Help your kids learn with Etsy and the Maker Faire

Tonight Little Sweetie was thrilled to learn that she has been accepted into the Vancouver Maker Faire, a DIY festival we attended last year. She loved it, and immediately wanted to run her own booth, based on her Etsy store,  2 Dots 1 Symbol, which sells emoticon...

Tx is short for f*** you, not thank you

Today’s practice: Write your thank yous instead of abbreviating them. Last night, I caught myself on the verge of a profound etiquette violation. A colleague had replied quickly and helpfully to an email I had sent, asking for information, and my breezy reply...

Meet Your Pinterest Customer

Pinterest is the social media darling of the month, growing madly and reported to be driving more traffic to third-party…

Stop blaming yourself for your kids’ challenges

Today’s practice: Focus on healing your kids, not on figuring out how you’ve damaged them. In the past year a number of very important and dear people in our lives have started or grown their families in a way not everybody knows is possible: by adopting...

5 essential steps to online security

Today’s practice: Tighten your online security. You’d think that writing a dissertation about political computer hacking would make a girl sensitive to the challenges of online security. And it has, up to a point. But I recently decided to up my level of...

Make a family tech schedule

Today’s practice: Make a family tech schedule. We recently took the bold, terrifying step of pulling all the gaming consoles (Xbox, Playstation and Wii) out of our home media center, and sending them on a vacation to the closet. We took this measure in response...

What experience do you want to have online?

Today’s practice: Think about the social media experience you want to have, not the brand you want to build. About three years ago, in a conversation that ultimately led to me shifting gears and joining Emily Carr, the very wise Morgan Brayton passed along a...

How to crowdsource your Facebook Timeline

If you struggle to keep your Facebook Timeline dynamic and engaging, without creating what is simply a mirror of your Facebook or LinkedIn presence, the solution may not lie with you, but with your friends. For the past few months, I’ve been running a private...

The future of online nostalgia

Sometimes the only thing that makes the glitchiness of the Internet tolerable is the expectation that one day we will laugh nostalgically about the old days. Remember how we used to have iPads, but they couldn’t see anything in Flash? Oh yeah — FLASH!!!...