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...

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...

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...

The return of “I don’t know”

Fifteen years ago, “I don’t know” was a regular part of our vocabulary. And then it all changed. I remember the night, shortly after I got my first high-speed connection, when a group of my friends were over and got into a conversation about Clifford...

Missing out on Twitter

I made a number of confessions in my Northern Voice talk on Coping with Social Media, and in Gillian Shaw’s related story for the Vancouver Sun. But the one that was met with the most surprise — and in a couple of cases, horror — was the revelation...

Still social after all these years

Ron Burnett has an interesting blog post on whether Twitter (and other social media) are really social. Ron is the President of Emily Carr University, where I run the Social + Interactive Media Centre. The crux of his argument is that Twitter is not as conversational...

5 solutions for coping with social media

Read Gillian Shaw’s story about my social media methodology in the Vancouver Sun. Is social media something you have to cope with? Or is social media something that can help you cope? In my talk today at the Northern Voice blogging conference, I made my best...

6 Ways to Get Wired and Inspired

We tend to think of setting goals and seeking inspiration as highly personal. But achieving our goals is not always a solitary pursuit: The encouragement and resources of a larger community can help us do something we couldn’t do alone. Your computer can support both sides of this equation.

Do social networks make birthdays better?

Today is my 39th birthday. Among other things this means I’ve now spent 2/3 of my life online, since we got our first computer when I was 13. (Apparently it also means that a year from now I’ll be forty, which all my forty something women friends tell me...