Many of my top posts of 2011 were posts that addressed major questions about the politics of the Internet today, and the future of the online world we are now creating. I wrote a number of these as part of my 40 day, 40 year history of the Internet; several others emerged out of the social media response to the Vancouver riots. If you are trying to understand what is at stake in today’s debates about how to use or regulate the Internet, or you are simply looking for a fresh perspective on the Internet’s social and political impact, I hope this posts will help you think about the crucial challenges that lie ahead for us online.

1. Predicting the future of the “personal brand”: In this excerpt from my interview with Dan Schawbel, I talk about why I find the talk about “personal branding” so troubling.
2. 1972: ELIZA, IANA and the search for (in)finite attention online: The 1972 Internet gave us ELIZA, a computer therapist, and IANA, which allocates IP addresses. Together they structure our contemporary dilemma: how do we get scarce, human attention in a world of infinite online distraction?
3. Dittos remind us of the pleasures of obsolescence: If the smell of solvents makes you sweetly nostalgic for your 3rd grade dittos, you know that technological progress is not without its regrets. And if you don’t remember dittos, you’re not too young to appreciate the joys of technological nostalgia.
4. Honoring the debt Canada’s connectivity owes to Chinese workers: When you choose a historical metaphor, you make claims on conscience as well as imagination. Canada chose to complete its national network of connectivity in November 1985, on the 100th anniversary of completing a national railway built on the hard work of ill-treated Chinese workers. The Canadian – and global — Internet is in danger of repeating that sad history.
5. The Core Tenets of the Social Web, 25 years in the making: What are the essential principles of today’s social web? This post spells them out — and identifies their surprisingly deep roots.
6. Lady Gaga and the transcendent narcissism of social media: After attending Lady Gaga’s Vancouver concert, I looked at how her on- and offline relationship to her fans showed the power and perils of social media narcissism.
7. Crowdsourced repression: Could it happen here?:  In the debate over the social media response to the Vancouver riots, much hinged on whether you believed that authoritarian repression was something Canadians needed to worry about. In this post, I argued that in a global society, we do need to think about how our use of the Internet plays into larger currents in world history and politics.
8. An online cure for an unsustainable model of leadership: On the sad occasion of Jack Layton’s passing, I asked: how can we create a world in which leadership need not be a fatal condition? And does the Internet help or hinder that quest?
9. 6 questions about the impact of social media on think tanks: How does the Internet change the way policy is made — or more crucially, change the role of policy in shaping our society and politics? Based on my comments at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, this post argues that policymakers, interest groups and think tanks need to understand how profoundly the Internet constrains their ability to set and enforce policy.
10. Got a pregnant friend? There could be an app for that: Imagining our future online world sometimes means imagining the next generation of tools and interactions we will use or enjoy. In this post, I make a bold prediction for the future of reproduction…in the form of application mock-ups.
11. 6 crucial police guidelines for stopping social media vigilantes: When Vancouver’s Police Board considered the report on the Vancouver riots, I identified the 6 guidelines the Police Department could adopt to prevent future online vigilantism.

Tomorrow, my final post in this series will share my top 11 favourite posts from other people’s blogs.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

I began this series with a list of my 11 most popular blog posts of 2011. As I looked through my analytics in preparation for that post, I was interested to see the appetite for posts that offer specific tech tips and how-to guidance.  Today, I round up the 2011 posts that I think offered the most useful tech how-to tips.

1. 3 steps to creating a Facebook friend list for your kid-related content: Whether or not you have kids, there’s no question that creating smart, specific lists of different Facebook friends is the essential skill for successful Facebook use. This post walks you through the steps for creating a list to protect your kids’ privacy, but it’s just as applicable to creating a list of close friends, trusted colleagues, or simply a list of the Facebook friends you actually know.
2. Create a category-specific series box with WordPress, Thesis and Organize Series: If you use WordPress, I highly recommend the Organize Series plug-in. This post represents the high water mark of my nerd achievements for 2011, since I actually had to do some original PHP scripting (a personal first) in order to make it work.
3. Search party: 10 tips for better searching on Google and beyond: The better you are at constructing nuanced, targeted search strings, the more effective and efficient you will be at just about everything you do online. These 10 tips will help you make the most of your Googling.
4. 10 ways to save on roaming charges when traveling with your smartphone: Don’t blow the budget for your next vacation or business trip on a whopping cell phone bill. These 10 tips will help keep your voice and data costs under control.
5. 4 great ways to use Evernote with Skitch today — plus 14 new possibilities: You know how happy you feel when you find out that two of your good friends have hooked up and are now a couple? That’s how I felt when  note-taking and information management powerhouse Evernote acquired screen capture and image uploader Skitch, and celebrated by sharing these ways I already use them together.
6. Using Syncplicity and Dropbox to put Google Docs on your desktop: If you spend a lot of time uploading and downloading to and from Google Docs, or you simply prefer working in Word and/or Excel, this neat trick will help you keep your Google Docs automatically synchronized to your desktop or laptop (and even your iPad or iPhone, if you use Dropbox on them).
7. 4 ways to protect your privacy and reputation on Facebook Timeline: Protect your privacy on Facebook’s Timeline by tweaking your lists, past history settings and the permissions you give other apps.
8. 4 easy steps to creating a Twitter list from your conference backchannel: One of my favourite new tools of 2011 is Tweetbe.at, which makes it easy to create and maintain Twitter lists (among other useful features). Here’s how you can use it to create a list of anyone who participates in the backchannel of an event or conference.
9. What is Evernote, and how can it make you a social media power user?: Part of the reason I harangue random strangers into using Evernote is that it makes life and work easier for just about anyone. But the other reason is that it’s the gateway to social media competency, because it teaches you to work and think in ways that will make you a social media power user.
10. Delete your Klout profile and be more than a Klout score: Why and how to delete your Klout score — even if (or especially if!) you don’t think you have one.
11. 29 free or cheap online collaboration software tools for you and your team: Even if you do all your work solo (and who does?) most of these 29 tools are must-haves. But if you work with collaborators or teams, using these difference collaboration software tools will rock your world.

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This week I’m sharing my favourite posts of 2011. Today, I’m rounding up my top posts on living with social media: from how to navigate social media with your kids, to online romance, to the online challenges and opportunities for personal growth and happiness.

