Publications
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Help your kids learn with Etsy and the Maker Faire
Tonight Little Sweetie was thrilled to learn that she has been accepted into the Vancouver Maker Faire, a DIY festival we attended last year. She loved it, and immediately wanted to run her own booth, based on her Etsy store, 2 Dots 1 Symbol, which sells emoticon...
Tx is short for f*** you, not thank you
Today's practice: Write your thank yous instead of abbreviating them. Last night, I caught myself on the verge of a profound etiquette violation. A colleague had replied quickly and helpfully to an email I had sent, asking for information, and my breezy reply ended...
Meet Your Pinterest Customer
Pinterest is the social media darling of the month, growing madly and reported to be driving more traffic to third-party…
Stop blaming yourself for your kids’ challenges
Today's practice: Focus on healing your kids, not on figuring out how you've damaged them. In the past year a number of very important and dear people in our lives have started or grown their families in a way not everybody knows is possible: by adopting kids who have...
5 essential steps to online security
Today's practice: Tighten your online security. You'd think that writing a dissertation about political computer hacking would make a girl sensitive to the challenges of online security. And it has, up to a point. But I recently decided to up my level of tech...
Make a family tech schedule
Today's practice: Make a family tech schedule. We recently took the bold, terrifying step of pulling all the gaming consoles (Xbox, Playstation and Wii) out of our home media center, and sending them on a vacation to the closet. We took this measure in response to our...
What experience do you want to have online?
Today's practice: Think about the social media experience you want to have, not the brand you want to build. About three years ago, in a conversation that ultimately led to me shifting gears and joining Emily Carr, the very wise Morgan Brayton passed along a pivotal...
From the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Wrap: Twitter for CEOs (audio)
Why and how should CEOs use Twitter? That was the focus of my conversation with Michael Castner yesterday, on the Wall Street Journal's Daily Wrap. You can listen to that interview below, or read the Wall Street Journal story we were riffing off: Better Leadership...
How to crowdsource your Facebook Timeline
If you struggle to keep your Facebook Timeline dynamic and engaging, without creating what is simply a mirror of your Facebook or LinkedIn presence, the solution may not lie with you, but with your friends. For the past few months, I've been running a private...
The future of online nostalgia
Sometimes the only thing that makes the glitchiness of the Internet tolerable is the expectation that one day we will laugh nostalgically about the old days. Remember how we used to have iPads, but they couldn't see anything in Flash? Oh yeah -- FLASH!!! LOL Remember...
The Harvard Business Review
Help your kids learn with Etsy and the Maker Faire
Tonight Little Sweetie was thrilled to learn that she has been accepted into the Vancouver Maker Faire, a DIY festival we attended last year. She loved it, and immediately wanted to run her own booth, based on her Etsy store, 2 Dots 1 Symbol, which sells emoticon...
Tx is short for f*** you, not thank you
Today's practice: Write your thank yous instead of abbreviating them. Last night, I caught myself on the verge of a profound etiquette violation. A colleague had replied quickly and helpfully to an email I had sent, asking for information, and my breezy reply ended...
Meet Your Pinterest Customer
Pinterest is the social media darling of the month, growing madly and reported to be driving more traffic to third-party…
Stop blaming yourself for your kids’ challenges
Today's practice: Focus on healing your kids, not on figuring out how you've damaged them. In the past year a number of very important and dear people in our lives have started or grown their families in a way not everybody knows is possible: by adopting kids who have...
5 essential steps to online security
Today's practice: Tighten your online security. You'd think that writing a dissertation about political computer hacking would make a girl sensitive to the challenges of online security. And it has, up to a point. But I recently decided to up my level of tech...
Make a family tech schedule
Today's practice: Make a family tech schedule. We recently took the bold, terrifying step of pulling all the gaming consoles (Xbox, Playstation and Wii) out of our home media center, and sending them on a vacation to the closet. We took this measure in response to our...
What experience do you want to have online?
Today's practice: Think about the social media experience you want to have, not the brand you want to build. About three years ago, in a conversation that ultimately led to me shifting gears and joining Emily Carr, the very wise Morgan Brayton passed along a pivotal...
From the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Wrap: Twitter for CEOs (audio)
Why and how should CEOs use Twitter? That was the focus of my conversation with Michael Castner yesterday, on the Wall Street Journal's Daily Wrap. You can listen to that interview below, or read the Wall Street Journal story we were riffing off: Better Leadership...
How to crowdsource your Facebook Timeline
If you struggle to keep your Facebook Timeline dynamic and engaging, without creating what is simply a mirror of your Facebook or LinkedIn presence, the solution may not lie with you, but with your friends. For the past few months, I've been running a private...
The future of online nostalgia
Sometimes the only thing that makes the glitchiness of the Internet tolerable is the expectation that one day we will laugh nostalgically about the old days. Remember how we used to have iPads, but they couldn't see anything in Flash? Oh yeah -- FLASH!!! LOL Remember...
