forget it’s a robot, Gist is savvy enough to be disconcerting, but not smooth enough to be invisible. You still have to hook Gist up to all your networks before it can make sense of your social graph. You still have to visit Gist.com to view your colleagues’ and friends’ profiles.

For those of us who can tolerate that glimpse into just how transparent we are through our lives online, visits to Gist.com are a peek around the next corner: the one where everyone knows your full online profile the moment you give them a call, send them an e-mail or even walk into view. As uncomfortable as that future may sound, Gist reminds us of the up side: with all that context comes the possibility for quicker and even deeper connection.

Don’t limit your spring cleaning to tidying your linen cupboard and sweeping the dust bunnies out from under your bed. You computer needs cleaning too!

Why clean, you ask? With hard drive space getting cheaper every day, the time it takes you to clean will be worth far more than the space you free up by deleting unnecessary files. The payback comes not in disk space but in brain space: instead of struggling through piles of irrelevant e-mails, contacts and calendar events, you can invest in a spring cleanup that will multiply your efficiency for the rest of the year.

My own spring cleanup was inspired by a recent interview with Joseph Smarr, the former Plaxo CTO who recently joined Google. Once Joseph made it clear to me that my holy grail of contact management was not going to arrive anytime soon, I realized it was time to find a solution that works for now.

Why would you want to clean up your address book? Let me tell you why I cleaned up mine — and point you towards related solutions that I’ll write about over the next few weeks:

1. Get focused: With over 2,500 contacts in my address book, I had a hard time focusing on the information I needed and the people I cared about. The contact information for an old friend might include all 12 of the phone numbers she’s had in the years we’ve known each other; there have been times when I’ve picked up the phone to make a call, only to give up on the challenge of figuring out which number to use. Significant professional contacts have fallen off my radar because I don’t notice their name in a sea of irrelevant data.
   
   Solution: Thin the address book and create a list of top contacts that becomes your smartphone’s default contact group.
2. Sync different: I now use my address book across four different machines (MacBook Pro, hackintosh netbook, iPhone and iPad) that need to stay in sync. I’ve been using MobileMe to do the job but in recent months it’s been deleting contacts. It made sense to clean up my contact list before the move — if only so that I can tell whether my new choice of tool is introducing garbage text or extraneous contacts.
   
   Solution: Try Google Sync, Soocial or Plaxo as a MobileMe alternative for syncing multiple devices — but be sure to choose the right tool for your specific needs.
3. Be social: Contact lists have taken on a whole new role in recent years: as a social networking hub. If you use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other social networking too, you’ve probably seen the “invite your friends!!” buttons that offer to find anyone in your Gmail (or Yahoo, or Hotmail, or Outlook….) address book who is already on the social network you’ve just joined. Use each network’s “invite your friends” feature every 3-6 months, and you’ll connect with more and more of your friends and acquaintances across whichever networks you have in common. One of the great things about these friend finders is the way they help you reconnect with people you haven’t heard from in years: meanwhile, you don’t need an address book full of the names of people you may or may not ever speak with again.
   
   Solution: Use a separate Gmail account to store an expanded (and messy) list of all the contacts you have in the known universe, and clean up your primary contact list so it only contains currently relevant and accurate contacts.
4. Choose the right tool for the job: I tend to use my address book as a catch-all database because it’s almost always open on my computer, syncs to my other devices, and is easy to browse or search. It’s where I file my social security number (on a private card of info for me), my husband’s shoe size (on his address book card) and our passport numbers (on a card labeled “passports”). That makes sense for storing information that is linked to a specific context (for example, if I’m calling Air Canada, it’s handy to find our family’s frequent flyer numbers stored in the notes field for my “Air Canada” contact number), but there’s no need to fill up my address book with every other random bit of information — all that does is add clutter.
   
   Solution: Move database information out of contacts and into tools like 1Password (for logins), Bento (for a structured database) or Evernote (for notes).
5. Eliminate negative associations: I’ve been using an electronic contact list for fifteen years. As I’ve rolled forward from device to device and software to software, a lot of old contacts have rolled with me. If I’m never going to place another call to the guy who gave me an inappropriate gift in 1996, why do I need to be reminded of that awkward moment every time I scroll past his name?
   