1. Facebooking the kids: 12 Dos & Don’ts: Facebook can be a great way to share your family news with a small circle of friends — if you’re smart about using privacy settings. This post rounds up the recommendations from my series on Facebooking the kids.
2. Social media for the 28th day: 9 tech tips for easier periods: Even if you’re not part of the menstruating population, this post may help you think about how you can adapt a tech routing to cope with any aspect of your life. And if you do  have periods — well, seriously, you’ve got to read this post.
3. Internet tunes: Craiglist Hookup – Missed Connections: This year I started collecting songs about social media, and blogging my favourites. This song about falling in love via Craigslist is one of the songs that has lodged in my head. It’s awesome.
4. The Lonely Princess: A social media fairy tale: If you’re looking for a bedtime story that will help you explain social media to your little ones, introduce them to the Lonely Princess.
5. Creating a family social media policy: The ongoing conversation in our home about how to use social media — and in particular, how to do so in a way that is both safe and enjoyable for our kids — has helped us evolve a de facto social media policy governing how we engage with social media as a family. I decided it was time to go from de facto to actual, recorded policy. Use our policy as a jumping-off point for your own.
6. 8 ways to beat the urgency trap in online communications: If 2011 felt like the year social media speeded everything up, it’s not too late to slow down the pace.
7. Facebook dating: 8 tips for pickup artists (or how to avoid them): Did you know that Facebook has become a dating move? Yes, really. Here’s how it works — and how to avoid becoming a casualty.
8. The 10 best tips on how to write an online dating profile: In my continued, vicarious adventure into online dating, I cast a wide net for great online advice that could help me write a compelling dating profile for a dear friend.
9. 6 solutions to the sadness of social media: Is social media making us sad? On the UK’s Channel 4 News website, Benjamin Cohen is concerned that social media is changing the nature of friendship, and has adjusted his use of social media in response: I’ve stopped sharing as much, full stop….I’m not suggesting that everyone else should do the same, but I’m suggesting
10. Leaning into online struggles: This fall was rough, but it got easier once I remembered to “lean in”: to give into the challenges instead of struggling against them. Here’s how you can apply the same principle to your life online.
11. 9 ways the Internet can cheer your mood when you’re feeling sad:  Feeling blue? The Internet can help. Really.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

My year-end post for the Harvard Business Review asked the question, What did the Internet do for you this year? In that post, I wrote:

Appreciating the moments when our online work and lives just click tells us that all this time we spend online is not a compulsion, but a well-deserved choice. And noticing the patterns in what’s worked well in the past — the online campaigns that consistently hit home runs, the social networks that bring us joy after joy, the content that elicits meaningful conversations — can help us invest in the activities that are most likely to pay off in the future.

In that spirit, I’d like to ask HBR readers to share their online triumphs from the past year — the moments, experiences and tools that have wowed, delighted and empowered you.

Some readers weighed in via the comment thread, but I’ve also seen lots of interesting answers on Twitter. I’ve rounded up some of them here:

@HarvardBiz asks what did the internet do for you in #2011? For all Arabs, it has enlighten their way towards 3freedom http://t.co/w2D7w6ka

12/19/2011 8:44 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@bilalak

Bilal Abdul Kader

Work hard ! RT @HarvardBiz: What Did the Internet Do for You This Year? http://t.co/OoTQnuBv

12/19/2011 9:40 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@kevinsigliano

Kevin Sigliano

My horizon of all things social from a biz perspective was broadened. What Did the Internet Do for You This Year? http://t.co/bBUtKXLZ

12/19/2011 9:04 am via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@LucyNiro

Lucy Niro

RT @HarvardBiz: What Did the Internet Do for You This Year? http://t.co/WmwyB2sn For me it made my life a lot fuller.

12/22/2011 9:05 pm via FlipboardReplyRetweetFavorite

@fcoanguiano

Francisco Anguiano R

Got us get involved with the #national discussion on #leadership http://t.co/ypeRaCAx What did the #internet do for you http://t.co/McnAxu6E

12/20/2011 2:31 pm via CoTweetReplyRetweetFavorite

@TheForumCorp

TheForumCorporation

RT @dailydeals: What did the Internet do for you this year? Hopefully, we helped you score #deals + #save money! http://t.co/WQdgBhzy

12/20/2011 10:32 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@DailyDealChat

DailyDealChat

Giving thanks for the internet this holiday season from @awsamuel -- biz opps+knowledge sharing+deepening relationships http://t.co/6i0PEhqx

12/20/2011 5:36 am via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@kateeidam

Kate Eidam

What did the Internet do for You 2011? http://t.co/p1AyMRky Invest in the activities that are most likely to Pay Off in the future.

12/19/2011 2:18 pm via feedlyReplyRetweetFavorite

@Hammarstrand

Hammarstrand™

My horizon of all things social from a biz perspective was broadened. What Did the Internet Do for You This Year? http://t.co/bBUtKXLZ

12/19/2011 9:04 am via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@LucyNiro

Lucy Niro

Complicated the system for booking appts... ;) RT @jwillie: What Did the #Internet Do for You This Year? http://t.co/mhATYUJM @HarvardBiz

12/19/2011 9:03 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@Davi_Edlebeck

Davi Edlebeck

“@HarvardBiz: What Did the Internet Do for You This Year? http://t.co/Eheg2oD3” // Took hours of my time!!

12/19/2011 8:49 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@anaristizabal1

 Ana Nanitanana 

But I really wanted a pony. RT @HarvardBiz: What Did the Internet Do for You This Year? http://t.co/OHi6DtnD

12/19/2011 8:55 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@randomhookup

R Hookup

Thanks to everyone who helped define the highs of Internet life this year — on Twitter, on HBR, on this site and all over the beautiful web. You’re my inspiration for 2012.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

I published 231 blog posts on this site in 2011. Of those, here are the 11 most popular posts: the posts that had the most pageviews. I’ll be sharing more top 11 lists over the next few days, including my own favorite posts of this year — both on this site, and elsewhere.

1. 25 rules of social media netiquette: As part of my 40-day blogging project on the first 40 years of life online, I round up wisdom from 25 different bloggers on how to behave well online.
2. On the dangers of crowdsourced surveillance: This blog post about the social media response to the Vancouver hockey riots was published on the same day as my Harvard Business Review blog post, among the first to raise concerns about the prospect of online vigilantism.
3. 10 ways Evernote can train you to think like a social media power user: Evernote is more than the most awesome digital notebook you could ever want on the web your desktop your iPhone your iPad your Android every device you can think of. It can actually train you in the work habits and thought processes that will make you a wickedly effective social media user.
4. How to write a blog post in 10 minutes: As part of my series on social media in 3 hours a week, I explain how to write a useful, polished blog post in 10 minutes — and just in case you don’t believe me, supply a real-time screencast of me doing just that.
5. How to sustain a social media presence in 3 hours a week: From finding inspiration in Google Reader to scheduling your blog posts and tweets, this post walks you through the steps and weekly workflow that will allow you to maintain a useful and effective social media presence in just 3 hours a week.
6. Using Syncplicity and Dropbox to put Google Docs on your desktop: If you spend a lot of time uploading and downloading to and from Google Docs, or you simply prefer working in Word and/or Excel, this neat trick will help you keep your Google Docs automatically synchronized to your desktop or laptop (and even your iPad or iPhone, if you use Dropbox on them).
7. Delete your Klout profile and be more than a Klout score: In a companion piece to the Social Sanity Manifesto at Harvard Business Review, I walk you through the steps of deleting your Klout profile — even if you didn’t know you had one.
8. Respecting the billable hour: Would you ask someone for $500? If your answer is no, read this post so you’ll know whether, when and how it’s ok to ask for (or give) a pro bono hour of someone’s otherwise billable time.
9. 4 great ways to use Evernote with Skitch today — plus 14 new possibilities: With the news that Evernote acquired Skitch, an image capture tool, two of my very software products became part of a single company. This post outlines the ways these two apps can and should be used together.
10. Crowdsourced repression: Could it happen here?: This post digs into the the question of how the social media response to Vancouver’s hockey riots raised the spectre of authoritarianism.
11. The dangers of relying on Facebook and Twitter authentication: Pinterest may have been my favorite new software tool of 2011. But its early reliance on Facebook and Twitter authentication kept me from sharing it with my best friends — and demonstrated the reason you should be cautious in designing sites that do all their sign-ups via other social networks.

