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Photo Credit: Johnathan Beard

Disturbing, but not at all surprising.  That’s what I think of the story featured on the Associated Press titled, “Do “I’m on vacation” posts pose security concerns?“.  In it, the author describes an Arizona couple who own two home-based businesses.  As part of their promotional efforts, both individuals Twitter regularly, up to and including their detailed vacation plans where they would be out of town for an extended trip.  The couple Twittered when they left, where they stopped, and most conveniently for the felons who burglarized their Arizona home, how long they would be gone.

It was, as far as I know, a pretty isolated incident.  But I’m not sure why.  How do celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s #1 user with over 2 million followers, feel safe with that many people being able to know so much about their whereabouts?  Last month, Kutcher, Oprah, and several others’ Twitter accounts were hacked precisely because they were high profile users with massive followings.

Even in the tamer blogosphere , where authors generally consider their posts more carefully than a 140 character Twitter post, there was the high profile stalking of Kathy Sierra in 2007.   The author of the popular (top 50) marketing blog Creating Passionate Users felt compelled to leave the blogosphere and lecture circuit after some bad people posted her name, home address, disturbing images of her, and death threats online.

Maybe it’s just simple math.  Most people are good, but a certain percentage will always be bad.  And in America, it is generally accepted that the price of fame is a lack of personal privacy.  The more followers you have, or visitors to your blog, or Facebook friends, the more likely it is that someone you don’t know so well (or at all) could be using your full disclosure to their advantage.  And if you don’t believe me that there is full disclosure going on in social media, check out some high school kid’s myspace page.  Any of them.  You’ll see what I mean.

The last thing I want to do is to throw a wet blanket on the social media movement.  After all, I blog (putting my name as the URL!), Facebook, etc., and see the tools as very powerful to me personally and professionally.  Some of our clients are experimenting quite successfully in social media, and I think the best is yet to come.  But I also keep my family blog, with pictures of my kids and the details of our comings and goings, private and only open to people who have registered on the site.

What do you think?  I’m really curious here.  Does increased visibility always mean increased risk?  Should I unplug my computer from the wall at night just to be safe (I know someone who actually does this)?  Should I stop worrying so much and make all of my profiles totally open and broadcast my every move?  Let me know in the comments.

Thanks Meeker for the tip.

[EDIT] – I just found out that Kathy Sierra is on Twitter.  Interesting.

A few days ago, I outlined some of the horrors of my painful switch from using Blogger to using Wordpress.  Now that the anguish is beginning to fade, I thought I’d distill the steps I took (and failures I had) into a step by step guide that I wish I would have had at my disposal.  This process is definitely the easiest and safest way to transfer your Blogger blog to a Wordpress site that I know of.

First off, this guide is for people who have their own domain and webspace, and who simply use Blogger to publish their blog via FTP to their own webspace.  I found several guides for people who have their blogs hosted with Blogger (e.g., yourblogname.blogspot.com), but scarce resources for those who host their own site. This guide assumes that you have complete FTP access to your webspace (and that you know what that means).  I am not a technologist, and couldn’t write a line of code to save my life, so hopefully these instructions are easy to follow.

I moved to Wordpress because of the increased control I could get over my blog look and feel, and the ease of use of adding plugins to customize how my blog behaves.  There are some other great articles on the advantages of Wordpress if you Google “Wordpress vs Blogger”.

So here’s what you do.

Step 1: Back up everything.

One of the nice things about Blogger is that is publishes everything to HTML files and neatly-labeled folders.  It’s a weakness in some ways compared the the way that Wordpress uses a database to store most of your content, but it sure makes backing the files up easier because they are all in one place.  The best way to back up your Blogger site is to grab all of the content in your root directory (all HTML files and folders), and make a copy of it to your local computer.  I would suggest going one step further and backing it up on a CD or DVD, just in case.  You can never underestimate the power of your own ability to screw something up (especially if you’re me).

I use Filezilla as my FTP client.  It’s free, stable, easy to use and brought to you by the same open source community that produces Firefox.

Step 2: Change your Blogger hosting settings.

In your Blogger Dashboard under your blog name, click on Settings=>Publishing.  It should say at the top of the page, “You’re publishing via FTP”.  Click on the very first option below that statement, “Switch to: Blogspot.com (Blogger’s free hosting service)”.  On the following screen, give your new URL a name (it doesn’t really matter what, since this will be temporary), type in the Spam verification and click “Save Settings.”

