Facebook Apps Can Now Access Phone Numbers and Addresses: Online Collaboration«

On Friday evening, Facebook quietlyannounced to application developersthat third-party apps will be able to access the addresses and mobile phone numbers of its users.

As theAll Facebookblog points out, users must explicitly give permission to third-party apps wanting access to personal information, but many people probably won’t notice the addition of the words“current address and mobile phone number” to the text in the request window, and will likely click“allow” without realizing they’re granting so much access to their data.

This change is consistent with Facebook’s policy of encouraging openness. But for web workers who are increasingly using Facebook for business purposes, such a policy may not be welcome.

Of course, the easiest way to avoid making your postal address and mobile phone number available to third parties is to not include it in your Facebook profile at all. To edit this data, go to“Profile” at the top-right of the Facebook screen, then click on the“Edit Profile” button. From the menu on the left, click on“Contact Information.” Delete any information you may have entered in the“Mobile Phone” and“Address” fields, then click the blue“Save Changes” button at the bottom of the screen.

Note: if you’ve added a phone number in the“Other Phone” field, Facebook will copy that number into the“Mobile Phone” field if you leave the mobile number blank. So you’ll need to erase any phone numbers that you’ve entered into either field.

Do you include your personal contact information on your Facebook page?

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The Rapid Evolution of Digital Language : Online Collaboration«

“App” wasnamed Word of the Year for 2010by the Linguistic Society of America at their national conference this month.“Nom” was the runner-up. Never heard the word“nom”? You’re not alone: swiftly-evolving digital language may be the curse of the web worker.

Language evolves, but the web has provided a hothouse for the overblown blossoming— and just as swift demise — of fad language, jargon and discipline-specific words. Last year’s Word of the Year,“Tweet”, and the Word of the Decade,“Google,” were also technology-related. How do web workers keep up with the breakneck evolution of online language? And how do we avoid misusing words and sounding out-of-touch in a field where being connected is the most basic requirement?

The Linguistic Society of America’s naming of“app” as its word of the year points to the speed at which words and word usage evolves online. App–  an abbreviation, of course, for application— is a technology-specific word that, for a while, was heard all too often in the phrase,“There’s an app for that!”“Nom,” a word made popular by the Cookie Monster, has taken hold in the world of social networking— a world in which theCookie Monster has quite the following.

The changing language of the digital space points to the evolution of the web and online culture, as much as to our growing technological vocabularies.

The Common Vernacular

Back in the 90′s, it was common to“surf the‘Net”, to“ICQ” a friend, and to hang out on“bulletin boards”. Within a few years, we were talking about static websites as“brochureware”— with a negative inflection — and communicating in acronyms: IMHO, ROFL, and so on.

Today, better search facilities, and our improved ability to control our own online experiences, preclude most of us from having to“surf the‘Net”. Similarly, changes in the way in which online properties are run has severely reduced the number of“webmasters” online. The declining popularity of these terms points to the changing way we use the Web as much as to simple word usage trends.

Similarly, the adoption and adaptation of concepts like“Web 2.0″ puts their associated fad terms out of use almost as quickly as they come into the industry’s consciousness. The growth and persistence of digital brands impacts our language, too. I’ll still“Google it”, but I’ll no longer“ICQ” you the results of my search— I’ll more likely“IM” them.

Beyond the popular language of the Web lies discipline-specific terminology, or jargon. While this may stick around for longer, its evolution is still incredibly fast by comparison to the rest of our language.

Take“usability”, for example. Initially,“usability” was the buzzword, until awareness of“accessibility” became widespread. Around this time,“user testing” could usually be taken to mean physical testing with users in a room with a computer.

We’ve seen these areas unite and expand into the broader field of“user experience”, which includes the design focus that many readers ofJakob Nielsen’s AlertBoxused to long for. Where once they were ends in themselves, usability and accessibility are seen today as two elements of the broader discipline of user experience, a term which has overtaken the other two in the conversations I’m hearing online. Oh, and“user testing”? These days, that could mean anything from in-house, on-site testing with actual users, to virtual testing carried out by an offshore agency you’ve never met.

Interestingly, it’s often the practical terms within an area or field that outlast the bigger-picture or trend terms for that field: talk of wireframes, use cases, information architecture, and so on persists. But to speak of“usability” or“accessibility” when you mean“user experience” immediately implies a lack of knowledge and expertise.

Staying Up-to-Date

Many web workers take the evolution of online language with a grain of salt, and few of us expect to be across all of the common buzzwords. That said, my web working friends seem to know— and use — more jargon than they realize.

It’s true that the majority of these words aren’t restricted to online usage: word themes that begin and grow online are inevitably carried into the offline world. We use them in general conversations, often with people who aren’t tech-savvy or web workers.

For most of us, staying up-to-date with the evolving online language is less about looking up words we don’t understand than it is listening to the conversation of others, reading widely and heavily, and avoiding using terms whose meanings we’re not sure of.

Most of us know the current language of our fields, and have a general, less-developed knowledge of those of related disciplines. Our knowledge of general web terms is usually commensurate with our degree of online submersion and socializing. And for most of us, that’s enough.