I’m pleased so many people have enjoyed these 11 posts from 2011. In the next part of this series, I’ll show you 11 more posts that are worth a second look.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Under “fire, pants on”, please file my blog post of not two weeks ago, claiming to have seen the light on how to choose online collaboration tools so that you accommodate the least-geeky member of your team. As a philosophy, that lasted for 10 whole days, but as a practice it survived for less than 48 hours. The truth is that I go into each project as if half the value I bring to a team is the opportunity to introduce them to new software tools that will make them smarter, happier, and more attractive to the same or opposite sex.

But the door-to-door, project-to-project evangelism of productivity tools is not a scaleable model. So here you have it, an inventory of the software tools that I bludgeon gently encourage my colleagues to use. These are all web apps, except as noted, and are all free, except as noted.

Project management, time tracking and scheduling

1. Basecamp: A project management platform that includes task management, messaging, file sharing, calendaring, time tracking and “writeboards” (shared documents). Use it as the hub for planning and tracking your project tasks and deliverables, and to exchange all project-related emails so that they are archived in one place without overloading your inbox. By setting up separate permissions levels for members of your immediate team, and your client, partner or subcontractor teams, you can keep selected task lists and email threads private to your inner circle, while coordinating communications and planning with a larger group. Free for one project, $24-149/month for premium plan.
2. Google Calendar: Online calendaring tool that lets you see your calendar on any web-connected device, or even sync to your computer or phone’s calendar. Use it to manage your personal schedule, share your availability with your team, view teammate’s available windows (you can each set your calendars to show available/unavailable rather than full calendar details), subscribe to your closest colleagues’ calendars, and invite people to meetings or calls.
3. Harvest: Time tracking and invoicing tool. $12-90/month depending on the size of your team. Use it to log and track time on your projects, track expenses, invoice clients, and see reports of invoices paid and outstanding.
4. Doodle: A scheduling tool that lets you identify a set of potential call or meeting times and find a common time that’s convenient for everyone invited into the Doodle poll. For scheduling any call or meeting that has to accommodate the scheduling constraints of more than 2 people.

Communications

5. Skype: Audio & video teleconferencing tool, running off software you install on your computer. For one-to-one video calls, or calls where we want to exchange links via text during the call. But not for group calls if I can avoid it, because I have yet to do a group call on Skype that didn’t spend the first 15 minutes trying to get everyone on the call before inevitably losing one or more callers sometime during the meeting.
6. SMS: Text messaging on cell phones. For urgent issues, for “I’ll be there in 5 minutes” when running late, for sending passwords to someone after just emailing them with a username, for “sorry can’t talk in a meeting” messages when I fail to take a call.
7. AIM/Gmail chat: Instant messaging/chat service, accessed through web interface or a desktop chat client (like iChat).For conversations with my immediate team or closely collaborative subcontractors, just about anytime day or night. Opening an IM to a colleague is less intrusive than calling them; if they are in a meeting they can still answer quick questions or tell me when they’ll have time to reply. It’s also one of the fastest and most reliable ways for my close colleagues to get my attention, which is why I only use it with a very small circle.
8. Email: For heartfelt thank yous or confidential exchanges that don’t belong in the Basecamp record.

Writing, file and document management

9. Google Docs: Online document management with real-time collaborative editing, in doc or spreadsheet form. For tracking project tasks and contacts (in a spreadsheet); collaboratively drafting documents or project plans, particularly with more than 2 collaborators (Word’s “track changes” rapidly becomes a nightmare if you send a document to 2 different people for comments at the same time.)
10. Evernote: A flexible online notebook to hold all your documents (or snapshots, or voice memos), synced across multiple devices (web, phone, tablet); install the (free) software app for your computer and phones or use the web version when you’re away from your own machine; . Create a shared Evernote notebook for minutes of team meetings, drafts of documents and notes you want to share with the team, a single note with the contact info of everyone on your team, snapshots of whiteboards creating during meetings (so they become searchable thanks to Evernote’s text recognition) or web clips of any pages you want to include in a shared compilation of project-relevant research (you may want to create a separate shared notebook just for that research file). Pay for Premium service ($45/year) to enable editing of notes in a shared notebook, plus other benefits listed here.
11. Subethaedit: A document editor you install on your mac, which lets two or more people collaboratively edit a document in real time; free for 30 days, 29 Euros for purchase. As long as I’ve invited you into the document over wifi, you’ll see what I type as I’m typing it. I use this for real-time collaboration when working with a colleague in a setting that doesn’t have reliable wifi, by creating a computer-to-computer network over wifi. (If there’s solid wifi, I now use Google Docs since it’s completely real time, too.) We use this to take collaborative minutes during team meetings (so the person who is talking doesn’t have to type while they talk) and to have a set of collaborative minutes and backchannel during every client meeting or pitch.
12. DropBox: Cloud-based (i.e. online) file storage and file sharing. Create a dedicated project folder in the top-level of your DropBox account, and invite other members of your project team into the folder. Use it to store all background documents on your project plus any working documents and deliverables; organize these into subfolders.
13. Syncplicity: A DropBox-like cloud-based file storage service, but with automatic syncing to Google Docs. Use Syncplicity on its own or with DropBox so that the latest version of any doc or spreadsheet in your Google Docs account is automatically synced to your local computer here’s how), so you can edit it while offline or simply work in Word or Excel. Move files into your Syncplicity folder to have them automatically upload to DropBox.
14. Scrivener: Mac or Windows application for writing long documents, especially books and scripts/screenplays. Store a project on DropBox so you and your co-author can each keep it synched to your respective computers, and take turns writing or editing your common project. Instructions on using Scrivener for collaboration are here, but be sure to read this page about Scrivener + DropBox and note the warnings against opening the same file on two different machines at the same time. Free for 30 days, $40-$45 to buy.
15. MindMeister: A brainstorming and mindmapping tool for creating flowcharts or mindmaps, and sharing those with a team (you can give others permission to view or modify). Free for up to 3 mindmaps (or for even more for the first 30 days), $5-15/month after that. Use it to map out a project vision, outline and organize a document, break a large group into smaller teams, map out the structure of a website or analyze any challenge visually. If you haven’t used mindmapping as a thinking or planning tool, read http://www.mind-mapping.co.uk/make-mind-map.htm”> a good introduction here or here.