This critical step makes sure that your Blogger blog is in a format that is easy for Wordpress to import, so don’t skip it.   If you have a high volume of traffic and don’t want to change the settings on your live site, then duplicate the blog first, and change the settings on the cloned blog rather than your original.

Step 3: Install Wordpress.

After switching hosting providers to Bluehost.com, this was a really easy process because Bluehost has a one-click install of the latest version of Wordpress. If your web host doesn’t support that, it’s still fairly easy and Wordpress will tell you how here.

You can install Wordpress in the same directory as your Blogger blog, if you’d like.

Step 4: Install the “must have” plugins and your theme.

You can always add plugins whenever you’d like, but I’ve found that installing them right off the bat is the best approach.    That way I’m not distracted with the look and feel of the site until after I’ve done all of the nuts and bolts type things that should be taken care of first.   I’m going to recommend my favorites:

1.  Askimet.  It’s so good at catching spam that it comes bundled with your Wordpress installation.  To set it up, you just need to register a Wordpress username.  The plugin will walk you through everything you need to do.

2.  All-in-One SEO Pack.  There are other SEO plugins out there, but I really like this one.  It’s updated frequently, and it helps me remember to enter all the content in where I should whenever I make a blog post.  If you don’t care about people being able to find specific posts on your site via Google or other search engines, you can skip this one.

3.  Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam.  This plugin adds a captcha to every post and lets you choose what words are displayed, which is pretty neat.  It also features audio pronunciation for the visually imparied.

4.  Google XML Sitemaps.  The easiest way to incorporate a search engine friendly sitemap into your site.  Once you set it, and tell Google Webmaster Tools where it is, you can forget it’s there. It updates automatically every time you make a change to the site and notifies Google of the change.  Simple and easy.  Again, if you don’t care about Search Engine Optimization, forget this one.

5.  Ultimate Google Analytics.  This easily implements the Google tracking code into your blog so that you don’t have to do it manually.  Google Analytics is free, and pretty comprehensive, so it’s a great tool for bloggers who want to monitor their traffic, etc.  If you don’t have a GA account, all you need is a Gmail address and you can set one up here.

6.  TinyMCE Advanced.  Last but certainly not least.  This one is of extreme importance to Blogger users because of a key difference between Blogger and Wordpress.  In Blogger, if you want to add more line breaks, carriage returns, or whatever you call them, to a post, you simply hit “enter” over and over again until you have things positioned where you want them to be.  Wordpress, in its infinite wisdom, doesn’t have that ability out of the gate, so it needs this plugin.

If you don’t install this, and try hitting the “enter” key multiple times to add line breaks to your post, Wordpress will automatically delete them.  Once you have this installed and activiated, go to Settings=>Tiny MCE Advanced in your Wordpress dashboard and click the checkbox, “Stop removing the <p> and <br> tags when saving and show them in the HTML editor”, then save your settings.  Trust me, you’ll thank me for saving you hours of frustration on this one.

Of course there are many, many more plugins available, but these 6 will give you good security, search engine visibility, and useability.  And tranquility.

There are a myriad of themes available here to change the look and feel of your site as well.  Install one that you like before you import your Blogger blog.  The reason for this is that you will likely have to make some manual formatting changes to it because it won’t import completely perfectly, and you don’t want to make formatting changes to fit the Wordpress default theme, and then fall in love with a new theme a couple of weeks later and have to duplicate your efforts.  You can start your search here, and get help installing themes here.

Step 5: Export your Blogger blog.

Now, you can try to go directly into your Wordpress dashboard and import your Blogger Blog under Tools=>Import=>Blogger.  But my experience was that this simply didn’t work for the hundreds of posts that I had.  This is really easy.  In your Blogger Dashboard, click on Settings=>Basic=>Export Blog.  Then click on “Download Blog”.  It may take a few minutes to download to your hard drive.

Please note that the file that is exported does not contain your images.  The images are only referenced as links, so unless you are a code wizard (which I am not), you’ll need to leave your old images folder from Blogger on your webspace until the end of time.

Step 6: Convert your export file to a Wordpress format.