Imagebystock.xchnguserBrybs.

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6 Social Media Pain Points (and What to Do About Them): Online Collaboration«

You may love social media, but even the biggest fans of the social web will find some sources of frustration. What is your social media pain point? I thought I’d explore some of the main ones I’ve identified and offer up some potential solutions.

1. Managing Your Profile and Reputation

So many networks, so many different audiences and connections. Maybe you’re feeling like you have split personalities: being professional on LinkedIn, running at the mouth on Twitter, then letting your hair down on Facebook. But wait! You forgot that you’re connected with your boss or your client on Facebook. Panic ensues. Or what if someone is Googling your name before interviewing you for a job. What will they find? Over the last 10 years, we’ve all learned some tough lessons about what it means to be digital.

Solution:Reduce the number of networks you use. Keep your work and personal networks separate. Create a“universal” profile to help clear up the clutter. About.melets you display an attractive, social-media integrated profile. Gist encourages you to claim your public profile so everyone using their application sees consistent information for you. Iblogged about the companyrecently.

2. Privacy Issues and Protecting Your Identity

Are you feeling squeamish about what personal data is floating out there in the ether about you? You may not even realize how complicit you’ve been in releasing this information, from emailing your credit card information because it was quick and easy, to uploading a photo to Flickr with a geotag that reveals the exact location of your home. So what can you do about it?

Solution:Get smart and help educate others about privacy issues. Be smarter about what you reveal and how and when you reveal it. Opt out of automated features on social networks and take the time to manually configure your privacy settings to a more conservative setting. Companies likeReputation.comare popping up to rescue us from our accidental over-sharing.

3. Curating Information and Coping with Information Overload

RSS feeds, Twitterstreams, news feeds… when will it end? We continue to open the floodgates to more and more information, desperately seeking tools to help us parse, filter, slice, dice, and otherwise funnel information into our already overloaded brains.

Solution:My advice? Stop your addiction to data; go cold turkey. Pare down and eliminate. You do not need to know everything, and trying is an effort in futility. Identify no more than a handful of blogs or information sources that give you a solid cross-section of the information you need. Trust the curators whose job it is to be human filters of the information that interests you or that pertains to your work. Count what you’re consuming like you count calories: No more than five sources. Can you do it? And what about your Twitterstream? Focus more on your interactions with others than the never-ending stream of information. Create heavily curated Twitter lists based around specific areas of interest to zero in on more important information, then peruse them occasionally to get a quick fix. Use these lists sparingly and stop immediately if you find yourself getting sucked back into the datastream.

4. Keeping Up With New Tech Developments

You’re human. You can’t keep up all the latest technology development or the myriad of continuous changes to the tech you’re already using. Every week, Facebook offers new features and interface tweaks.

Solution: So what do you do if you want to at least understand where things are going? I’d go back to my suggestion to identify trusted curators, such as bloggers and news sources that are devoted to explaining what is current and keeping an eye on what’s next. Then go back and review #3 above in order to keep your data consumption under control.

5. Organizing Your Digital Files and Data

Our digital ephemera is everywhere, and we are generating data more rapidly than ever before. Our files are hard to organize and hard to find. I’ve come to rely on my computer’s search function to find files because I can’t file them away in neat little folders fast enough any more. Online, I rely on Google to find thing because I find that I have too many tools, sites and apps to help me tuck away data that I can no longer find posts or articles when I need them— did I save it withDelicious?Instapaper? How can you better organize the files and content you want to save and access again in the future?

Solution:Find the handful of tools that help you monitor, manage, curate, archive and organize your data. From Hootsuite for monitoring and managing your accounts to tools such asScoop.itandPearltreesto archive, organize and share articles and blog posts, there are tools and applications out there created specifically to relieve your social media pain. Dropbox might be an answer for your files. New sites likeGogobeansoffer to bring all your digital“stuff” into one place to help you manage it and manage who sees it. Once you find the one that works for you, use it regularly and learn to use it well.

6. Finding the Time to Deal with Social Media

Yes, dealing with social media takes time. How much time? Iblogged about it here.

Solution:See #3-#5 above.

If you’re experiencing social media pain, step back and look for ways to pare down and simplify. Narrow down your trusted sources of information. Resist the temptation to get caught up in data frenzy. Leverage technology tools that help you ease the pain.

What is your social media pain point? Let us know in the poll above and discuss it below.

Stock xchng imageby user cribbe

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New Version of File Sharing and Collaboration Service Box.net Targets Simplicity: Online Collaboration«

At a media event at its headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. on Thursday,Box.netunveiled the latest version of its cloud-based, file-sharing software. The service enables Box users to view and collaborate on files and works in both the browser and on mobile devices; it’s similar to long-time WWD file-sharing favoriteDropbox, but it offers many more enterprise-friendly features, such as granular permissions and role-based access to files. The new version of Box has been rebuilt from the ground up with a greatly simplified UI, as well as offering new collaboration and real-time notification features.