   Solution: Use a separate account or software application to archive all the old or marginally relevant contacts that don’t need to see every day but don’t want to lose forever.

I’ll describe each of these solutions in more detail through a series of upcoming blog posts. And if you’ve got even more spring cleaning energy — or if your address book is already sparkling — you can dig into the rest of your computer by following the overhaul of my entire setup for personal information management: contacts, e-mail, calendars and notes. In the coming days I’ll share more tips and insights from the Great PIM Cleanup, ranging from the best way to sync address book groups to the secrets of consolidating multiple Gmail accounts.

Of all the problems that plague the plugged-in, social worker, one of the simplest remains the hardest to solve: Syncing contacts. Most of us have so many contacts spread across so many networks we lose track of them, can't access them when and where we need to and miss opportunities to connect. All we want is to synchronize all of our contact lists. A master rolodex. Why is that so hard?

Google offered to connect me with Joseph Smarr, the former CTO of Plaxo, a company that's been trying to create this for the past 18 yars now; Smarr is now with Google on a team focused on the social Web. I asked Smarr to help me understand the limitations of contact syncing today, why something so simple is actually complex, and when we can expect it to get easier.

Why can't I keep my Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and other contact lists in sync both ways, right now? Smarr: It's basically technically impossible. And that's assuming all the parties are cooperating, which they aren't, and that it's what you actually want, which you don't.

I don't? What you actually want is a little more complicated than "make it all the same everywhere." If I'm connected to somebody on LinkedIn, I want them in my address book, that's pretty clear. But then if I disconnect them from LinkedIn, do I want their info deleted from my address book? Maybe not. And do I want to be connected to everyone on LinkedIn who is in my address book? Maybe not. Some people use multiple social networks with the same sets of people and want it to all sync. Some people partition different aspects of their life by keeping LinkedIn just for professional stuff, or Facebook just for friendly stuff, or Twitter just for celebrities. Different people end up wanting different things.

The whole Buzz rollout has been the most notorious fail of the year around not being careful about how people want to use their contacts across different contexts. What lessons can you draw from that experience? You have to make sure users really understand what they are doing and have the right controls and don't get surprised. The rule is, if you've surprised your users, then you haven't done a good job. The problem is you can't always anticipate what's going to surprise users, and different users have different expectations. Lots of Buzz users were very happy: thank goodness that it magically helped me follow all these people and didn't make me do a whole bunch of work. And other people were surprised and dismayed. It's exactly the same functionality, so one-size-fits-all doesn't always work.

How do you manage relationships across different social networks? I'm a great example of someone who doesn't have the tools I need to do as good a job as I'd like to do. The challenge for me is that not everyone is on every platform, whether it's Plaxo or Facebook or Twitter. That's why I've been so passionate about open standards for moving data between these social networks. I shouldn't have to get everyone on Gmail just so I can email them. I shouldn't have to get on Sprint to call them. It's lunacy to think that we have to get everyone in one place because that's the only way sharing will ever happen.

So how do we get companies to let go a little bit and cooperate to help us manage contacts across networks? The game-changer is the rise of smartphones. Social media players need to be on smartphones to be relevant, and it's forcing those companies to build all the APIs they'd need to play with each other as well.

So all I have to do is wait a little longer until this problem is solved? Consumers need to demand this, use Get Satisfaction, and blog, and ask companies "How come it doesn't work this way?" Anyplace where you store data and don't have sufficient access to make it work with the other tools you use, you should be making those companies aware that you're not happy about it.

But if Facebook and Google aren't agreeing on a way to help me sync those contacts, how can I know who to lobby? The problem is that a lot of the sites don't want to publicly shame the other sites by saying "Click here to connect with Facebook — oh, doesn't work? Go yell at Zuckerman." Plus, there are legitimate concerns on behalf of LinkedIn and Facebook and others around protecting their users' privacy. But ultimately you either trust users and try to give them the tools to help them make smart decisions and to clean up the damage after the fact, or you act paternalistically and say sorry, we need to save you from yourself.