Twitter and social networking

16. Twitter: Post 140-character status updates or private messages. For exchanging quick questions-and-answers via DMs, posting mentions of my colleagues that give them kudos for their work, compiling Twitter lists of tweeters who cover the topic we’re working on, and reaching out to others about our work.
17. Hootsuite: Tool for viewing, composing and scheduling updates to Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. Upgrade to a premium account ($15/mo) so you can share access to a Twitter account with colleagues, assigning tweets to team members for response, or queueing up tweets for review before sending.
18. Listorious: A list of Twitter lists (I know, I made fun of it, but I’ve seen the light.) Use it to jumpstart the Twitter account for a new project by finding and following a few relevant lists, or to find experts whose tweets will be helpful to your work.
19. Facebook: Social network. Friend the people you are working with on a project or on an ongoing basis, and get to know them as actual human beings; this is a great way to build your working relationship. If you don’t want to share all your adorable kid pictures with your colleagues (I recommend that you don’t), or if you have other reasons for keeping some of your Facebook posts off the radar of your clients and collaborators, follow these instructions on how to use Facebook lists to share different content with different groups of people.

Link and citation sharing

20. Delicious: A social bookmarking tool for storing, organizing and sharing links to websites; use it alongside or instead of your browser’s built-in “bookmarks” or “favorites”, or better yet, use a tool that keeps your browser bookmarks in sync with delicious. Choose a common tag or tags that you and your team members will use to bookmark relevant resources (after first double-checking to see that the tag isn’t already in use), and share links by tagging them instead of circulating them by email; subscribe to the tag from within Google Reader or iGoogle so that you can see the latest links from your team.
21. Zotero: A Firefox extension for creating and managing a citation library, organizing your notes about articles/books, and inserting citations (endnotes or footnotes) into a document. Create a Zotero group for your project team (see this how-to) and use it to share the resources (and especially, the annotations) you add to your citation library.
22. Papers: A Mac application for finding, downloading, organizing, annotating and citing PDFs instead of leaving them scattered all over your hard drive. Create a Livfe collection (“>here’s an overview) to share your citations and notes with other colleagues who need to work from the same documents (for copyright reasons, they’ll have to re-download the PDFs to their own Papers library. Free to try for 30 days, $79 to buy.

Image sharing

23. Pinterest: A tool for collecting, curating and sharing images you bookmark from across the web and organize into “pinboards” (like bulletin boards) of favorite images. Set up one or more pinboards for your team and set the board settings to allow “me + contributors” to pin images. Create a pinboard of design inspiration for your team, a set of product options you are considering purchasing, an image file of photos or pictures you may want to incorporate into a document or website, or infographics you want to tweet.
24. Skitch: Image capture and annotation software tool (Mac and Android only, iOS coming soon). Use Skitch to capture screen shots of web sites or applications, annotate them with comments or change requests, and upload them to Skitch servers for sharing with your team members.

Blogs & content management

25. Google Reader: An RSS reader for aggregating the RSS feeds of different blogs or searches, so you can read them all in one place. Set up subscriptions to the blogs that are relevant to your project, or to the RSS feeds for relevant Google news or blog searches. Place those feeds in a single folder within Google Reader, save that folder as a bundle and then share the bundle with the other members of your team. (Note that your bundle will be visible to anyone who has the URL.)
26. WordPress: Blogging and content management system. Use a WordPress or other blog to share news about a project-in-progress, or to create an internal (password-protected) site for project musings that are shared only with team members.
27. Drupal: Content management system for running blogs or complex web sites. I often work with teams to build and manage Drupal sites, or to create ongoing content (e.g. blog posts) for those sites. The key to working effectively as a team on a Drupal site is to make good use of its roles system, so that you can safely assign a new team member to a role that lets him create content without worrying he’s going to nuke some other aspect of the site.

App management

28. Mailplane: Gmail client for Mac, with easy switching between different Gmail accounts. If you are responsible for reading or responding to email on behalf of a website or project team, set up the website’s email hosting through Google Apps, and add the email account you’re managing (e.g. info@yourwebsite.com) to the list of accounts in Mailplane. Now it’s easy to switch between your own Gmail account and the Gmail account you’re managing for the team. Free for 30 days, $25 to buy, SO worth it.
29. Prism: Firefox extension or standalone app. If you are using a lot of web apps, it’s easy to lose them in a mess of browser windows. I wrap each of my favourite web apps as a separate app, and put links to each app on your desktop or in your launcher or doc. Mac users can also use Fluid to do the same thing.

That’s the roundup of tools I currently use on a regular basis, and that I’ve used as collaboration tools this year. I add new apps to my toolkit all the time — Google+ is just starting to make its way into my collaborative workflow — so I’m always eager to hear about new collaborative tools that could change my life. What are the essential tools in your toolkit?

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Today’s practice: Refuse to quantify your worth and your relationships. Delete your Klout profile, and sign onto the Social Sanity Manifesto.

My latest blog post for Harvard Business Review outlines a Social Sanity Manifesto: a set of commitments you can make in 2012 so that the Internet becomes a place where relationships are built, not commodified. Here’s the very first commitment on the list:

I will delete my Klout profile. (If you use social media, you probably have one, even if you haven’t signed up on Klout.) I will assess my influence through my actual and reflected accomplishments, not a commodification of my relationships.

Deleting your Klout profie is an immediate and tangible action you can take to recover from metrics madness. Even if you’re not ready to turn your back on metrics, you may still want to delete your Klout profile. Klout has been criticized for violating the privacy of minors, exploiting users for their own profit, and using a deceptive or unreliable algorithm.

Yes, it feels somehow risky to drop out, in part because other apps, including the beloved HootSuite, now build Klout into some of their filters. But we should be wary of the service’s claim to reduce our importance, and our friends’, to a single number. We should be wary of building a world in which human value, and human relationships, are quantified.

Pulling the plug is simple, but not obvious, particularly since Klout changed the process after a number of pro-deletion posts were published. So I’ve mapped out the steps to deleting your profile, as they stand today. It takes a staggering 7 steps, but you can complete them all in less than 3 minutes, so just take the absurd number of steps as another strike against Klout and a good reason to kiss it goodbye.