In addition to being faster and simpler, the new interface should provide a better experience for interacting with content by removing clutter and providing much more screen real-estate for the viewing of files within the browser. Box.net believes that many of its competitors in the enterprise collaboration (notably Microsoft SharePoint) are too complex and difficult to use, which is why it is concentrating on making its software as simple and intuitive as possible.

Other significant changes to the new version of Box include:

• Real-time activity updates.Powered usingTornadotechnology, the new Box brings real-time updates and in-line uploading to users. It works in a similar fashion to theGrowlnotifications on Mac OS X, keeping users up-to-date with latest content and collaboration activities anywhere on Box.
• New collaboration features.A new discussions tab at the folder level facilitates conversations around projects rather than individual files.
• Box Apps Marketplace.Third-party apps have been available for Box for some time; more than 150 partner apps have been developed and notable integrations includeNetSuite,Google Apps,SalesforceandSurgarCRM. The new Box Apps Marketplace provides easy access to those partner applications from a new tab.

Invitations to the new version of Box will start rolling out to the company’s 5 million users today; users will be able to switch between the old and new versions through the end of February.

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Collaboration Tool MemberHub Updates to 2.0 : Online Collaboration«

I’ve written a few times aboutMemberHubbeing agreat group communication and collaboration tool, so I was interested to hear about its recent upgrade to version 2.0.

MemberHub provides places for group members to connect and communicate, as well as tools for managing those members. It offers more features than such services asConvosandTgethr, which we’ve looked at in the past.

Its core features are focused on easily sharing information and working collaboratively within groups, whether working online or via email. It is built around discussions and messaging, integrated file management and calendar functionality.

MemberHub is not aproject managementsystem, but it has functions not found in other group communication systems, like the ability to send out text messages from the app. This could be tremendously useful for both reminders and emergency notifications.

Thanks to the recent upgrade, administrators can now add members to a group without users needing to pre-register.

For larger groups, the process of managing members and hubs (or groups) within a business or organization has been simplified. Improvements to this area make working with the product much easier. MemberHub can manage members individually and as a part of multiple groups, which is one of the key differences between MemberHub and other collaboration tools I have seen.

As a user, I can now add multiple email addresses to my profile, to better facilitate being a part of multiple hubs or groups. Administrators can add members to the larger organization, and assign them later to individual sub-groups like Finance or Membership. Administrators can create subdomains with custom branding for each hub.

An organization of any size should see many benefits from implementing MemberHub. In my first review, I was impressed with its functionality as a communication platform. I still think that MemberHub is a great option for businesses, schools, non-profits, and churches. It’s now an even better option for larger groups.

MemberHub remains one of my favorite and most-recommended web services. I’m not aware of any other service that combines member management and online communications features as well.

MemberHuboffers a free single-hub plan, and paid options ranging from $5 per month for 3 hubs and 30 people, to $149 per month for 1,000 people and unlimited hubs.

How are you keeping your group connected?

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Choosing a Collaboration Tool Capable of Working Internationally : Online Collaboration«

When you’ve got team members all over the world, you have to have the right tools to keep them all up to speed.Inventure Managementworks with Brazilian and American employees and found itself in need of a collaboration tool that could cross international barriers easily. Janis Majors, who manages projects for Inventure, described the search process:“We are a management consulting company with clients ranging from multi- billion dollar companies to start-ups. What we needed was a cloud-based project management tool we could use as an extranet, shared with our clients. A major consideration was Google Apps integration, as we use Google Apps Enterprise as our IT backbone, running our email system, intranet and websites. We tested more than 20 software packages that integrate with Google Apps, and when the dust settled only one contender was still standing:Smartsheet, because it is intuitively easy to use, and at the same time actually manages to track everything we need to track. We decided to go all in, and implemented Smartsheet as our only system for project management, task management and information sharing, internal as well as with clients.”

Avoiding Cultural Issues

One of the potential issues that goes along with using tools in different territories is that you may easily find yourself facing a cultural barrier, as well as any language barriers that you already now about.  Taking cultural considerations into account from the point you decide on a tool is necessary. Your training may have to reflect the diversity of your team, as well as being available in multiple languages. Majors notes,“Until now, we have held informal training sessions, mostly conducted by myself. But as we are growing and building a Smartsheet training program with several internal instructors. We haven’t experienced any difficulties with language/slang so far. But our Brazilian employees all have to be proficient in English. Implementation in a regular Brazilian company would be difficult. An advice to Smartsheet would be to consciously use the‘simplest’ and most common way of explaining a feature, even if it is less elegant. This would increase the pace of Smartsheet’s expansion into international markets. Actually, it would not be difficult to translate Smartsheet into other languages. A Portuguese version would open up a huge and booming Brazilian market, for example.”

One of Inventure’s key considerations was choosing a tool that its staff could access, no matter where in the world they are. The company significantly reduced the resources it has to put towards IT and maintaing a server. But being sure that the different members of its team were able to fully use that tool was just as important a consideration.

What do you look for when choosing tools that will be used by team members in more than one country?