Has managing contacts become a mass consumer problem, and not just a problem for us geeks? Absolutely! People want to stay in touch with one another. That's a basic human emotion. And people are using all kinds of different tools because we're in a world where nobody has dominant market share. Whether it's sharing status updates or sharing photos or just knowing where your friends are and what they're doing, that fragmentation is going to continue, and it's very healthy as long as consumers have the choice to connect up the tools they use and communicate across the services.

I've been at this over 8 years and sometimes I'm not sure we're any further ahead than when I started. But this has become more of a mainstream problem. Before social networking and before smartphones, maybe this was a power user problem. But now everybody is faced with this.

And people are so used to this all being so terrible that a lot of them don't even realize how good it could be. It's only when you have a taste of this magic that people will crave the work that it takes to get it done for real.

Meanwhile, it feels like a full-time job to manage all my data.

It is a full time job. And that's the other sad thing. Think of all the great content and personal interactions you're missing and I'm missing and that we're all missing. It's one of those things you don't notice because you don't see it.

But think about the moments when your friend shared some photos or a blog post or something, and you think, I would have missed that you'd done that. And I'm so happy you got married or you went on a cool trip or you got a new job.

And you know there are so many more people you care about who are doing those things. You're just not hearing about them, or worse, they're just not sharing it in the first place because they're so pessimistic that the right people will even hear it, or that they'll be able to do it with the right level of privacy controls.

There's so many great human-to-human moments in store of staying in touch, and having a more intimate relationship, and sharing that joy -- if we can just work things out. That's what keeps me motivated.

Of all the sessions I missed at this year's SXSW, the one that I regretted the most was the Social Search panel, which drew rave reviews. So I decided to catch up with panelist Brynn Evans, a digital anthropologist and user experience consultant who is now applying her academic research on social search to real-world user experience challenges for research firm Bolt Peters. I asked Brynn to help me understand what social search is all about, and why it's not here yet.

Samuel: I hear people using "social search" to talk about very different kinds of sites and services. What do you mean by "social search?"

Evans: It could look like the Aardvark model (two people conversing directly to get information), or it could be in a more implicit way, like how OneRiot does it. That looks like trends or popular topics that come from a group of people.

Another flavor of social search that's particularly interesting is friend-filtered social search: when search results include information that people in your social network have shared, like blog posts, news articles and status updates. Friend-filtered social search has the potential to make the search experience much more personalized.

"Personalized" is one of those holy grails that social media likes to promise us. Is it the personalization of results that makes social search such a tough problem?

The technological challenge is how to index all of my activity, all of my friends' activities, all of our relationships to each other, and then make sense of all that every time I perform a new search. If this is done well, I may see personalized search results based on my query and my past history matched to my friends and friends-of-friends' interests and expertise. And since our relationships to all those people keep changing, search engines will have to construct results on the fly, which could take a long time and be computationally intensive.

Is this just a technical problem, then?

It's also a tough problem in the social sense. I actually think the social part is a much harder problem. We all have tons of information and expertise about various topics, but in the real world we share this selectively with people. But for an online system to work, we'll need to share a lot of information. How will we (or the system) decide what information to share with our friends? Some things you may not want to your friends to know about, and conversely, you may not want to know about your friends! If I'm searching for a divorce lawyer, for example, and you start a simultaneous search for a divorce lawyer--do we actually want to connect over our possible, impending divorces? Quite possibly not.

So the problem is that people don't want to share all the information that social search could reveal?

There will be times where I want to keep the world from knowing I have cancer (for various reasons), but if a close friend also develops cancer, I most certainly want to connect and share any advice I can.

What are the best solutions currently available for people who want some form of social search to reflect the context of their social networks?

Unfortunately to actually have this kind of experience today, people need to be present and active on multiple social networking sites. First, the search system will need to know which friends are part of the social circle; and then the system will need to either crawl the friends' activities or be able to reach out and ask the friend to help you.