This step is skipped by many, but man, I couldn’t make anything work without doing it.  There is a free web-application aptly named “Blogger2Wordpress” that will make the necessary changes to your export file so that it is Wordpress friendly.   Click on the link in the last sentence to go to the application.  Then, upload your Blogger export file, click “convert”, and save the result to your hard drive.

Step 7: Import your blog.

Now that you’ve converted your blog to a Wordpress format, the rest is just details.  In your Wordpress dashboard, browse to Tools=>Import=>Wordpress and upload the file you downloaded in Step 6.  Follow any additional on screen instructions that Wordpress gives you.

Step 8: Fix stuff.

Although the TinyMCE Advanced plugin allows you to use multiple line breaks to format your posts, it won’t fix the posts that you’ve just imported.  You may find other discrepancies too, such as Wordpress not picking up all of your Blogger tags, authors, etc..  Additionally, if you uploaded any videos through blogger (not just linked to them via Youtube, etc., but actually uploaded them), you will probably need to re-upload the videos through Wordpress.   That wasn’t a deal breaker for me, since I only had about 6 videos that were easy to re-upload.

Go through all of your old posts and fix them until you’re happy.  This can be a long, manual process or a quick and easy one, just depending on the content and format of your previous blog.   Test everything you can think of so that your readers don’t email you with technical issues.

Step 9: Delete or move your Blogger HTML pages.

Finally, use your FTP client to browse to your site directory and move or delete your old Blogger HTML pages.  I chose to move them into an “old_html” folder, but if you’ve backed them up you may delete them if you like.  Make sure you leave the images folder untouched.  Again, you never moved your images, just the references to the images, so leave the folder where it is.  From now on, you can choose to have Wordpress upload images into that same folder, or into a new one.  It’s up to you.

Step 10:  Get your party on.

You’ve done it!  You moved your blog and are now nestled snugly in the arms of a great open-source community.

I know a lot of other people have moved from Blogger to Wordpress and may have other tricks and tips to share.  Please let me know in the comments, and good luck!

A few days ago, I added Google Adsense advertisting to what I hope is an unobtrusive are inoffensive area of my site.  I was curious – could I make any real money by blogging?  Would the ads be relevant to my readers?  Would anyone care?

These questions put me face-to-face with the ethical dilemma I’ve been having as of late: is it unethical to block ads?

Like over 47% of the online community (as of April 2009), I use Firefox as my default web browser.   And like over 50 million other people, I use Adblock Plus and a set of filters to block out 99% of the advertisements on sites I visit.

It started out innocently enough: many years ago, I was surfing the web on a 56K modem and the ads were simply eating up too much bandwidth (especially on sites like weather.com and cnn.com, where the ads are numerous and the actual content is slim), so I installed AdBlock with Firefox, and POOF all the ads were history.

Fast forward to 2009, where broadband penetration is north of 25% for the US, and I suspect that number to be tripled or higher for content creators.  So bandwith isn’t a big deal.  True, the ads are mostly annoyances, but the ad revenue is at least theoretically what compensates the producers of content and frees those people from having to hold down another job just to put good stuff online.

So here’s the moral contract I’ve made with myself.  For blogs, news sites, Hulu, and other services that I use regularly and derive value from, I will selectively disable Adblock Plus for the entire site.  It’s the way capitalism and American consumerism works at its best – voting with our (or really the advertiser’s) money as to what content is valuable and useful to the individual.  This costs me nothing, but I believe that it will make me a better citizen of the internet.

Conversely, I will selectively block individual ads that I find to be offensive, overly obtrusive, or stupid.  Yes, that’s highly subjective, but so am I when I’m choosing what to read or consume.

As with yesterday’s example, I shouldn’t expect something for nothing.  What do you think?

A colleague of mine forwarded a great article to me called “Beware the Social Media Charlatans” by Robert Strohmeyer at PC World.  In it, Strohmeyer cautions against spending resources on the burgeoning social media consultants popping up all over the country.  The problem, as he sees it:

Combine a rapidly growing trend of social media adoption with an economy that has forced hundreds of thousands of workers to reinvent themselves as entrepreneurs, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for consultant overload.  Since nobody seems to know what the hell’s going on with Twitter anyway, nearly anyone can pass themselves off as an expert on the subject. So suddenly all those poseurs who might otherwise have bilked the hapless with offers of life coaching services or Feng Shui consulting have jumped on the social networking bandwagon. You can hardly swing a stick on the sidewalk nowadays without smacking one of these guys in the head.