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How to Make Paper Communication Productive With QR Codes: Online Collaboration«

A couple of weeks ago,Charles brought up the subject of QR codes, an increasingly popular topic for remote workers and general purpose mobile Internet users alike. That got me thinking about how I use QR codes, and how I might be able to use them to greater effect in a collaborative working environment.

A QR code is basically a real-world link to a virtual destination. It takes the manual entry aspect of URLs out of printed website addresses, by allowing people interacting with a printed document or graphic display to simply scan a barcode with a mobile device, leading them to the desired web page. Other info can also be conveyed via QR codes, including contact information and map locations.

Creatingand using QR codes is so easy, it struck me that they could also be incredibly useful for enterprise deployment, especially if you or your office still uses paper for a portion of your record-keeping or communication purposes. Here are some sample applications of the kinds of implementations that I’m now using to help make the process of going from paper information to digital destination as painless as possible.

An Appendix of Links

When preparing a printed document for review by a coworker or collaborator, I’m now including an appendix of links as QR codes, with coordinating in-text citations. It’s much better for the reader, since they aren’t interrupted by lengthy URLs that, even if they were actually going to manually enter them as they read, would be a huge pain to input. Instead, with an appendix of QR codes, if a reader finds that they really need to check one of the included contextual links to access the background info for a particular passage, all they have to do is snap it with their mobile to be taken to the article or document in question. This is especially convenient if the person you’re preparing the document for does a lot of work while travelling, but there are even desktop readers, like the multi-platform Adobe AIR app QReaderthat can use your computer’s webcam to capture and interpret QR codes.

Record Keeping

Many organizations still keep paper files, even when much of their business and bookkeeping has gone digital. If you want tighter integration between what you have in print and what you keep digitally, QR codes are a great way to make the link. You can even encode QR symbols with ftp:// or file:// links if your records are stored locally or on an intranet server, and then read these using a webcam and a program like QReader, mentioned above. Contact information can be saved entirely as QR codes, in case you find yourself needing to get in touch with a former employee or coworker who is long gone from the active duty roster.

Inter-office Memos and Posted Bulletins

Some offices still circulate printed memos and post printed bulletins. QR codes are perfect for this type of communication. Phone numbers for RSVP requests and map locations for events or meetings can be included as QR codes for easy retrieval using cellphone cameras and apps.

In fact, even if you’re sending out an event notice by email instead of print, including a QR code with map coordinates might be a good idea, since recipients can just snap a photo of their screen before leaving the office and instantly have directions to the right location in Google Maps, leaving out the possibility of human error that comes along with manual entry of such information.

1,000 Other Possibilities

The way I see it, if you’re still using paper for whatever reason, there’s no reason that paper shouldn’t also include QR codes. Even if there’s just one, and it links directly to a digital version of the very same document it appears on, that would be a huge boon to most workers, who in most cases have to follow through with at least one digital action as a result of any paper-based request or imperative. If you’re a part of a larger organization, you can even try implementing a customized organization-wide QR-based app that lets you do whatever you need to with the technology, since the type of info it can store is virtually limitless (it can hold over 7,000 numeric characters).

The paperless office may still be a dream for many, but with QR codes, you can make sure that even with one foot in the papered past, and one in the digital future, as little information as possible is lost in the gap between the two.

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Document Collaboration Best Practices: Online Collaboration«

Working in teams with members spread out across various time zones around the world can be a challenge. Even when your team is located in the same building, sharing and collaborating on documents and content can be tricky if you aren’t using the right tools.

All too often, I see people working on the same document and shipping it around via email, and before long, you have multiple conflicting versions made in parallel by several people. Yes, it may seem like creating a document and sending it to a few team members over email is the easiest solution, but it can quickly become a nightmare of merged edits and too many versions, all going in different directions.

Here are a few document collaboration tips and best practices  to reduce the pain and make you more efficient.

Pick a Tool

1. Figure out if you already have an appropriate tool you can use. Your IT department or another team member might already have a document collaboration tool, so start by trying what you have to see if it meets your needs.
2. Wikisare a great solution if you have a large team and want to develop content that anyone can edit, or if you want to share the content with a large audience. They are also a good solution if you will have a large number of pages with related content and many links between documents. You can install a wiki internally behind your company firewall if you need additional security or you can open it up to the world, depending on your needs.
3. Google Docsworks really well for sharing a few documents with a small team, and it is one of the best ways to collaborate on spreadsheets, presentations and other documents where the end product is a standalone document in a specific format.

For all of my current projects, I use wikis and Google Docs; it’s likely that one of these solutions will also work for you. If not, there areplenty of other choicesdepending on your specific needs, ranging from simple text editor applications with local network sharing to high-end collaboration suites for large enterprise businesses and everything in between.

