Making art from a lifetime of data

This weekend Little Sweetie asked whether she can have my computer when I die. I had to explain that she is unlikely to want it: by the time I die, my current computer will be useless. “But how about this,” I suggested instead. “When I die, you can...

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.

10 ways academics can use Twitter

M.H. Beals has a terrific overview of Social Media for Researchers and Academics, based on a one-way workshop held at the Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services in Edinburgh. Her post provides a great roadmap of the different ways academics can use...

The social media obituary

His real break came as a stuntman in the Hollywood movie “On the Beach,” about survivors of a nuclear war, which was filmed in Melbourne, his hometown, in 1959. It starred Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire. “He watched Gregory Peck do 27 takes and thought, ‘A...

Who would you be without the Internet?

Without the internet I wouldn’t be able to write. In the realms of pre-internet media, one either comes to the publisher/editor/gatekeeper with mad skills and gets published, or he gets a generic pink slip with a one-line apology. You can’t use this system...

5 reasons to blog like it’s the last night of the world

I worry a lot about the world ending. My scenarios usually involve some kind of catastrophic climate change, pandemic virus or global economic meltdown followed by civil collapse. This intermittent tendency to fret over various doomsday is something I try to deprive...

140-character lessons in how to live your real life online

Your online relationships, conversations and creativity are as real as anything you do offline. That’s the message I delivered last weekend at Northern Voice, Canada’s leading blogging conference. My talk, titled Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life,...

5 ebook features that tap the power of social note-taking

Peter Meyers has a useful blog post on 3 ways to improve ebook note taking over at O’Reilly Radar. As he points out in his post, note-taking is one of the ways in which print books still kick the ass of digital books, since they allow you to “[j]ot notes...