While I haven’t personally been in a position to hire a social media consultant, I am ocassionally annoyed by the risible amount of self-promotion through social media channels these folks seem to require to keep their businesses going.  And I’m sure that if my livlihood depended on teaching businesses how to Twitter, I’d be pretty miffed about Mr. Strohmeyer’s article.  But then again, the term “consultant” has always been a loaded one, and I’m sure that most consultants have already come to grips with that in their own businesses.

The truth is, even at our agency, which is filled with a lot of very smart and creative people, social media has yet to be proven the panacea and/or the gold mine that a lot of marketers want you to believe.  It’s an important component to consider for some businesses and certainly valuable for individuals who want to take control of what the Internet is saying about them, but the metrics just aren’t there to support some of the radical positions I’ve heard at conferences and in the blogosphere.

But here’s my favorite part of the article:

The truth is that there are almost no rules in social networking that don’t already apply in just about any other social environment. A great many smart people have already written worthy perspectives on how to be a good citizen on Facebook and Twitter, and I hardly need to reiterate here what amounts to general common sense. Just as in life, the only rule that really matters is the Golden Rule. All the rest is either derivative, or flat-out nonsense, and you really shouldn’t be paying big bucks for either. [emphasis mine]

This is true.  Think about it.  Let’s say you went to a party where 10% of the people you knew intimately, 20% were best friends, colleagues, etc., and the remaining 70% were acquaintances, important people from another time in your life that you didn’t keep up with that often, and some people that you admire from afar as potential business connections.  I’d say that probably approximates the Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn profiles of many.  During that party, which let’s just say lasts an entire day, you update everyone you can about the fact that you’re speaking at a conference.  That’s normal, and good, right?  But here’s the thing – you probably wouldn’t tell everyone things like, “I just woke up,” or, “THESE ARE MY FIVE FAVORITE THINGS”, or “according to a survey I took, I am most like the Sex in the City character Gandalf the Orange” multiple times.

And you certainly wouldn’t want one of the people at that party to be a smooth-talking salesman for a company who’s product you might use but you don’t care much about, like soap, or paper, or maybe even an interactive agency or social media consultant!  If they had something valuable to say that was directly beneficial to you or interesting, that’s one thing, but you’d never invite a broadcaster of unwanted content to your party, at least not on purpose.  Your time is limited, and you don’t appreciate it being wasted.

Facebook recently included a “Hide” feature for removing status updates from those people that you want to stay “friends” with but are sick of hearing from.  I don’t know about you, but I welcomed the opportunity to shut out some of the noise so that I could spend my time keeping up with people who were interested in having an actual conversation.

A social media strategy for a company, or for an individual, requires the thoughtful guidance of someone who is skilled at building relationships.  And I like Robert Strohmeyer’s advice – the first rule to think about is the Golden one.

I’ve been MIA lately, and with what is clearly becoming a pattern of very poor netiquette, I neglected to tell anyone.

The truth is, I’ve been switching hosting providers, and I’ve also been converting our family blog from a Blogger format to Wordpress.  Let me tell you, neither process has been easy, painless, or fun.  But at least it’s finished (mostly).

I’ll offer this to anyone considering using Wordpress to power their blog – it’s by far the most versatile, expandable, and customizable platform available.   And, it’s free.  However, you’d better be prepared to get your hands dirty in the code once you start wanting it to do some very specific things – like be able to handle extremely large image uploads.

And please, save yourself some frustration and do your homework when it comes to choosing a shared hosting provider.  I had been using 1and1 hosting, chiefly because they seemed to offer the most for your money and they advertise very heavily in trade publications.   However, if you ever intend to have any appreciable degree of traffic on your site, or plan on uploading or manipulating large files or images (think over 2MB), it’s a terrible choice.  1and1 has draconian server limitations for their shared hosting accounts, such as not being able to use a server process that requires more than 16MB of RAM.  I didn’t care about this until I selected a Wordpress template for my family blog that I wanted to upload images to that were 8 megapixels (about 5MB) in size – then Wordpress just crashed and burned.  Not to mention the fact that a ton of Wordpress features simply don’t work within the 1and1 hosting environment.