These steps work whether you have claimed your Klout account or not, but they are a little different if you haven’t signed up for Klout. Follow the orange arrows in each picture so you know where to click.

1. Go to Klout.com.
   >> If you have previously signed up, log in using your Facebook or Twitter account, and follow my directions for registered users.
   >> If you’ve never signed up, click on “Learn more” (see orange arrow) to get into the Klout site, and follow my directions for unregistered users.
2. Unregistered users: Once you’re inside the Klout site, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on “privacy”. Skip to step 5.
3. Logged-in users: Select your profile settings from the upper-right dropdown.
4. Logged-in users: At the bottom of the profile settings page, choose the itty bitty “click here” link next to the assertion that “Klout values your privacy”.
5. Next, you’ll land on the Privacy Policy page. At the bottom, you’ll see the following text: If are not a Klout user and wish to opt out of Klout, please click here. If you have a Klout account, please sign in before following this link in order to delete your account.  
   
6. Now you’re on the final appeal for mercy — a page that exists just to give you another thing to click before you delete. For logged-in users, it looks like this (click where it says, “continue opting out”):For unregistered users, it shows this option instead (you’ll need to authenticate with Facebook or Twitter to complete the process):
7. Finally, you will see the opt-out completion form, where you get to tell Klout why you are leaving. I told them: I’m committing to the Social Sanity Manifesto! I don’t want to live in a world where my relationships are measured.
   

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Tonight Emily Carr students presented 5 ebook prototypes developed over the course of this semester in an ebook design course. As the students presented their work, and members of the local business, tech and creative communities responded to them, it was clear that we are grappling with a common set of fundamental questions raised by the emergence of ebooks. Here are the 6 crucial questions we need to address as authors, publishers, designers and readers:

1. How can ebooks take advantage of the design, multimedia or functional opportunities provided by web-enabled tablet devices like the iPad, Android tablet or Kindle Fire?
2. Does social interaction enhance or distract form the reader experience?
3. Who is the author of an ebook? The content creator, the editor/curator,the designer or the developer? If the user contributes content, comments or self-directed navigation, is the user an author too?
4. If you break the page page-turning metaphor, how to you cue the reader/user about how to navigate the book?
5. What is the ebook equivalent of printing on archival paper? How do you build an ebook to last?
6. What is the difference between an ebook and a website? What is essential to preserving “bookness”? Does it matter?

It was this last question that most troubled and preoccupied the people in the room. We are eager to pin down the definition of “ebook”, to draw the line between website and app and ebook, or to agree unambiguously to throw these terms out. Our anxiety about defining what makes a book speaks to the value our society places on the traditional codex, and the opportunities (as well as the dangers) that come from transcending it.

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If you had asked me on Friday whether I was in a committed relationship, I’d have said yes. I’ve been married to the same man for over 11 years, and we’ve been together for 14.  Together we have two children, a business, a house, and multiple bank accounts. Not to mention a shared personal website, a shared business website and shared Twitter and Facebook presences. Heck! Even our house has a website. Come to think of it, so does our Twitter relationship.

All in all, it’s hard to imagine how two people could be more thoroughly entangled than me and Rob Cottingham, in both oldfangled and newfangled ways.  Or so I thought, until a weekend of software tinkering exposed a potential fault line in our relationship: iCloud.

iCloud is Apple’s new offering for multi-device people and households, promising a new ease and reliability for online storage and synchronization. Among its many features is the newfound ability to set up automatic downloads in iTunes, so that any apps, music, video or books you purchase on one device will automatically download to all your other Apple gadgets, too. If you’re in the land of the free, you also have access to iTunes Match, which will scan the music in your iTunes library (even the stuff you ripped yourself, instead of buying from iTunes) and make it available for download to your other iDevices.

All this is mostly great news for Apple users, particularly those of us with more devices than limbs. But it also raises a tough question: what to do with your family’s multiple Apple IDs?

Apple will tell you that each of you should maintain a unique ID, but a lot of folks have long chosen otherwise. If your family shares a music library, or you simply want to spare yourself the cost of buying 5 separate copies of Angry Birds, you may use a single account as a way to avoid repeat purchases of the same items. (Let’s be clear: I’m not speaking to the legalities or ethics of combining accounts, just the breadth of practices.)

There’s an ease-of-use consideration, too. Apple users have long griped about the problem of managing multiple IDs. It’s a problem I’ve had to grapple with myself: I have a primary Apple ID I use for app purchases, a second I use for renting family movies (so they don’t land on our business account), a US iTunes account (for stuff that isn’t available in Canada), and an account I use for buying ebook apps on behalf of Emily Carr. Rob has a Canadian iTunes account of his own (though we’ve long shared my address when buying often-costly iPad apps) as well as a second vestigial US account.

It’s a bit unwieldy at the best of times, since buying music or apps often requires switching between accounts and re-logging into the iTunes store, which is less than fun on a teensy weeny virtual iPhone keyboard. And it turns the job of updating apps into a real chore: a nonstop series of logins and logouts, which you are destined to repeat on device after device.

But the arrival of iCloud, iTunes Match and automatic downloads makes it newly tempting to consolidate your iTunes purchases — indeed, your entire family’s purchases — onto a single account. Sadly, there’s no way to combine pre-existing accounts, but it makes lots of sense to choose a single account (likely, the account that has made the most music or app purchases to date) and make that the only iTunes account you use for future purchases. Consolidate all your music files into a single iTunes library, login with your new canonical account, and then activate iTunes Match: all the music you’ve ripped yourself, and all the music you’ve purchased from iTunes through that account, will henceforth belong to your one iTunes account. (Though watermarking of tracks will likely mean that iTunes music purchased under other accounts will not be accepted by iTunes match, you will still be able to manually transfer those tracks between devices.)

On both cost-management and efficiency grounds, it makes lots of sense for Rob and me to consolidate our future iTunes purchases under a single account — likely the one in my name, since we’ve been using it to buy almost all our iPad apps, and because I’ve probably made more iTunes music purchases over the years. While we’re at it, Rob could start using that same account for App Store purchases on his Macbook so we can share desktop apps.

The big advantage of combining accounts, besides saving money on purchases we’d otherwise make twice, is the ease of managing our iTunes libraries. The easiest way of  playing (and mixing) our latest respective iTunes purchases is by making them under a single iTunes account (even if we’re buying the tracks on our separate iPhones, iPads or MacBooks).  That way, I can set our home media server to automatically download any music that is purchased under our shared account, giving us each convenient  access to our complete music collection. (More on that setup coming soon.)

But automatic downloads have a Big Brotherish side, too. If Rob and I share an iCloud account and enable automatic downloads, my purchase of the latest Gaga remix will be instantly zapped to Rob. If Rob downloads a social media strategy book, its sudden appearance in my iBook library will make me wonder how I can possibly catch up with his reading. And if either of us downloads a new game in the middle of a workday — well, there will be some tough questions that night.