What do you use personally?

The other day I tweeted the following:

Need a recommendation on screen recording software! ishowuHD = flaky. quicktime records keystrokes (bad). silverback = can't start session.

I received about 20 replies from people with suggestions! But to get that result, I need to have a large enough network of people on Twitter and I need to have accrued enough good will so that they answer.

That sounds a lot easier than Googling!

Google has the potential to really bring social search to the masses. If people are still coming to Google as their go-to search source, any social feedback that will make the search more relevant will also need to appear somehow in the Google results page. Wouldn't it be great if Google could re-rank your search results by what your friends have also viewed or commented on, and at the same time offer to ping your network on your behalf if you get stuck finding the answer you're looking for?

Where do you think we'll see the next leaps forward in social search?

Facebook will probably do something interesting with social search in the near future. They already integrate Bing results with Facebook searches. It'd be great to see them suggesting which friends might be knowledgeable about various search topics.

Another interesting advance would be to identify experts based on actual, recent activity on social networking sites, rather than on what people list on their profiles. Since I recently returned from a trip to South by Southwest, if you asked me a question about it now, I would be likely to provide a response. But eight months from now, if I don't talk about it anymore in the blog-o-sphere, I have probably forgotten much of my experience or at least it's no longer as relevant to ask me questions about it.

What other advances or solutions should we watch for?

As with all technologies, I get excited to think about cross-platform functionality. For social search, this could mean integrating my social network activity with Google (which I rely on and trust). Or it could mean integrating with my mobile phone, so that I can ask questions on-the-go and that people could track me down to get responses even if I'm away from my computer.

What workarounds should we all use until real social search is available?

Well...what workarounds do we currently use? I see people doing social searches all the time--asking a friend for help. People already use their personal networks to find information, so until the web can make this experience better for us, I'd say to cultivate your networks.

It sounds like what really matters is knowing experts on the topics I search for all the time.

Heck, you never plan to search for the reason for the crescent moon on outhouse doors--but when you need that information, it helps to be on good terms with a historian.

I recently read a profile of the performance artist Marina Abramovic, whose work is currently featured in a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Abramovic’s signature works include Rhythm 0, in which she lay passively in a gallery next to a series of objects that audience members could use on her body, including to injure her; The Lips of St. Thomas, in which she cut a pentagram into her stomach using a razor; and Balkan Baroque, in which  the artist spent hours sitting in a basement room, scrubbing maggot-covered, rotting cowbones.

While I was still mulling over how I could get to New York for the exhibit — and whether I was brave enough to see it! — I landed in a crunch week that blocked out all thoughts of weekend getaways. I got the great news that my first blog post for Oprah.com was going to go live — a post that would link both to my blog and to the SIM Centre’s. I had three days to get my blog cleaned up, and to get the SIM Centre site — at that time, a bare-bones placeholder — ready for public consumption. So I went into overdrive, and the day that my Oprah post went live, I was more than a little bleary-eyed.

“I hear you were working until 4 last night!”, a colleague exclaimed when I showed up.

“The last three nights, actually. But you know, that’s what it takes to launch a web site.”

She looked at me, incredulous. Her face portrayed the same mix of fascination and horror I’d felt when reading about Abramovic’s work. To my colleague, 3 consecutive late late work nights sounded about as pleasant as cutting a pentagram into my flesh.

I relayed this story to Lauren Bacon, a friend and colleague with her own successful web shop, Raised Eyebrow.

“You know what it’s like, don’t you? You just can’t get a web site done without all-nighters.”

“Actually, we have a no overtime policy,” Lauren told me. My jaw dropped.

“How do you get your sites launched?”

“We plan our development process out,” she told me. “It’s very rare that anyone has to stay late.”

I was astonished. Lauren’s been in the development business longer than I have. With no all-nighters?

The intensity of the shock was my sign that something was up. Shock happens when something collides with a baseline, unshakeable truth. And I’ve trained myself to be suspicious of unshakeable truths: it’s the absolute truths that always get you in trouble. Absolute truths hold you back, tell you something has to be a specific way and can’t possibly be any different.