Have the Right Mindset

You need to go into the document collaboration process knowing that other people will change“your” work. As a result, you want to think about the document as a team effort and not something that you own. The vast majority of the time, the additions from team members will make the output better, so be careful to look at changes for improvements and not get defensive about other people changing or rewording your earlier draft. Occasionally, someone (maybe even you) will make a change that takes the document in the wrong direction. Often these undesirable changes are based on some misunderstanding of the purpose or the audience for the final product. Hopefully, you’ve picked a tool— like a wiki or Google Docs— where you can view and restore previous versions. It’s a good idea to get in touch with the person whose changes are reverted or add a comment on a discussion page to explain why, and to investigate whether some of it can be reincorporated.

Release Early and Often

Too many people want to get their document as close to perfect as possible before they share it with anyone else, but that really isn’t the best way to collaborate. Would you try to cook a perfect dinner for someone without finding out when they were arriving or asking if they have any dietary restrictions? Probably not. You would at least have a conversation with them to better understand their needs. The first version of your document can be that initial conversation where you find out if your plans are on the right track. You can start with a disclaimer at the top of the document stating exactly where you are in the process to help people understand that it’s just a list of ideas or an outline for what will eventually be the finished document. This gives people time to tell you whether you are going in the right direction or are way off in left field before you have invested too much time in it. You can even assign sections to different people to work on or get suggestions that you might not have come up with on your own. By putting the content out there early and making frequent changes, you can get team members involved and collaborating early.

Format Later

Don’t get too caught up in formatting and making the document beautiful early in the process. Especially when you are collaborating with other people, worry about getting the content right first, and then figure out how you can best display it with the right headings, formatting and image later. This also gives you the flexibility to transfer the final version of the content into another tool with more robust formatting features to create nicely-designed PDF files or other formatted documents.

What are your favorite collaboration tips for working on documents with other people?

Photo by Flickr user Sean MacEnteeused under the Creative CommonsAttribution 2.0 Genericlicense.

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A Team Member Without Good Internet Access: What to Do? : Online Collaboration«

When you work with your team on a purely virtual basis, good Internet access is crucial. One person with a spotty connection can slow down the whole group. This issue is becoming a growing concern as companies hire employees around the world; Internet access isn’t consistent in every country.

Right Person, Wrong Internet Connection

Situations do come up when the person you want or need to work with just doesn’t have the Internet connectivity to support the tools you use or to easily download the files they need. There are different options available, the simplest of which can be adding a stipend to pay for an improved Internet connection of some sort.

There are, however, some places where a great Internet connection just isn’t available. For the right person, it’s worth choosing tools that don’t require high-speed Internet access. This kind of situation can be less than ideal, especially if you need to keep files synchronized, making it necessary to weigh the difficulties against the value of working with a particular individual.

Preparing for Emergencies

At any given time, you can read about floods, fires and a wide variety of other natural disasters in the news headlines. With team members spread throughout the world, there’s a greater chance that services such as Internet access will be disrupted by such events.

It’s good to have an emergency plan in place for these situations so you aren’t left scrambling if a team member’s Internet connection goes out. That can include making sure that you’ve got alternate lines of communication set up— you may be surprised by how many teams communicate purely online, not even making a note of members’ cell phones in case of an emergency. It can also be worthwhile to look into setting up alternate methods of internet access ahead of time, like a wireless modem.

Hiring With Internet Access in Mind

It’s interesting to watch the job ads listing positions for telecommuting. It’s become fairly common for such jobs to require having a high-speed Internet connection as part of the job. Virtual assistants based in places like the Philippines or India will often make a point of noting the speed of their Internet connection. It’s become a valuable asset in such careers not only because it makes a person more productive but because many employers now expect an Internet connection beyond dial-up.

PhotocourtesyFlickr userJonas Boni

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Creating and Implementing Your Marketing Plan (Part 1): Online Collaboration«

Marketing is an area where many business owners flounder. That’s usually due to the fact that they lack a plan for getting the word out about the business, but it’s hard to know where to start when creating a marketing plan. You may have ideas for how you might promote your business, but figuring out if your strategy and tactics are worthwhile and then organizing your ideas into a workable plan of action can be overwhelming. In this two-part post, I’ll discuss a few tools and tips to help you create, implement and maintain a marketing plan for your business.

Before you can begin any kind ofmarketing or promotion, it’s important to have a firm grasp of the purpose, mission, and values you want for your business, but for the sake of this post, we’ll assume you’ve gotten that far. You know your unique selling proposition, your target market, and what your business represents. Now you just need to find a wayto create a more focused and consistent plan for increasing awareness and, ultimately, finding more customers and clients.

Finding Your Marketing Strategy and Tactics

One of the hardest things about marketing is selecting the overall strategy and individual tactics for promotion. There are hundreds of ideas; narrowing them down can be a challenge, especially if you’re new to marketing.

One of the best ways to get your initial direction formarketing onlineis by looking to other successful companies or entrepreneurs and learning from their experience. For example, if you want to build a blog, find a few bloggers that you admire and follow, and then dig back to the very beginning of their blogging days. This will take a bit of time, since most successful blogs take a while to establish. If they’ve published two or more posts per week, it might take a while to get back to their very first post, but keep digging!

Once you reach the beginning, get ready to take notes. You’re going to begin going through all their posts looking for clues as to what has made them such a success, and here are a few things to look for as you go.