Marriage, kids and domain names are one thing, but sharing an instant window on one another’s music and app purchases? Are we really ready for that kind of intimacy? And if we are, what the hell are we going to talk about over dinner once “hey, guess which app I tried out today!” is off the table?

If you’re still not ready to go all the way with your sweetie, you can still hedge your bets while getting that iCloudy goodness. Some strategies for combining iTunes accounts without losing your individuality:

1. Change your AppleID. If you’ve decided to consolidate under a single account, but the account is linked to an email address that belongs to just one of you, you can make that account feel like yours (plural) rather than yours (singular). Login to the Apple ID site with your soon-to-be-main account by choosing “Manage my ID”, and then edit the email address that is associated with the account so that it points to an account that you can both access. If you already share a domain name, use an address like “us@ourdomain.com” as your new AppleID (make sure you can actually access email under that address); if not, create a new gmail or other free email account that you can both use. (If you were using that account to sync email or other data across devices, you may want to create a new AppleID with that old email address once you’re done, so you can continue using that address for non-iTunes data syncing).
2. Turn off automatic downloads.  If you want the cost savings of a joint account, but feel weird about getting an Apple mediated play-by-play of your sweetie’s purchases, you can make an agreement to turn off automatic downloads. (Coming soon to a wedding near you: “…and forsaking all others, and turning off automatic downloads…”) This doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing scenario: you might leave automatic downloads turned on for a single shared computer, but turned off on your respective iDevices.
3. Differentiate between content types. Maybe you want to share apps, but not music, books or videos. Maybe you want to share music, but not apps. Since automatic downloads let you choose which kinds of content each device will automatically download, you and your sweetie can decide to share an account for some purposes but not others. Share an account for apps, if that’s what you want to avoid double-purchasing, and then use separate IDs for your respective music purchases. Tell your devices to enable automatic downloads for music only, and the tracks you buy on your iPhone will magically show up on your computer — but only your computer, and not your sweetie’s.

Even if you’re sharing a single AppleID for all your iTunes purchases, you should still keep separate AppleIDs. With iCloud, your AppleID will be used for things like syncing your calendar or contacts, which you almost certainly want to keep disentangled from your spouse’s data. Knowing that you can set up separate Apple/iCloud IDs for those purposes should free you up to explore the romantic possibilities of sharing iTunes purchases.

And if even that doesn’t prepare you for making the ultimate commitment — well, you can always try renewing your vows.

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I want you to think really carefully about how happy you are right now, because as soon as I describe the killer features of the latest iteration of the Plex media center software, you’re going to be plunged into deep despair. Despair over the fact that you don’t have the new Plex installed on your computer right now, and may in fact have to wait until the end of the business day to get it.

That’s how I felt, anyhow, as soon as the Raised Eyebrow team started to regale me with its benefits during a recent meeting. I raced home, got the software up and running, and have been nothing short of dazzled.

I’ve been a huge Plex fan since David Drucker put me onto it a year ago, but the new version of Plex — and its flagship innovation, myPlex — take the app to a new level. With version 9.5 and the advent of myPlex, your media collection gets a home on the web. Here’s what that means in practice:

1. Anytime, anywhere access. If I forget to run a video transfer with Klexi, I have a tendency to skip my morning workout because I don’t have anything fresh to watch on my iPad because I . With myPlex, I can use my iPad’s 3G connection to stream anything on my home media server to my iPad, with no pre-planning. (I fear that if this is good news for me, it’s even better news for the people who make money on my data overages).
2. Watch it later queue. Login to your myPlex account from any computer, and you can add a browser bookmarklet that lets you store any web video for later viewing via Plex. Found an intriguing TED talk? Dying to watch that cute kitten video again and again? With one click, you can add them to your Plex queue, and you’ll find them waiting for you when you get home (or online) to catch up on your viewing.
3. Sharing! Maybe you never offer to help your friends move, or bring them chicken soup when they are sick in bed. You will nonetheless be counted as the best friend in the world when you give your pals access to your myPlex media server, and to your complete collection of all 4 seasons of Mad Men episodes. Whoever said food isn’t lot had it right: data is love.

If you have thus far resisted the siren song of Plex, it is time to get serious (and to get torrenting) with this how-to. A used Mac Mini sells for about $100 more than Apple TV, and with the glory that is Plex and myPlex, you are going to be delighted that you’ve rolled your own home media server.

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The capacity to operate a 747 is incompatible with social media smarts.

That's the conclusion one might draw from the social media fail of the week — a prize that should exist if it doesn't yet. Qantas Airways landed in the headlines for a tone-deaf Twitter contest that asked people to tweet their dreams for luxury air travel, including the hashtag #qantasluxury. The promotion was arguably in poor taste given the global economic downturn, but was also inargueably and acutely insensitive given the airline's current labor relations standoff with the unions representing its pilots, engineers, baggage handlers and caterers.

"#QantasLuxury is having a CEO who thinks a 71% pay rise is fair and workers are greedy for asking for 3%", read one not-atypical tweet.

Qantas joins two other airlines, United and Southwest, in the esteemed ranks of the most-covered social media failures. Southwest got its trial by fire after turfing filmmaker Kevin Smith from a flight on the grounds that he was oversized. Smith struck back via Twitter, resulting in widespread outrage, and ultimately, Southwest's apology via multiple online channels. United can put a tune to social media humiliation thanks to United Breaks Guitars, the viral YouTube music video that excoriated the company for its careless baggage handling.

And Qantas makes three. Why airlines? You can thank the volatile combination of limited legroom and unlimited connectivity. Aggravate a worn, cramped traveler — or anyone who has recently endured a flight in coach — and then hand them a smartphone: cranky tweets, videos and blog posts will follow.

We've all experienced the utter powerlessness of shutting ourselves into a tin can and trusting our 10th grade physics' teacher's explanation of how, exactly, airplanes are able to fly. Social media now returns just a little of that power.

But airlines are far from the only businesses to face a newly redrawn balance-of-power between company and customer, or between employer and employee. And it's these larger shifts that should make every industry take note of the Qantas gaffe.

Unhappy customers, unhappy contractors, unhappy employees: none of them needs to suffer in silence. Conversely, the delighted first-person reports of great service or work experience carry an authenticity that often outshines a company's own official marketing.

Many companies assess the impact of social media through that narrow lens: marketing. You use Facebook to project your desired brand, Twitter to target your desired customers, LinkedIn to target your next recruitment campaign. Hand your marketing team the keys to these social network vehicles, give them a few bucks to spruce up your website with some nice share links, and your job is done.