I can highly recommend (and indeed, so does Wordpress) bluehost.com for all of your shared hosting needs.  They don’t have dedicated hosting options, so if you end up with a massive spike in traffic you’ll have to change hosting providers, but their service is outstanding (phone calls answered by a real person, live chat sessions started within a minute of clicking on the button, etc.), and they only run about $7 a month.  I’ve been very happy so far.

So enough complaining.   I’ve successfully moved both blogs and have learned a ton in the process.  Now  I just need to figure out how to get rid of the strange characters that got inserted everywhere on this blog after the move.  And then back to posting more content.  The funny thing about bad netiquitte is that when you stop posting, it’s not like people complain or anything.  They simply stop visiting your site and they vote with thier visits.  The good thing is that you can easily resurrect your site with fresh content at any time, and the rewards of writing are worthy of my time even without substantial traffic.  Thanks everyone for reading!

UPDATE:

Success!  This is why I love Wordpress.  The problem I had in moving my database is that everytime I had a double space on this blog, it somehow converted the double space to this character – Â.  After a painless search and installation of a simple plugin (aptly named Search and Replace), I was able to replace all 516 instances of  with the double space.  Everything was fixed in less than two minutes.  Sweet!  That’s a lot better than waiting for a tech support email from Google (owner of Blogger) to solve a similar problem I had a while back.

(update: Budget Surplus as a Percentage of GDP, 1965-2009 – image credit – www.powerlineblog.com, and thanks for the link, Pete!)

I’ve been doing a bit more reading lately than writing. I think that has to do with trying to wrap my head around these tumultuous economic times, and the best way for me to do that is to read and discuss. Here are a few places that I’ve been spending my time lately, and my own take on the recession:

Blogs to read:

Blogs are great because they are free, personal, and you can talk back to whoever wrote them. Here are three of my favorites:

1. Get Rich Slowly – This is an oft-referenced and well-researched personal finance blog. With the economic climate being what it is, I’m always looking for another angle on saving money and better managing my finances. Believe it or not, sound micro-economic principles often translate well into the macro-economic world of my clients. Another good reason to stay up with the times.

2. My Money Blog – Another great personal finance blog. Here, the author shares (to the penny!) every detail of his financial picture. Investments, debt, mortgage rates, etc. Of course, it’s a bit voyeuristic, but also extremely informative. Here in America we’re generally very secretive about our personal finance, and therefore we rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to learn from one another’s financial experience. I’m not about to publish my net worth online, but I’m glad this blog does. It’s also full of great, realistic tips for saving money and for making money on the side.

3. I Will Teach You to Be Rich – This is Ramit Sethi’s blog about personal finance. At times he can be a bit brash or even egotistical, but the financial advice he offers is very sound, and many people can benefit from such advice as, “Shut up about your money unless you’ve taken the time to read a book about how money really works”, even though it might fall more kindly on folks’ ears if it were rephrased. Overall, great stuff.

A few reasons why we’ve had this recession coming to us:

One of the recurruing themes I’ve seen in everything I’m reading is the basic assertion that things are going to get worse before they get better, and that Americans have had this recession and market correction coming for a long time.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, consumer spending makes up roughly 70% of America’s GDP, and according to the NY Times, the average household credit card debt (this doesn’t include houses, cars, college loans, etc.) was over $8500, and collectively Americans owe $2.56 trillion on credit cards alone. All this, while the savings rate has plummeted from 8% of income in the 1960’s to less than half a percent today. Simply put, this trend is completely unsustainable, regardless of your polictical views or whomever you’d like to point the finger at.

Sadly, the recession will undoubtedly hurt many people, because as consumer spending drops (people tend to hold on to their money when they are scared they might lose their jobs), companies will suffer and have to let people go. Those people who have been laid off then cease, save for necessities, being consumers. Thus the companies suffer further and either let more people go or collapse completely. There is a very real reason that our fine elected officials on Capitol Hill are scrambling around to pass the “bailout bill”.

What the government wants you to do:

1. Ignore the gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach that the economy isn’t doing well. The official label for this is “poor consumer confidence,” and it drives the stock market down into the toilet because people want to pull their money out in anticipation of a collapse. Also, if you are afraid of losing your money you will spend less. Which brings us to #2.

