Publications
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
5 online calendars your family can’t live without
If you think online calendaring is for scheduling business meetings, appointments and the occasional lunch date, you're missing out. Online calendars can also be a great way to bring order to the chaos of family life -- if you create or subscribe to the essential...
Focus on your priorities with O.M.F.T.
Last night I was delighted to participate in a panel hosted by Canadian Women in Communications, speaking alongside Rebecca Bollwitt (aka Miss 604) and Gillian Shaw of the Vancouver Sun. CWC President Stephanie MacKendrick did a terrific job of eliciting our...
For Harvard Business book: How do you reward yourself at work?
How do you reward or motivate yourself to complete a task or project? I'm tackling this question in one of my pieces for a forthcoming edition of Harvard Business Review's Getting the Right Work Done. And I'd love your help. Maybe you're the kind of person who takes a...
Does social media have to make you happy?
At Simply Zesty, Lauren Fisher asks a provocative question: why happiness? Her point is that social media is frequently challenged for its (purportedly) negative impact on happiness: What’s also strange, is the idea that social media in some way owes us happiness,...
How to find a great domain name (or Twitter handle)
For the National Geographic Assignment Blog: The Great Online Migration
In any migration, there are those who go ahead to settle the wilds, and those who linger to ensure that nothing gets left behind. While each of us now makes a different choice about how much of our lives to live online, those differences should not be turned into an...
Web Fuelled Business masters the physical logistics of going virtual
The entrepreneurs who participated in the Web Fuelled Business program this week are pushing past the limits of physical location. They are bricks-and-mortar shops that are using the web to attract local customers who would never find them on the street; they are...
Should my blog be on my web site or a separate site?
Tailor your voice to each place you use social media
"I make leather armour." That's a sentence I never expected to hear in this lifetime. In fact, until about 4:30 yesterday afternoon, I didn't know what leather armour was. I din't know that leather armour existed. Leather armor, it turns out, is what you wear if you...
How to stop wasting time on technology challenges
Today's practice: The next time you dive into a time-consuming tech challenge, stop to ask: what would a normal person do? Saturday morning I woke up at 4 a.m. in preparation for my flight to London -- and accompanying time zone readjustment -- later that day. I...
The Harvard Business Review
5 online calendars your family can’t live without
If you think online calendaring is for scheduling business meetings, appointments and the occasional lunch date, you're missing out. Online calendars can also be a great way to bring order to the chaos of family life -- if you create or subscribe to the essential...
Focus on your priorities with O.M.F.T.
Last night I was delighted to participate in a panel hosted by Canadian Women in Communications, speaking alongside Rebecca Bollwitt (aka Miss 604) and Gillian Shaw of the Vancouver Sun. CWC President Stephanie MacKendrick did a terrific job of eliciting our...
For Harvard Business book: How do you reward yourself at work?
How do you reward or motivate yourself to complete a task or project? I'm tackling this question in one of my pieces for a forthcoming edition of Harvard Business Review's Getting the Right Work Done. And I'd love your help. Maybe you're the kind of person who takes a...
Does social media have to make you happy?
At Simply Zesty, Lauren Fisher asks a provocative question: why happiness? Her point is that social media is frequently challenged for its (purportedly) negative impact on happiness: What’s also strange, is the idea that social media in some way owes us happiness,...
How to find a great domain name (or Twitter handle)
For the National Geographic Assignment Blog: The Great Online Migration
In any migration, there are those who go ahead to settle the wilds, and those who linger to ensure that nothing gets left behind. While each of us now makes a different choice about how much of our lives to live online, those differences should not be turned into an...
Web Fuelled Business masters the physical logistics of going virtual
The entrepreneurs who participated in the Web Fuelled Business program this week are pushing past the limits of physical location. They are bricks-and-mortar shops that are using the web to attract local customers who would never find them on the street; they are...
Should my blog be on my web site or a separate site?
