Latest publications
Read my latest stories for The Wall Street Journal, Passcode, The Harvard Business Review, JSTOR Daily and more.
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 The very structures that were once a source of organizational efficiencies are not only superceded by technologies that make those efficiences irrelevant;...
Wanted: LadyJoiners
My life is basically a series of social network and web app sign-ups, with a few friends, colleagues and tasks stuffed into the interstitial moments. So the arrival this week of Path -- what some people might consider YAFSN (Yet Another F*ing Social Network) -- was my...
Tweeting the daily life of our future-ancient world
Bill Caraher's post on Historical Figures in Social Media drew my attention to a bevvy of ancient worlders now tweeting away: iTweetus (a Roman soldier), iHerodotus (Greek historian), and Plutarch (ditto). I love the mashup of old-nerd-meets-new-nerd, which reminds me...
If we didn’t have computers…
LOVE Social Media but If we didn't have computers-wouldn't need #SocialMediab/c we wouldn't have stopped being social in the 1st place. When I first shared this interesting tweet from online pal Brenda Johima, it was with some reservations. After mulling it over for a...