And tech truths might be the most pernicious kind. After all, much of the power and efficiency of technology lies in its consistency, structure and predictability. We’re taught to think of technologies as constants…and so we fall into thinking of tech in absolutes, and getting attached to truths that hold us back more than they help us.

Here are some of the tech truths that I hear a lot — either in my own head, or from other people:

• I have to respond to every email.
• If we let our employees access Facebook they won’t get any work done.
• Social media is for people who don’t value their privacy.
• I have to be on Facebook (or Twitter, or FourSquare, or….).
• I’m no good at computers (programming, cell phones, blogging, etc).
• I need more followers/friends/contacts in my network.
• I can’t go on vacation without my Blackberry.
• I’ll never convince my boss to use social media.
• Macs are so much better than PCs.
• I don’t have time for social networking.

Do any of these sound familiar? Well, just because it made the list doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But if any of these lines is something you say (or think) a lot — and the more certain you are that it’s right — the more you need to step back and ask whether it’s a truth that’s serving you well. It’s these certainties that lock us into limitations that keep technology from being as useful to us as it can be, or that keep us from recognizing when it’s time to unplug and connect with people (or ourselves) offline.

If you’re ready to rethink one of your tech truths, here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Who else thinks this is true? Does that person have the kind of life, work or attitude I want for myself?
• Who do I know who doesn’t believe this? What does she or he have to say about this?
• What’s a gentle way I could push my limits? Can I think of a one-day or one-week experiment that would let me try out a different approach?
• What frightens me about letting go of this truth? What’s the worst thing that could happen if it were true, but I tried acting as if it weren’t?
• If this weren’t true, what would I do differently? What possibilities would emerge?

These are the questions I’m now asking about one of my most pernicious tech truths: the Law of the All-Nighter. Yes, I know lots of other developers who subscribe to this law — and like me they experience the pain of the morning (and week) after. Lauren’s experience proves that it doesn’t have to be that way. I could try another approach by promising that my next web project will involve no work after midnight — and by making that a project without a fixed launch date.

And while there are some fears around letting go — what if I never get the site finished? won’t I miss those crazy, focused late night work sessions with Rob? — there’s also the relief of imagining a web launch that isn’t followed by a week of total exhaustion and physical collapse.

If I can kill one tech truth, I know I can kill others. What are the tech truths that you need to kill?

Subject: Join our new working group?

Subject: Time to meet for coffee?

Subject: Beta invitation for new web app

Subject: Sign up for 2010 lecture series?

If your January inbox looks like mine, it’s full of requests and invitations. The problem with the New Year’s holiday is that everyone resolves to do more at the same time. So each January brings a new batch of eager clients, exciting projects and easy-to-make commitments. It’s when we resolve to try new technologies, commit to new communications channels, and become regulars at new web sites.

You can look forward to the stimulation and excitement that comes with all of this, but it’s a fine line. If you’re not careful, you’ll hit Groundhog day facing overload and exhaustion. You have to be selective about what you take on — and disciplined about retiring longstanding activities to make room for new ones. In other words, you have to be able to say, No. Frequently, politely and effectively.

The good news is that the same technologies that threaten to overload you with to-dos and appointments can also help you to say no. Here’s how I use my computer and the social web as allies in the discipline of saying no:

Set your intentions. Before you start saying no, make it clear to yourself what you want to say yes to. Sites like 43Things.com and SuperViva.com invite users to make a list of goals they want to achieve and experiences they want to have. Taking the time to write down your dreams can help you clarify what’s important to you, identify what you want to cross off this year, and get the community support to achieve it.

Prioritize your commitments. Use a spreadsheet to capture every single project you’re working on — even projects you’ve only started in your mind but know you want to attack. Create a second column to assign a priority level to each project, ranking items from 1-5 based on your gut level response. Then create a third column to jot down the name of anyone who could take over or help with each project on the list. Sort your projects according to priority, and set aside all but the top-priority items that can only be handled by you personally.

