Latest publications

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 of...

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, jumped off from...

The dangers of relying on Facebook and Twitter authentication

If you're not going to talk about me to your friends, I don't want to know you. That's the message that your web site is sending if you only accept registrations from Facebook and Twitter users. You can see what I'm talking about at Pinterest, a social network for...

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 anywhere you...

5 ways technology can reduce the family stress of business travel

When you’ve got kids, business travel is especially stressful. It’s hard for them to have mum or dad away, and it’s hard for you to miss them. Here are 5 ways that technology can help.

This 40th birthday brought to you by Apple

What's the right way for a geek to celebrate the big 40? In my case, as many of you now know, the answer was to spend the previous 40 days blogging. That met my need for ritual, but what about the day itself? I wanted to do something memorable, something that would...

How to quickly remove unwanted tracks from your iTunes smart playlists

I like to create new iTunes playlists for lots of different purposes: for parties, workouts, for a regular day of work. In principle, the smart playlists feature works great for this -- just select a couple of criteria like "added in the past 100 days" and "BPM [beats...