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Catch up on Alex’s latest publications and appearances here.

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 people you know...

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 Mac/Evernote...

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 really...

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, so I'm going...

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 won't be able to download these apps...

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 addiction, bedtime stories...

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 just about any spiritual...