But if all you've got is a social media marketing strategy, then you don't have a social media strategy at all. We've been saying this for a while now but it's worth repeating: Social media turns branding into a true (if often accidental) collaboration between company and customer, in the way it enables constant and often bottom-up collaboration within organizations, and in the way it accelerates the pace of conversation and organizational change. Social media tends to flatten hierarchies, disempower gatekeepers, and give a voice to anyone who cares to speak about an issue, or a brand.

No wonder companies go wrong when they treat a game-changing redistribution of power as if it were merely a new way to push an ad slogan. In the case of Qantas, the collision came when a marketing gimmick collided with far-reaching challenges to the company's internal operations; when the Twitter channel was mistakenly perceived as purely external instead of (inevitably) internal as well.

That collision could just as easily have set customer relations against legal, or communications against finance, or p.r. against strategic planning. I've helped clients navigate each one of these fault lines, and in every case, the chasm (and crises) emerge from the combination of a social media team's desire to "own" this new channel (whether due to plain old-fashioned turf-guarding, or the perceived online incompetence of their colleagues) and the rest of the company's hesitation about doing something that is seen as marketing.

The only way to prevent your company from pulling a Qantas is to cross that entirely spurious and downright dangerous divide. Stop treating social media as marketing, and recognize it for what it is: an invitation to transform the entire way your company works, and possibly even the business you're in. It's an invitation you decline at your peril.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

This weekend I had one of my periodic orgies of blog maintenance. Now it  happens that 14 hours of software upgrades, plugin installs, widget testing and css tweaking is my idea of fun, so giving my blog a weekend of tech love is also a way of giving myself a weekend of delightful relaxation. But you don’t have to be a hard-core geek to see that giving your blog some occasional tech attention — in addition to your ongoing content creation — is part of keeping your site functional and useful.

A successful blog relies on an effective maintenance routine.  Here are 8 secrets to a smarter blog maintenance routine:

1. Set a maintenance budget. Dedicate a specific amount of time (or money — i.e. someone else’s time) to your blog’s tech maintenance each month. Figure on spending at least 1 hour on tech for every 10 hours you spend on content: if you spent 50 hours a month writing for your blog, replying to comments, and promoting your blog on Twitter, you should spend at least 5 hours on tech maintenance. If you love the geeking out, you can spend as much as 35% of your blogging time on the tech side: if  more than a third of the time you dedicate to your blog goes toward playing with the box it came in, you should probably shift your energy back into creating actual content.
2. Know your goals. As with everything, your blog tech work will be most constructive if you keep an eye on the prize. Are you trying to increase your traffic? Get people reading your best work? Land a certain kind of business opportunity? Whenever you make time for tech maintenance, start by thinking about those goals, and ask yourself which fixes or upgrades will do the most to move you towards your goal. Just as important, think about how you’ll know if you’re making progress towards those goals: Will you see more conversions? (Customer inquiries, RSS subscriptions, book sales.) More overall traffic or more new readers? More pages per visit?
3. Track your changes. If you know what you’re trying to accomplish, you’ll be better able to set priorities for each bout of upgrades. But how will you know what paid off? Your best bet is to keep track of all your changes in the same place you track your site metrics. I do this with the annotation feature on Google Analytics: whenever I fix or enhance some aspect of my blog, I make an annotation noting what I’ve changed. So if I’ve made an adjustment that I hope will increase my RSS subscriptions, or bring in more traffic to a section of the site, or lead to more page views per visit, I can later compare my traffic before and after the change, and see if my tweaking paid off.
4. Keep a queue. I have a separate notebook in Evernote for “Alex blog tech”, where I keep notes on plugins I’ve tested, code snippets I’ve implemented, and tweaks I want to undertake. Inside my tech notebook is a single document where I keep a (roughly prioritized) list of all my tech maintenance needs: the glitches I’ve noticed and intend to fix, the improvements I’d like to implement, the structural changes I want to consider. When I have a window available for tech work, I can take a quick look at my list and tackle the top-priority items.
5. Shoot your work. One way to help track your  changes is to take screenshots of your site’s before-and-after states. Use Skitch to take screenshots of your site before you start experimenting, and then take a shot afterwards that captures what you’ve accomplished. Store your before-and-after shots side-by-side in Evernote so that you can see what you’ve accomplished.
6. Follow your bliss. When I’m working on a client site, the top of their queue is the top of my queue. When I’m working on my own site, I get to follow my bliss: if the to-dos at the top of my task list are too boring to tackle, I work on whatever catches my fancy. There’s no point short-circuiting my tech maintenance urge by trying to force myself to undertake a routine job I can’t bear to plow through.
7. Multitask. One secret to undertaking those boring tasks (as well as the more enjoyable parts of tech maintenance) is multitasking. I do my tech maintenance while watching multi-taskable TV shows, and I often pair a fun tech job (like adding a new sidebar block) with a boring tech job (like backing up my database) so that I can get through the routine stuff and have some fun.
8. Blog your tweaks. When I implement an upgrade that requires me to customize a plugin, write or modify a code snippet, or combine off-the-shelf elements in a creative way, I try to turn that into a blog post. The more challenging the fix, the more effort I put into the blog post, because I figure I’m working out a solution that others will find useful too — like how to choose the right widget control plug-in, or how to create a category-specific teaser box. Some of these blog posts have become consistent traffic-drivers on my site, and they help ensure that when I next feel like hacking on my site, I remember what I’ve done!

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The advent of Facebook's new Timeline feature gives you, your colleagues, and your customers a whole new set of reasons to share your moment-by-moment news, photos, and reflections. Instead of a flat list of stories on your wall, and a glob of biographical data on your profile, the new Timeline creates a visually attractive story of your life dating all the way back to the date of your (reported) birth. If and when Timeline gets rolled out to Pages (as Facebook is already hinting), we will see brand presences change in much the same way: into dynamic, chronological, and visual stories.

But the business impact of Timeline will be felt long before it arrives on brand pages. As Timeline rolls out on individual profiles, anyone who has both a professional career and a Facebook account will have to rethink the relationship between them. Timeline is going to change the way Facebook interacts with our professional lives. Here are the changes to watch for — and the ways you can make them work for you instead of against you:

1. You'll know too much about your colleagues: If the folks in the C-suite have remained largely inscrutable until now, expect at least some of them to fall prey to Facebook's enhanced charms. Just as it's hard to resist mugging for a camera, it may be hard to resist Facebooking just to make your Timeline look prettier, more interesting, or simply less food-centric. That can easily lead to oversharing — which is especially problematic if the person sharing Too Much Information is the public face of your organization. And you don't have to be the CEO to worry. The Timeline lays so much out in a browsable form that you need to assume that it will be used as part of hiring processes, client assessments, and even just colleagues wanting to know the name of your new puppy.

You can take full advantage of Timeline without oversharing yourself. If you want to build a Facebook Timeline as a personal scrapbook or intimate communications channel, set up an "inner circle" friends list and make it your default level of privacy for all your posts, or even set your default privacy levels to "only me."