2. Spend more money. Spend it like you did back in 1999, or even 2004. Buy frivolous things, and big things, like cars, boats, and houses. This will have the effect of “stimulating” the economy, will increase the “consumer confidence” of your friends and neighbors, and

3. Get sick. Going to the doctor will help to bolster a critical sector of our economy and its hyper-inflated fees. If possible, get sick long enough to go to the hospital but not long enough to file for unemployment or disability.

4. Save less. Money sitting in the bank might be good because it gives banks the cash needed to make loans (see #2), but seriously, if consumer confidence is high enough, banks will find a way to lend to everyone anyway.

What you actually should do:

1. Admit that, in fact, things are bad. That’s okay to admit, because it’s true and the resulting fear, anguish, anger, or frustration can help motivate you to make the changes necessary to survive.

2. Spend much less money and save more. The fact is, you could lose your job, and the stimulus package that Congress just passed, if it works, won’t do so in the immediate future. That means you need to have cash reserves set aside to be able to ride out things for awhile – 6-8 months or more. With the costs of everything going up, you can only save money by cutting back on your present expenses or by earning more.

3. Don’t get sick. Take steps to exercise and stay healthy. This will help you avoid costly trips to the doctor, make you feel better (it may even increase your confidence, in a good way). Also, taking sick days means you are not at work, which means someone else might be getting a leg up on you in your absence. Plus, if you do lose your job and your health insurance, you’ll be in a much better position to stay strong and out of life-ruining debt.

4. Give stuff away. As I pointed out earlier, owning things really just means that you have to spend time taking care of things. There’s definitely a point of diminishing return for everyone, so take a moment and figure out what that might be for you. Plus, if you give things away you’ll be helping someone else out, and according to some research, that’s the only way to truly stay happy anyway. Charities are really struggling right now, and giving generously helps to put your life into perspective, a perspective that will become more and more necessary to weather the coming storm.

There is a particularly nasty virus out there that is very new, and so there isn’t a lot out there that has been written about it. I just wasted my entire Sunday trying to clear our home computer of it, and I finally think I’ve found a solution, so I thought I would post it here. My symptoms were that whenever I would search for anything in Google, MSN, or Yahoo, the results would appear as normal, except that all of the links were redirected to bogus spam sites.

As it turns out, I had some sort of Trojan Downloader, which had jumped on the web an infected my system with all kinds of nasty stuff. Most of it was easy to clear with some of my favorite ( and FREE!) antivirus and anti-spyware software (AVG Free, Spybot Search & Destroy, and Zone Alarm).

However, even with the Trojan (which, when you think about it, is a misnomer because the Greeks built the Trojan horse, not the Trojans) was cleared, the search results remained the same. Because this is so new, a lot of the forums online don’t have solutions posted yet. Late this evening some started showing up, so I’ll post the solution that worked for me.

I found it here, amidst some bantering about Linux vs. Mac vs. Windows. Basically, if when your search results are loading you see “7.7.7.0″ in your browser’s status bar, you need to browse to your C:/Windows/system32/wdmaud.sys and delete the file. You still need to run the antivirus programs to get rid of the Trojan that started the problem (and possibly downloaded other goodies on your PC), but deleting this file did the trick for me.

I really hope that helps someone out there, and I’m grateful to all of the altruistic techies out there who work to make the internet a slightly safer place.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

So, how rich are you?

Yes, the stock market is in the toilet. Yes, it takes $70 to fill up my car instead of $25. Yes, tomatoes are really expensive right now. And yes, this year we have to drive for a vacation instead of fly. I’m definitely feeling the economic “crunch” and I’m worried about the stability of my industry.

Yet I am still among the richest 1% of people in the world. Check this out:

Global Rich List, built a few years ago by an agency in London, allows a user to input heir yearly income and see exactly how they compare with the rest of the world. Take a minute and try it, please…the results will surprise you. Most importantly, I hope that it can serve as a reminder to all of us of exactly how much we have, and how when we give a little it makes a huge difference to those who are in great need.

I’ve been privileged to travel to several different countries with the purpose of helping out those less fortunate, and it is truly sobering to realize how much even the poorest people in the US really have (and perhaps more importantly, have access to). Things like clean water, decent healthcare (in the US even the uninsured are required by law to be treated for major illnesses), access to a free education, and a myriad of halfway houses and government programs do offer a wealth of opportunity for those in need.

