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...

On the limitations of dotcom culture

Graham Hatch’s blog post about privacy issues at Google and Facebook includes some interesting musings on the dotcom world: I’ve long had a sense that there is an assumption in the dotcom world which deems that because they are inventing the future they don’t...

10 tips on how to make a great iPad app (live blog)

I’m live blogging the news app demonstrations at Hacks/Hackers Unite, where we are seeing a variety of interesting applications for news gathering and delivery. Just as interesting, we’re hearing the panel of judges reflect on what makes a compelling app,...

Demo apps for iPad news (live blog)

I’m at Hacks Hackers Unite, where a group of eighty journalists (“hacks”) and software developers (“hackers”) have spent the weekend building demo apps that show the possibilities for news gathering and delivery on the iPad. You...

My latest for Oprah.com: Is an iPad Right for Your Family?

“I got an iPad!” my daughter announces to a friend. “No honey, I got an iPad,” I remind her. The argument over who the iPad belongs to is just one of the many wrinkles in our new life as The iPad Family. Self-serve movie watching, GodFinger...

The problem with social media “reputation management”

If you’ve been tracking the rise of social media services, you may have noticed how many are pitched as reputation management. “Reputation” is really just an efficient way of saying “what other people think about you”. And if you look at...

The return of “I don’t know”

Fifteen years ago, “I don’t know” was a regular part of our vocabulary. And then it all changed. I remember the night, shortly after I got my first high-speed connection, when a group of my friends were over and got into a conversation about Clifford...

Missing out on Twitter

I made a number of confessions in my Northern Voice talk on Coping with Social Media, and in Gillian Shaw’s related story for the Vancouver Sun. But the one that was met with the most surprise — and in a couple of cases, horror — was the revelation...

Still social after all these years

Ron Burnett has an interesting blog post on whether Twitter (and other social media) are really social. Ron is the President of Emily Carr University, where I run the Social + Interactive Media Centre. The crux of his argument is that Twitter is not as conversational...