2. Your colleagues will know the "propersonal" you: If you were holding onto the idea that Facebook could be your personal haven while you build your professional profile on LinkedIn, it's time to let that fantasy go. The Timeline offers an opportunity for you to tell the story of your career in a uniquely compelling way, so you need to consciously tackle the challenge of building a propersonal profile that will position you appropriately in the eyes of employers, clients, or colleagues.

To create a strong propersonal profile, you have to start by burying any inappropriate content. Use the new privacy setting called "limit the audience for past posts," so that your entire history becomes invisible to everyone except a select group of friends. Then, go back through the timeline and select a representative, but flattering range of posts and photos that you will share publicly. Complete your career information and flesh out any gaps with additional posts or photos (which you can backdate). Review your new Timeline and make sure the story it tells is consistent with the chronology in your résumé, and more importantly, with the way you present yourself in other professional contexts.

3. You'll know more about yourself: Even those of us who use Facebook for professional purposes rarely look back further than the past few weeks' worth of updates and comments. Facebook Insights may tell you the longer-term story in analytics, but that is different from re-reading the cringe-worthy, tone-deaf update you wrote on your first wall post back in 2007. Now that Timeline encourages us to turn back the clock, many of us will get a fresh perspective on how we present ourselves to our colleagues and the world — and we may not like what we see.

That perspective could be as valuable as a year's worth of executive coaching — if you seize the opportunity to take a hard look at where you spend your time and attention. Before you check out your Facebook Timeline, jot down the professional highs and lows of your past few years. Now look at your Facebook Timeline and compare: Did your big work breakthroughs come when you were barely updating (and perhaps a bit more focused on your job)? Or did your flurries of online activity correlate with the times when you felt especially alive and attuned to the pulse of your organization? You may gain surprising insights into the relationship between your social media life, your professional success, and your personal satisfaction.

Facebook's positioning of Timeline as a kind of digital scrapbook suggests that Timeline will primarily be used as a way to look back on one's own life. Every experience we've had with social media to date — including Facebook itself — suggests the opposite. Each new way of sharing or curating our life experiences becomes another opportunity for self-narration, and we spend as much time investigating, critiquing, and engaging with other people's presences as we do in reviewing our own. With the advent of Timeline, that balance needs to shift — at least until you're confident that the story you're telling is a story you can live with.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

Today I noticed an irony on the SIM Centre website: our Twitter sidebar widget, which does a lovely job of displaying tweets from all those who are connected to the SIM Centre, wasn’t showing tweets from the SIM Centre itself. I realized that was because our sidebar was fed by a Twitter list called @Simcentre/sim-people, which didn’t include @SimCentre. Easy enough to fix — right?

When viewing someone else's Twitter profile you can click an icon to get the "add to list" option.

Actually, it’s not so obvious how you go about adding yourself to your own Twitter list, even though there are lots of reasons to do so. (If you’re creating a list of influencers in your field, for instance, don’t you want to include yourself?) If you look at your own profile page, you won’t be able to access the drop-down menu that gives the “add to list” option when you’re looking at someone else’s profile. And the alternatives that Google turned up were either too hardcore (do I really need to learn Ruby in order to solve this problem?) or too dated (this methodology relies on switching to “old Twitter”, which is no longer an option).

Happily, I came up with a quick and easy workaround myself. Using HootSuite, it’s easy to add yourself to your own Twitter list. All you have to do is open your own profile within HootSuite (just click on your username in a tweet that mentions you, as per #1 in the screenshot below), click “add to list” (#2) and then select the list you want to include yourself on (#3).

If you aren’t already using a Twitter client, this is yet another reason to start (here’s how). And if you aren’t yet using Twitter lists — well, that is going to rock your world too.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online

This post originally appeared on simcentre.ca.

We are currently working with Affinity Bridge on a collaborative research project that has us deeply involved in the process of developing a website on the Drupal content management system (CMS) — the same CMS that the SIM Centre site is built in. The research project involves a large team of collaborators who are mostly new to Drupal and to web development in general, but they have bravely plunged into the nitty gritty of constructing a very detailed form that will ask users to submit content to their site in a highly structured format.

That work necessarily involves some difficult decisions about what kinds of question structures and fields will be used in different parts of the form. Since Drupal uses its own technical language to describe these different field types, I constructed a visual glossary of the different field types our team will be choosing between. This guide is intended to help them decide which field type to use for each question; we’re sharing it here so that others can use this glossary in their own work.

It’s worth noting that many of these element types allow you to configure the question to accept either one answer or multiple answers — in principle, there is no reason that you can’t limit people to selecting a single checkbox. But when you are designing a form, one way you can use different types of form elements is to signal the user: perhaps using a drop down list for items that require the user to make a single selection, and using checkboxes to signal the possibility of selecting multiple options.

1. Text field:

This is just a basic, single-line field that lets the user enter whatever she wants.



2. Text area:

If you want to offer your user a little more elbow room, you can create a text area. By setting the height of the field, and giving the user more or less room to write in, you’re sending a signal about how much detail you expect the user to provide.



3. Select list:

In its closed state, a select list (what you probably think of as a “drop down menu”) is nice and compact:



Once the user clicks on it, she can see all the options in the list, and select one:



 

4. Checkboxes/radio buttons:
   Your basic checklist, typically set to allow multiple selection, but can be restricted to allow single selection only.



5. Node reference:

This is a bit fancy: a field that is used to create a relationship between the content item you are creating, and another content item on the site, of another content type. So for example you can have a content type called “project” (as we do on the SIM site), and when you write a blog post you see a node reference field called “Related to project” that lets you say, hey there Drupal, this blog post is related to that project over there. This blog post node is referencing that project node…thus, “node reference”. Whoa.



Note that a node reference field can accept multiple answers. In this case, the user can click a button to add another row (or two) and establish references to multiple nodes.



6. Media file selector: If you want the user to upload a file (like an image or a document) you provide them with a media file selector.
   
7. Autocomplete text field:
   
   Sometimes you want to give the user more flexibility than a narrow list of checkboxes, but you want to gently encourage them to phrase their answer in a way that is similar to previous answers, or which chooses from a prexisting (but very long) list of options. An autocomplete text field suggests relevant options as soon as the user starts typing:

 



8. Explanatory text:

Just about any type of form element can include explanatory text, typically just underneath or above the entry field or options list.



9. Tabs:

If you’ve got a really huge content creation form, it can be helpful to break the field into sub tabs, as per this example:

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the different form elements you can include in a Drupal node creation form, but it covers the major bases. Thinking carefully about which kinds of form elements to use for which purposes, limiting the overall variety of element types in your forms, and using different types consistently, all help make the content creation process easier and more intuitive for your user.

Read more about better living with social media by visiting Love your life online