Make it easy to say no. When my e-mail inbox piles up with unanswered messages, you can bet that it’s full of e-mails that require a no — ones that I can’t bring myself to write. To make the process easier, I have created a few different signature files in my e-mail client, with polite “no” messages for different circumstances. I’d love to join you, but my schedule is really booked for the next month; or Thanks for thinking of us, but we’re only taking on a certain type of client right now; or That sounds like a great project, but my pro bono work is already committed for this quarter. Using these removes the burden of working up the energy to say no so often.

Streamline your online communications. Between e-mail, text messages, social networks and voicemail, and others, you may have ten different communications channels you need to process on a daily (if not hourly) basis. Consider a digital cleanse to help you evaluate the footprint that all these channels have on your productivity and happiness. Take a week in which you limit your online communications to a bare minimum. At the end of the week, close down your accounts on any networks that take more time than they’re worth, or edit your profile on those networks to tell people you prefer to be contacted by other means.

Make “no” your default answer. Plan on saying no to all new social network invitations, projects, and events. Say yes only if the invitation or opportunity meets a short set of criteria. For example, I look for conferences that combine business development (getting clients), professional development (improving skills or knowledge) and personal development (regeneration or personal growth) and only attend events that promise meaningful value on at least two out of three of those fronts. Write your criteria down and stick them to your screen, or put them on a digital stickie note. Soon, you’ll be saying yes to only those opportunities that meet the criteria staring you in the face.

None of these practices eliminates the anxiety that comes from saying no, or the fear that you may be passing up a fantastic opportunity. But it’s precisely because saying no is so difficult that we need tools and systems to help make it a little easier, and a little more habitual. The more you say no, the better you’ll perform when dealing with the important few projects or tasks that get a big yes.

This post originally appeared on the site of the Harvard Business Review.

I had a great conversation today with Glen Lowry about making: you know, making actual stuff, like objects or art, as opposed to quasi-making (like writing or thinking). I found myself replaying our conversation this evening when my attempt to write a blog post turned into yet another evening of tinkering with my blogging software.

Which one of these activities counts as making: writing the blog post, or playing with the box it came in — that is, the blogging software itself? It strikes me that this is one of those lines that divides technology lovers from technology users.

Except it’s not really a line, it’s a continuum that reflects how people relate to technology, and how technology fits into whatever it is they do or make. For some people, the technology is purely instrumental — a way to make stuff — where for others, the technology is in some way what they make. I’ve come up with some guesstimates of how much time people spend working with technology, versus how much time they spend working on technology, depending on where they sit on this spectrum:

• Passive users: Use the software they find on their computer (as installed by a manufacturer or IT department) according to the instructions or their basic intuition. 99% of their tech use consists of actually using tools to do something else, and maybe 1% goes to troubleshooting.
• Active users: If the installed software tools don’t quite cut it, or they hear about something interesting, or their computer tells them to install it, active users might add a program or two. But they’ll still use their computer, phone etc more or less as intended. 90% of their time goes to using technology to do something else, and 10% goes to trying out new options or learning to make better use of what they have.
• Seekers: Seekers have a sense that their tech could work a little better for them, so they try new things that appear on their radar, and seek out new tools that sound interesting. They hear that Twitter is cool, so they try it; they hear that Twitter is more fun if you have client software, so they try out a couple of options like Tweetdeck and Nambu. But what they find, they use as prescribed. They spend about 80% of their time using technology to do something, and 20% looking for the next super-cool tool that will make everything better.
• Tinkerers: Tinkerers enjoy playing with tech and seeing how they can bend to their will, so they are constantly shifting back and forth between using technology to get stuff done, and working on the technology itself. They are tweaking settings, installing plug-ins, running upgrades, and adding new hardware and software to their toolkit. They spend about 60-70% of their time using technology to do something, and 30-40% of their time making their technology work better.
• Hackers: Hackers find it viscerally annoying to use technology that doesn’t work right — as in, the way they want it to work. So while they may start out using a piece of hardware or software to get something done, they are likely to invest a lot of time in altering or creating a new solution that works the way they think it should. They spend about 30-40% of their time using technology, and 60-70% of their time making and fixing hardware and software so it works right.
• Developers: Developers enjoy making more than using. Sure, they need to send e-mails just like the rest of us, but mostly what they are e-mailing is snippets of code on their latest project. Technology isn’t what they use: it’s what they make. So they spend about 80-90% of their tech time actually making technology, and only 10-20% using someone else’s.