• How often do they publish to their blog? Weekly? Twice-weekly? Several times daily?
• Are their posts long or short?
• At what point did they starting getting consistent comments, and when did their comments start to steadily increase? Was there something that they changed or were doing during those times (and the months before) to generate those comments?
• How is their site laid out, and do you notice anything about their site that might be particularly helpful for capturing visitor attention and converting them to subscribers or customers?
• How has their writing evolved over time?
• What kinds of posts do they regularly publish? Interviews? Advice? How-to articles?
• Many bloggers tend to create“How I Created a Successful Blog” posts, once they reach a certain level of success. Keep an eye out, and if you find this sort of post, pay close attention to the blogger’s advice, and then think of ways you might be able to apply that advice to your own marketing efforts.

Be aware that there is no single answer to some of the questions listed above. If you can find a successful blogger who advocates short daily posts, I guarantee that you can find another who prefers long articles posted weekly. The key is to find an approach that you think will work best for your situation, personality and style.

Also, a note of caution, you’re not looking to copy any other blogger (in fact, that would be a good way to fail). You want to be original and unique with your business, so the point of this exercise is not to copy anyone else, but rather to emulate the marketing strategies that they’ve used to build their blogs. Think ofthese bloggers as mentors and role models, not people to clone.

Brainstorming Your Options

As mentioned, the options for marketing and promoting a business are virtually endless, but here are a few that I like best:

• Blogging, guest blogging and article marketing
• Podcasting and video casting
• Interviews and appearances for relevant websites and media opportunities
• Online networking

Once you have some ideas for potential marketing tactics, you’re ready to begin weeding through them to find those that you think are most likely to work for you. In next week’s post, we’ll discuss tools to help you with tracking and organizing your options and then begin prioritizing them into a plan of attack.

What tactics do you use to market your business now, and what ideas are you thinking of adding to the mix soon?

Photo by Flickr userdps, licensed under CC 2.0

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Integrated Online Accounting and Bookkeeping With Zoho Books: Online Collaboration«

Zoho, a provider of anextensive suite of 26 web applications, many of whichwe’ve written about previously, is now offering a bookkeeping and accounting system calledZoho Books. It will compete with online business accounting systems likeLessAccountingandQuickBooks Online.

I was given a preview of the app, and the folks at Zoho that I talked to take great pride in operating their company using their own products. Unfortunately, I didn’t get as much of a chance to explore the product as I would have liked, but another blog announced Zoho Books prematurely, and Zoho had to take the site down until today.

I was impressed with what I was able to see, however. Zoho Books is intended for businesspeople who may not have accounting backgrounds, but it includes the features we’ve come to expect from accounting software, including functions to manage customer, invoice, banking and expense data. Users can generate estimates, quotes and invoices in multiple currencies, all of which can be customized, include company logos, and be sent electronically or by postal mail. Its systems for generating reports, automating recurring invoices and sending out payment reminders should be useful for many businesses.

The new service is a natural extension of existing productsZoho InvoiceandZoho CRM. Not surprisingly, Zoho Books integrates well with the existing contacts modules, and the service makes it easy to import and export data. Zoho has preset systems for importing information from other major accounting programs, and Zoho support will assist you in importing data from other sources.

Zoho Books also includes some nice additions, including a function allowing accountants and financial advisorts to collaborate with business owners in real time, and a system for letting customers pay online using Authorize.net, Google Checkout, or PayPal for Business.

Even though the Google Apps suite competes with Zoho, the new app joins several other Zoho applications that are available in theGoogle Apps Marketplace.

Avideo tourand a free 30-day trial of Zoho Books are available, and Zoho is offering two free months for those signing up for the new service. Zoho Books is priced starting at $24/month or $240/year, which includes access for two users. Additional users may be added for $5/user/month. Combination packages will be available for those who are already using other Zoho products; pricing has not yet been set.

How do you manage accounting for your business?

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Trunk.ly Keeps Track of the Links You Share Online: Online Collaboration«

Ever since hearing that Yahoowas planning to ditch Delicious, I’ve been looking at alternative bookmarking services.Trunk.lyis a free bookmarking app with a twist: It automatically gathers all the links you share online and makes them available via a searchable web interface. It can connect to Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and Pinboard via built-in connectors, and as it can work with RSS feeds, it can also grab links from services such as Instapaper, Tumblr and Posterous.

Once you’ve created an account and logged in, you simply authorize the services you want the app to connect to. Trunk.ly will then start collecting any links you share, and it’ll also go back and gather any links you’ve shared in the past from your accounts, too.

Links are displayed in chronological order on the homepage with icons to indicate where they’ve come from, along with any tags and the tweet or message included with the original link. The listing of links is interesting to scroll through but probably not all that useful; where Trunk.ly shines is in its fast search feature, which filters the listing of links as you type, providing a quick way to find links you posted previously. For example, if you vaguely remember sharing a link to an awesome martini recipe a few weeks back and want to find it again, you can use Trunk.ly to dig it out of your archives.