Tailor your voice to each place you use social media
"I make leather armour." That's a sentence I never expected to hear in this lifetime. In fact, until about 4:30 yesterday afternoon, I didn't know what leather armour was. I din't know that leather armour existed. Leather armor, it turns out, is what you wear if you...
How to stop wasting time on technology challenges
Today's practice: The next time you dive into a time-consuming tech challenge, stop to ask: what would a normal person do? Saturday morning I woke up at 4 a.m. in preparation for my flight to London -- and accompanying time zone readjustment -- later that day. I...
OneZero
Take a one-way road trip with Ridejoy
Ridejoy is a social network that helps you share rides. Here’s how we used it to take a fantastic one-way road trip.
Better vacations with social media
Social media services made our blissful vacation possible. This series will give you tips on using Yelp, Ridejoy, Evernote and other tools to enhance your future travel.
For a magazine story: seeking business leaders suffering from tech pain
I'm writing a story for a leading business travel magazine and I'm looking for interview subjects. Do you have a tech pain point -- whether it's email overload, scheduling, or just finding a way to unplug -- that I can help you solve? If you are the CEO of a...
8 hot ways Evernote can spice up your sex life
"For doing your taxes". "For shopping and to-do lists". "For home improvement projects". These are three of the very practical suggestions the Evernote blog has to offer as part of their 8 great ways couples can use Evernote shared notebooks blog post, which I just...
Magic browser plugin for retroactive logins across open tabs
App: Running late
Imagining an app that lets your friends or colleagues know when you’re running late.
Genius grants for inspired groups of collaborators
It would be fantastic if some creative foundation endowed a fellowship program that identified talent clusters: groups of tightly collaborative peers, likely in a single place,but possibly applicable to groups that have very tight, web-supported distance collaboration
Wouldn’t it be awesome if we had this site or hashtag?
Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were a site that invited people to complete the sentence, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if….” ?
JSTOR DAILY
Take a one-way road trip with Ridejoy
Ridejoy is a social network that helps you share rides. Here’s how we used it to take a fantastic one-way road trip.
Better vacations with social media
Social media services made our blissful vacation possible. This series will give you tips on using Yelp, Ridejoy, Evernote and other tools to enhance your future travel.
For a magazine story: seeking business leaders suffering from tech pain
I'm writing a story for a leading business travel magazine and I'm looking for interview subjects. Do you have a tech pain point -- whether it's email overload, scheduling, or just finding a way to unplug -- that I can help you solve? If you are the CEO of a...
8 hot ways Evernote can spice up your sex life
"For doing your taxes". "For shopping and to-do lists". "For home improvement projects". These are three of the very practical suggestions the Evernote blog has to offer as part of their 8 great ways couples can use Evernote shared notebooks blog post, which I just...
Magic browser plugin for retroactive logins across open tabs
App: Running late
Imagining an app that lets your friends or colleagues know when you’re running late.
Genius grants for inspired groups of collaborators
It would be fantastic if some creative foundation endowed a fellowship program that identified talent clusters: groups of tightly collaborative peers, likely in a single place,but possibly applicable to groups that have very tight, web-supported distance collaboration
Wouldn’t it be awesome if we had this site or hashtag?
Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were a site that invited people to complete the sentence, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if….” ?
THE VERGE
Rock Bottom
When we finally pulled Peanut out of public school at the end of Grade 2, I thought we’d reached rock bottom. We had a 7-year-old with a basket of diagnoses and labels: anxiety, ADHD, sensory processing issues, tic disorder, fine motor lags and a 99.99th percentile...
Telling tales about my autistic son
Introducing The Peanut Diaries: dedicated to sharing the experience of raising our gifted, autistic son.
Now on JSTOR: A Novel Defense of the Internet
Like the Internet, the novel was once viewed as a colossal waste of time. My post for JSTOR Daily looks at how fiction became respectable — and how the Internet can, too.
How people feel about sharing a name online
Thanks to the Internet, more and more of us have digital doubles: people who share our name, and may often be confused with us. I try to keep track of all the other people out there named "Alexandra Samuel", and yet I also feel vaguely uncomfortable with the fact that...