I think something interesting starts to happen at around the “seeker” point in this continuum. As people start to spend more time working on their technology — thinking actively about what tools they want to use, and what will make them most effective — the technology stops being a tool and starts to be in some way a creative product. Even if you never touch a line of code, the simple decision to take charge of your iPhone — to replace that background image with a picture that inspires you, or to add a couple of apps that let you track where you’ve been and what you’ve seen — puts you in the driver’s seat, and makes your phone (or computer, or TV) into an expression of what matters to you.

But is it making? Is tweaking, hacking or even building your own computer the same as imagining an object that never existed and making it from scratch? If I could stop tinkering with my WordPress plugins I could pick up a paintbrush or chisel and let you know.

Switching platforms is disorienting, at least until you get up and running with the core software that gives you all the tools you had on your old machine. But you didn't switch to a Mac just so you could do the same old stuff. You switched because you wanted to rock the house, set the world on fire, and bravely go where no Windows machine has gone before. Here are four Mac-only apps that should fill your heart with joy at your newfound powers.

1. Find your files. Default Folder X ensures you're never more than a click or two away from the folder you want to save a file to, or find a file in -- even folders that aren't in your list of Places.. It adds contextual menus to any "Save" or "Open" dialogue boxes, in any program, so that you can immediately access any folders that you've recently used, or are currently open in the Finder. I find that 95% of the time, the folder I want to save a document to is in one of those two lists. You can see Default Folder X's additional icons in the right-hand side of this screenshot:
2. Type less. TextExpander lets you create text shortcuts -- or "snippets" --  for any text you type frequently, like your address or the date, or for images you use frequently, like your logo or headshot. I use the key combination "ddt" to enter the date; anytime I save a file, I start by typing "ddt", which inserts the date in the form 2009-05-23 at the beginning of every file name. That means I can sort files by name in order to see them in chronological order by date of creation, (you can do the same thing by adding "View by date created" to your Finder's default columns -- under View/Show Options in your Finder's menu bar -- but I like to see date last modified, too, and that gets to be a lot of columns in the Finder.) Enter "%Y-%m-%d" as a snippet in TextExpander, and choose your own keystroke combo (like "ddt") to get automatic dates in the form year-month-day.
3. Say click. If you're enjoying the helpful illustrations in this post, you can thank Skitch: a really kick-ass screen capture utility with an online component. Install Skitch on your machine to do quick screenshots that you can crop, resize or annotate; then use the "save" button to add that screenshot to a permanent archive, or "webpost" to put it on a website -- so that you can easily embed images in your blog posts.
4. Collaborate in Mac time. If you like Google Docs or wikis as a way of collaborating with your colleagues to write documents, try doing it in real time. SubEthaEdit is a plain text editor that runs on your Mac -- and lets you collaboratively write and edit in real time if you have a colleague who's running SubEthaEdit too. Rob and I use SubEthaEdit to take notes together during meetings, or to live blog conference events (I transcribe, Rob cleans up as we go so it's ready to post right away.) If you're away from the wifi cloud (and still breathing), you can create your own computer-to-computer network by clicking on the Airport status icon in your menu bar; invite your fellow SubEthaEditors to join the private network you've created. Like this:
   
   Keep your SubEthaEdit disk image on your computer so that you can get your colleagues up and running with SubEthaEdit if you want to take notes together; you can transfer it to them using a keychain drive, or by dragging-and-dropping into their public dropbox once you're connected to the same network. (Just use shift-apple-K in the Finder to bring up a list of computers in your local network).

Which apps make you happy to be a Mac user?