While there’s a bookmarklet for adding links manually to your Trunk.ly account, as well as some social features (you can follow other Trunk.ly users and see their links, and you can also see when other users share the same links as you), it probably isn’t going to replace the existing dedicated social bookmarking services like Pinboard and Delicious, unless you happen to post every single link you’d like to recall to a social media account. However, it is an easy way to maintain a no-effort, zero-cost archive of all those links that you share online.

Let us know what you think of Trunk.ly below.

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Jobs 2.0: Data-centric Jobs for Generation Y: Online Collaboration«

While some may say that Generation Y are slackers, I think they’re just waiting around for the next crop of interesting jobs. Well, good news, 20-somethings, the new fall line of jobs is here! You’ll note that most of these jobs center around one thing: data. Gen Y (which I prefer to call Gen A, for“Analysis”) will be the first generation entering the workforce that have the skills to apply measurement and analysis to everything. They’ve been counting calories on their iPhones, anxiously trying to raise theirKloutscores and driving their follow counts on Twitter. Data is the new black.

Content Monetization Manager (Department: Production)

There are an incredible number of ways to monetize content coming onto the horizon. The days of CPM being the only game in town are over. Affiliate links, daily deals, in-text ads, sponsorships, promoted on-site Twitter feeds and remnant inventory optimization: It’s all coming your way if you make money from content. How to best utilize these monetization strategies for your users, your content, your site design and your bottom line is a tricky thing. The content monetization manager will make use of all of the content monetization tools available, the underlying usage analytics, and the CMS, and will constantly A/B test monetization strategies and page layouts to maximize revenue, while preserving the user experience.

Webmaster 2.0 (Department: Marketing)

Pretty much no one has the title of“Webmaster” any more. But like all things retro, it’s coming back. The new webmaster, much like the content monetization manager, will be responsible for fine-tuning every detail of the corporate website to produce the desired result (sales or leads). Websites are becoming much more dynamic, more content-heavy (including text, images and video), and blurring with corporate blogs. Tools of the webmaster 2.0 includeGoogle Analytics, SEO,Salesforceintegration (for closed-loop data), and the CMS. The job will include lots of A/B testing of landing pages,cohort analysisand a healthy dose of keyword and inbound linking SEO.

Amplification Manager (Department: Marketing)

As social media evolves and expands, it also becomes more diluted. Many social media vanguards have now pushed Tweeting and Facebooking down to the internship level (partly because it is so time-consuming). What is emerging is a radical new philosophy of amplification: the ability to use social media, SEO, virality, and sharing as a powerful mechanism for promotion. While most social media managers would sum up the first five years of social media as“engagement,” the next five will be about “amplifying.” Like having sharing buttons in all the right places, cross-posting, SEO, targeted retweets and Klout scores (amplification being a big part of this score). If you’re not amplifying, you’re dying.

Game Mechanics Designer (Department: Engineering/Product Management)

Just like almost every website has a sharing feature, every application in the next few years will have game mechanics. Easy to understand, but harder than you think to design, game mechanics will become a full-fledged job. Just like any application development company worth its salt has a studied and knowledgeable UX person on the team, the game mechanics designer role will become just as important and prevalent.

Employee Mechanics Designer (Department: HR)

The future of the employee experience will be much likeFoursquare. You’re in sales and made 50 phone calls in a day? Great, you just got the “Heavy Dialer” badge. You’re in QA? Well how many bugs did you close out today? Check the company QA leaderboard. It’s all coming; Marc Benioff is already talking about integrating these kind of features into Salesforce.com.

Much like the game mechanics designer designs the incentive and engagement structure in your application, the employee mechanics designer will design the internal game that is your business, which will include an ever-evolving set of rules that must be aligned with the current goals of the company.

Metrics Manager (Department: Finance)

The metric manager’s job is to extract data from every nook and cranny of the company. Once the stream of data is flowing, it’s then time to put it in a data warehouse and do interesting things with it. Pretty charts and pictures usually are the most engaging place to start, but departmental dashboards and daily metrics emails will be more useful. Metrics managers will love statistics andTufte.

Crowd Manager (Department: Crowd and Community– A New Department)

In the next 10 years, every company will leverage the crowd in some shape or form. Whether it’s directly through building applications inMechanical Turkor sponsoring designs in99Designs, or indirectly by managing a sub-crowd in a marketplaces likeTrada(for advertising) orNapkin Labs(for design). How you interface with the crowd, how you incentivize them (payment, praise, virtual currency, rewards), and, more importantly, how you teach your own company to work with them correctly is key.

In case you don’t want to work for anyone (how very Gen-Y of you)— there are also some amazing self-employment opportunities arising as well:

Crowd Worker (Self-Employed)

Having a boss is so 2010. The next generation of workers will be gainfully self-employed working in the crowd whenever and wherever they want. As crowdsourcing marketplaces (such as Trada’s performance-based advertising marketplace) reach critical mass and generate real dollars for their workers, full-time livings are being made by a few. Soon the few shall be the masses. 2011 will be the year that crowdsourcing as a viable businessanda viable job becomes a reality.

