Choosing a widget control plugin for WordPress

For the past few months I have used the Widget Context plugin on my WordPress blog in order to control where widgets show up on my site. Everything you see in the two right-hand columns of my site is widget-based, as are the 3 columns that display teasers for featured...

The meaning of engagement

A great description of meaningful engagement from Chris Jones: True engagement requires more time and energy and active listening skills, but the resulting flow of information brings rich rewards. Insights begin to accumulate and multiply. Ideas get validated and...

Is social media just for married people?

Think Social is a blog from the Paley Center for Media that focuses on the public benefits of social media. It’s an incredible blog and one that you must follow if you are looking for thoughtful reflection on both the social and political potential of social...

Tips for avoiding social media compulsion

Chris Brogan’s blog post, Your Blog is Not Your Job, contains some great tips on how keep blogging and social media from overtaking your primary work and focus. These include: Use an egg timer. If you’re going to venture out onto Twitter, time it. Keep a sticky...

Can a mobile phone make you sane instead of crazy?

Aaron Bellve of Spit, Bristle and Fury (killer blog title, BTW!) has a thoughtful post about an NPR story on the dawn of therapy by mobile phone. Cell phones, rather than augmenting our human encounters, are replacing them and in something as complex, sensitive and...

Now on Oprah.com: Life passages online, plus an empty nest bonus

My latest blog post for Oprah.com talks about ways to get support during life passages. Whether you’re celebrating milestones like the birth of a baby, a marriage or a birthday, or confronting challenges like death or illness, I’ve got some pointers on how the web can help. This post looks at one passage in particular: your newly empty nest.

The virtues of losing touch

Google Buzz got slammed for prepopulating its users’ friends lists based on their most frequent email correspondents. Facebook has taken heat for privacy settings that default to a high level of sharing. So what’s the big deal about sharing stuff with...

5 solutions to hyperthinking and hypertasking

While working my way through the consultation paper on Canada’s Digital Advantage, I found myself: investigating the best way to copy and paste text from a PDF to Evernote, leading to an open browser window with a series of tabs about various options for...