Who would you be without the Internet?

Without the internet I wouldn’t be able to write. In the realms of pre-internet media, one either comes to the publisher/editor/gatekeeper with mad skills and gets published, or he gets a generic pink slip with a one-line apology. You can’t use this system...

5 reasons to blog like it’s the last night of the world

I worry a lot about the world ending. My scenarios usually involve some kind of catastrophic climate change, pandemic virus or global economic meltdown followed by civil collapse. This intermittent tendency to fret over various doomsday is something I try to deprive...

140-character lessons in how to live your real life online

Your online relationships, conversations and creativity are as real as anything you do offline. That’s the message I delivered last weekend at Northern Voice, Canada’s leading blogging conference. My talk, titled Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life,...

5 ebook features that tap the power of social note-taking

Peter Meyers has a useful blog post on 3 ways to improve ebook note taking over at O’Reilly Radar. As he points out in his post, note-taking is one of the ways in which print books still kick the ass of digital books, since they allow you to “[j]ot notes...

This 40th birthday brought to you by Apple

What’s the right way for a geek to celebrate the big 40? In my case, as many of you now know, the answer was to spend the previous 40 days blogging. That met my need for ritual, but what about the day itself? I wanted to do something memorable, something that...