Another view of the Internet in 1971

Rob Cottingham, who was actually around in 1971, remembers the early Internet a little differently. He’s annotated the Computer History Museum’s 1971 ARPAnet map, which I included in my kick-off on my 40 years of looking back on the Internet: Thanks, Rob,...

Why I’m happy to pay for the New York Times

My latest blog post for the Harvard Business Review is a celebration of the New York Times’ new paywall. OK, maybe not a celebration of the paywall itself, but a celebration of the decision to alpha test the paywall on Canadian readers. This news gave me the...

Twitter makes jet lag even more painful

It was 3 in the afternoon, but it could have been 3 in the morning to judge from the exhausted faces of a roomful of entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs constitute the up-and-coming generation of businesses in Cluj, Romania, and I had just spent the day talking them...

How many e-mail clients do you need?

Jodie Tonita is a lovely person. She is passionate, funny, kind to children and small animals, and an amazing hula-hooper. Unfortunately she was sent by our alien overlords to ensure I never do my actual work. As evidence, check out this message Jodie left on my...

For Lent, I’ve decided to give up reading about digital fasts

Gosh, how I love digital fasts. And Lent 2011 has given us a bumper crop of digital fasters who now find 40 days without Facebook (or Twitter) more profound and painful than a month without booze, TV or smokes. Well, if they can live without us for 40 days (sniff!)...

10 things to do while waiting for your domain name to propagate

Most of the time the Internet does a very good job of creating the illusion that everything can now be instantaneous. You’re on the phone with a colleague on the other side of the world, editing a Google Doc together, and the second you see that typo appear she...

5 steps to create your social media toolkit

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Social media in 3 hours a week

Building a social media presence around a specific area of expertise is your best way to connect with a network and audience that cares about your work, and gets real value from your online contributions. This blog post walks you through the 5 steps that will get you up and running with three tools that will let you build and maintain a credible online presence as an expert: a Wordpress blog, a Google Reader account and a Twitter presence managed through HootSuite.