Latest publications
Read my latest stories for The Wall Street Journal, Passcode, The Harvard Business Review, JSTOR Daily and more.

“Since I started blogging…”
I overhear more and more conversations about how people cope with their lives online. We talk about our day-to-day strategies for coping with e-mail overload. We gossip about our friends' Facebook profiles and worry about whether we should be joining the latest social...

Can documentation save the world?
Yesterday I wrapped up my 2010 Home Media Overhaul and Documentation Festival with a blog post on why to watch TV. But I left another unanswered question on the table: why document your TV setup? Documentation is somewhere between a neurosis and a calling for me. As...

Why on earth would you want to watch TV?

How to automatically organize your Mac’s bittorrents with Plex, Transmission, Automatic and Hazel

Ingredients for a Mac home media center (or two)

Welcome to the 2010 Home Media Center Overhaul and Documentation Festival

How Social Media Can Sustain Your Friendships (from Oprah.com)
This blog post originally appeared on Oprah.com. "I'm writing because I'm an old friend of Angel J.," the e-mail said. "I see from your site that you know her; can you put us in touch?" It wasn't the first time we'd served as a point of reintroduction. Our wedding...

Warning: Common sense on Twitter
It was bound to happen sooner or later: someone has actually offered some actually human level, common sense about RTs. You know RTs: "retweets", the Twitter equivalent of blowing a kiss, or maybe it's more like picking the lice out of someone's hair and eating it....

Where are you at?
I have become so habituated to referring to people in my tweets as @robcottingham, @morganbrayton, @kk etc. that I'm starting to think of "at" as part of my friends' names. You know, the way Spanish names often include "de la" or Hebrew names include a "Ben" this or...

The next frontier in hierarchy-busting with social media
Lots of organizations suffer from the pain of incorporating social media into command-and-control structures. The very structures that were once a source of organizational efficiencies are not only superceded by technologies that make those efficiences irrelevant;...