All poverty, even extreme poverty, is relative. The richest of the rich in one country may be the poorest of the poor in another. But if you’re a destitute individual in the US, it doesn’t help you very much to have someone remind you what the slums in Kibera are like, or exactly how little some people subsist on in Calcutta. But relative to everyone who is suffering in this world, most Americans are (relatively) really well.

So give, internationally or domestically, to help alleviate the suffering of those around the world who are greatly in need. If you think you can’t afford it, check out Global Rich List and think about how much even cutting a small luxury from your life could really help someone out. Google “Poverty” if you need some ideas of where to give – some great organizations are using search engine marketing – just check the right hand column.

I’ve been MIA for a while now, because my wife just gave birth to the latest member of our family, Kaela Ruth. Our new daughter is incredibly beautiful and keeping me very busy.

I started this post a few weeks ago, and decided to finish it today while in the Atlanta airport. I watched this great Google Tech Talk video in which Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame talks about how to better manage your email. The upside of me not blogging for a month is that I’ve had 30+ days to put these habits into practice, and let me tell you, it’s changed my digital lifestyle for the better.

The video is excellent, but it’s 60 minutes long. If you’d like the highlights and my opinion, then read on.

Here are seven philosophical points about the “whys” of controlling your email, rather than letting your email control you.

1. Knowledge workers make money by turning knowledge and information into value. You can’t effectively do this if your time is all tied up in pointless emails.
2. Where you decide to put your time and attention says a lot about who you are.
3. “Time and attention are finite, but demands on your time and attention are infinite”. You have to filter out what gets attention and what gets ignored.
4. Never check your email without “processing to zero” – actually doing something with the email you receive rather than merely “checking it”. In sum, you have to look at every piece of email in your inbox whenever you check your email, and you have to decide what to do with it. Not necessarily respond to every piece, but you have to make a decision about each and every one.
5. Once you’ve gotten the info that you’ve needed to from the email, it’s useless to you. Get rid of it!
6. Make your system as simple as you can stand it.
7. If you’re not in customer service or some other extremely time-sensitive email situation, then turn off your email app and only check your email once an hour, or less if possible. As much as you can, try to reduce the number of times you check it.

Mann then asserts that there are most 5 options that you have for processing a given email:

1. Delete it! (or archive it if it’s really something worth saving).
2. Delegate it. If you tell someone else to do it, set a reminder to yourself to ensure that it in fact took place.
3. Respond to it. This is a tough one for me to follow, because I’m a writer. But email isn’t the place to debut my next philosophical tirade. Mr. Mann suggests placing a line in your footer that states, “I will not write any email longer than 5 sentences”. If nobody reads long blog posts anymore, certainly in a business context no one reads long emails anymore. If it’s that long of a response, then schedule a meeting.
4. Defer it (will need a response, but could take additional time). I don’t know if I like this one. At least in my world, I can respond to most emails fairly quickly.
5. Do it. If something requires action from you, just get it done. If you can’t do it right now, schedule a meeting or reminder for it, and then it’s taken care of.

This has truly helped me to tame my inbox and to stop using it as a reminder system. I was very guilty of reading the emails when I didn’t have time to respond to them.

Anyways, it’s good to be back. I still have no idea why Google still refuses to index my blog, so I may go ahead and move it from a Wordpress platform to something else, or redesign it and see what happens. At any rate, it’s not like I’m selling ads or anything, so I’ll keep writing for now.

Bear with me, this site will likey be taken down sporadically as I try to implement some new security features. I haven’t found conclusive proof that I’ve been hacked, but Google Webmaster Tools is reporting some major spam keywords in my keywords report (that aren’t being caught by other keyword analysis). Words such as the names for major drugs, porn, software piracy, etc.

For the record, this really isn’t fun. I’ve had to take over two months off of writing regularly just to try and fix all of this stuff in my spare time. On the other hand, I’ve learned a ton about internet security and the importance of taking some basic precautions when running an open sourced CMS, such as Wordpress. I’ve also learned quite a bit about the down-and-dirty world of Search Engine Optimization (something n-tara interactive has lots of experts on but until recently I was but a mere novice in understanding).

Special thanks to Nick Rice, who is always one step ahead of me. I’ll try his suggestions on a couple of Wordpress plugins (Ask Apache and Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam) and manually checking my HTML source code, and I’ll report back soon.