OneZero
Saying goodbye to pen and paper
My latest blog post for Harvard Business Review has provoked a strong reaction to the idea of saying goodbye to the paper notebook. Here's my own take on the experience of giving up on paper and pen. 4.00 22.95 Alexandra Samuel Those 25 characters, comprising a tip, a...
13 New Year’s resolutions for a better life online
As you start the new year with the best intentions for your personal, professional and emotional development, don't forget to put your tech life on the list. Here are 13 resolutions to choose from, depending on your own tech challenges and commitments; you'll know...
Please help me launch my new Harvard Business ebook, Work Smarter with Evernote
On December 18th, Harvard Business Review Press will release my first ebook: Work Smarter with Evernote. This short guide shows how Evernote can help you become more focused and effective on the job—and get ahead in your career. I'd like to ask for your help: please...
How to talk about tragedy online
Time out, people. In the past 24 hours we have been have been inspired, informed, comforted and mobilized by the unfolding conversation on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. But it's clear that we have also had moments of feeling attached, horrified, angered and shamed....
The trouble with resilience
Today's shooting is one of those moments when time, and our hearts, break. How can we go on? How will life ever feel the same? What should shock us is not only the moment of tragedy, but how quickly tragedy fades. I remember with icy-hot clarity the morning of 9/11,...
Using the Internet to find empathy in solitude
Twitter is outsourced schizophrenia. I have a couple hundred voices I have consensually agreed to allow residence inside my brain. So writes Adam Brault in a very thoughtful blog post, I quit Twitter for a month and it completely changed my thinking about mostly...
ShopStyle: Diary of an online shopping addiction
Update: If you visit shopstyle.com from outside the U.S, you may be taken to an international site -- which in the case of the Canadian site has far fewer results. To access the U,S. site, visit this URL (and bookmark it). You'll be taken to the. women's clothes...
2×2: Filtering your Facebook friends
How do you decide to view or relate to different friends on Facebook? As with all things in life, this can be described by a 2x2 matrix: Love this person Not so much Entertaining Facebooker Add to my "A1 pals" list, which is the news feed I look at most of the time...
JSTOR DAILY
Saying goodbye to pen and paper
My latest blog post for Harvard Business Review has provoked a strong reaction to the idea of saying goodbye to the paper notebook. Here's my own take on the experience of giving up on paper and pen. 4.00 22.95 Alexandra Samuel Those 25 characters, comprising a tip, a...
13 New Year’s resolutions for a better life online
As you start the new year with the best intentions for your personal, professional and emotional development, don't forget to put your tech life on the list. Here are 13 resolutions to choose from, depending on your own tech challenges and commitments; you'll know...
Please help me launch my new Harvard Business ebook, Work Smarter with Evernote
On December 18th, Harvard Business Review Press will release my first ebook: Work Smarter with Evernote. This short guide shows how Evernote can help you become more focused and effective on the job—and get ahead in your career. I'd like to ask for your help: please...
How to talk about tragedy online
Time out, people. In the past 24 hours we have been have been inspired, informed, comforted and mobilized by the unfolding conversation on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. But it's clear that we have also had moments of feeling attached, horrified, angered and shamed....
The trouble with resilience
Today's shooting is one of those moments when time, and our hearts, break. How can we go on? How will life ever feel the same? What should shock us is not only the moment of tragedy, but how quickly tragedy fades. I remember with icy-hot clarity the morning of 9/11,...
Using the Internet to find empathy in solitude
Twitter is outsourced schizophrenia. I have a couple hundred voices I have consensually agreed to allow residence inside my brain. So writes Adam Brault in a very thoughtful blog post, I quit Twitter for a month and it completely changed my thinking about mostly...
ShopStyle: Diary of an online shopping addiction
Update: If you visit shopstyle.com from outside the U.S, you may be taken to an international site -- which in the case of the Canadian site has far fewer results. To access the U,S. site, visit this URL (and bookmark it). You'll be taken to the. women's clothes...
2×2: Filtering your Facebook friends
How do you decide to view or relate to different friends on Facebook? As with all things in life, this can be described by a 2x2 matrix: Love this person Not so much Entertaining Facebooker Add to my "A1 pals" list, which is the news feed I look at most of the time...
THE VERGE
My pre-Trump dystopian anxieties may be getting the better of me
How Email destroyed the world
I spent the last day of Western Civilization addressing the very phenomenon that caused our collective downfall: email. On November 8th—Election Day—I spent six hours in a rented studio in Manhattan, taping a new class for Skillshare. Email Productivity: Work Smarter...
Resistance is futile: A success story
Sometimes success looks like a little boy sobbing his eyes out. This success story begins yesterday morning, when Peanut showed up at school in his Halloween costume: a Borg cube. For those of you who aren’t Star Trek fans, let me explain that the Borg are a race of...
In The Orange Dot: Is my kid addicted to tech or am I just old?
Even adults can get obsessed with their social media analytics. So what do you do when your kids start measuring their every online move.