Predicting the future of the “personal brand”

Yesterday Dan Schawbel published an interview with me on his Personal Branding blog. I have previously criticized the “personal branding” vogue both on this site and on my HBR blog, so I warned Dan he might be in for a rough ride! Much to his credit, he...

The 8 stages of professional commitment: social media edition

I’ve recently crossed the commitment threshold. Not the romantic commitment threshold — heck, that’s easy, considering how little software is required (usually). I’m talking about the professional commitment I make to each project I take on,...

11 ways Twitter can change your life, as told by its users

Online conversations change lives. That belief drives most of my work and writing, which is why I’m always so interested to hear people reflect on the ways that social media affects their relationships, career or self-image. A few months ago I collected some of...

Does the Internet eradicate barriers or perpetuate them?

The Guardian published an interesting story this weekend about the Internet’s impact on disability. Aleks Krotoski writes that her masters’ thesis in social psychology demonstrated two ways the web benefits people with physical disabilities: First, the web...

Diary of a yak shave: Or, How to get an Excel file into Scrivener

I need to write a draft document that borrows from my previous blog posts. A sane (non-techie) person might just write the freaking document, already. But that is not the Geek Way. So I’m now in the middle of an epic yak shave: Installed a WordPress plugin that...

Singing goodbye to a Facebook “friend”

This week I participated in a fireside chat with Rochelle Grayson for Canadian Women in Communications, on The Pros and Cons of Social Media Marketing. It was the scrappiest conversation I’ve ever had from a (notional) podium, probably because Rochelle and I...

Status report on the perpetual home media overhaul

Gillian Shaw’s delightful weekend story in the Vancouver Sun covered online alternatives to cable, and outed me once again as the World’s Most Committed Cross-Platform TV Consumer: And then there are the techno geeks like Vancouver’s Alexandra Samuel...