Expect the increase in the self-service workforce to drive the need for new regulation (and opportunity) around individual and group-buying healthcare. It would also be a good time to invest in Starbucks, the primary office-space of the crowd-crowd.

Life Coach 2.0 (Self-Employed)

It used to be the good old days where you could just pack your old self in a box, move to another town, and start over. Unfortunately, with everything in the cloud, your former self is destined to keep following you. What you need is some expertise.

The new life coach will be versed in online reputation building and PR. They’ll know about services likeAbout.mebefore you do. They’ll be monitoring your Klout scores and crowd reputation. Breach some etiquette on Twitter or make some publicfaux pas– no problem – your life coach can just SEO that away for you in a few weeks.

As the future become about reputation, engagement and online social profile, we’ll all need a little help smoothing out the edges. Life coaches will need to know about building reputation, scoring algorithms, and how to be a better you (at least statistically speaking).

Personal Trainer 2.0 (Self-Employed)

The future of the self is measurement. How many footsteps did I take today (FitBit)? How many calls at work did I make (employee game mechanics)? How did my Klout score go up or down? Am I meeting my workout goals onDailyMile?  The old personal trainer/nutritionist role will morph into a digital age version of itself, focused on measuring first, optimizing second. Skills will include technology (measurement), data management (storage), analysis, and medical and privacy law.

Niel Robertson is a three-time entrepreneur and CEO ofTrada Paid Search, a crowdsourced paid search marketplace. You can find Niel on Twitter at@nielr1.

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Talking Through New Productivity Tools With Your Team: Online Collaboration«

When you add a new tool to the set you expect your team to work with every day, it takes more than just a little bit of training to get the ball rolling. You have to sit down and talk about the tool if you want your team to make full use of it.

Communicating the Value

In most organizations, adding new tools isn’t something that’s up for discussion with the people who actually do the lion’s share of the work. That’s for reasons of practicality. The IT pros make sure that everything works together, and management should get a good idea of whether it meets the organization’s needs and fits the budget. It’s only when the tool is being incorporated into the processes your team typically uses is it really discussed with the organization as a whole.

But once the decision to use a particular tool is made, it’s worthwhile to have a sit down. By telling your team members the reasoning behind the decision and giving them context for the new tools they’ll be using (beyond simple training) you can reduce resistance. It’s not uncommon for an organization to find that employees drag their feet about adopting new tools. More often than not, that’s down to the fact that the employees in question view the transition as more work for them. Without clear communication as to how a new software package can help your team do their work, they’ll see it as something of a hindrance.

Offering the Discussion

Learning new tools, especially those that may seem at first to add to your team’s workload, is not an exciting prospect. As a general rule, your team probably wants to find ways to reduce its overall work load, rather than add to it. That makes it necessary to sell changes— to convince your team that there’s value in making the change. In many cases, productivity or collaboration software should be an easy sell, since these tools generally make your team’s lives easier. But if they don’t (maybe you’re bringing in a tool that makes tracking projects company-wide easier, but requires your team to do more work), you’ve got to hold a discussion to demonstrate its value. You have to show that this change is going to have a big impact for the company overall and why it’s worthwhile for your team members to go with it.

Having this discussion may mean a few one-to-one conversations for difficult change-overs, or if you work with a virtual team. No matter what, though, the conversation has to take place.

PhotocourtesyFlickr userChelmsford Public Library

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Don’t Do Social Media Marketing by the Numbers: Online Collaboration«

As the social media industry matures and best practices continue to refine, I’m struck by how too many people tend to get caught up in the numbers— or at least the wrong numbers— and let those numbers dictate how and when they use social media. I’m not talking about keeping an eye toward the bottom line, or making sure you are getting a return on your investment in social media tools. I’m talking about companies thinking there is some“magic number” for how many tweets to do in any given day, how many times to post to Facebook a day, or how many blog posts to publish in a week.

While you should create some kind of structure or parameters around the time you spend communicating through social media, and there are some general rules you can consider, you shouldn’t be setting rigid limits. Through the years, I’ve come up with these guidelines. They change from year to year based on the popular network of the moment and how familiar people become with these networks. I suggest that you:

• Tweet or check Twitter several times a day.
• Update the status on a Facebook Page at least once a day, check at least several.
• Blog at least once a week, check comments at least daily.

You should also know your audience because they may have a maximum tolerance. My own parameters for maximum engagement vary depending on service, my audience, and my capacity, etc, but generally I try to:

• Tweet no more than several times in an hour.
• Update the status on a Facebook Page no more than several times a day.
• Blog as much as it makes sense for your business goals, your audience and your capacity.

There seems to be much more of an audience“tolerance level” for more blog posts compared to more Facebook status updates, for example, because blogs serve as useful as repositories of content as well as distribution channels of current information, and because unless someone subscribes to your blog by email, it is far less of a push medium than many social networks, there is much more of a“tolerance level” for more blog posts than more Facebook status updates, for example.

Here are some numbers that youshouldbe thinking about, instead of simply counting how many tweets you put out today:

1. The increase of engagement in your channels.Some easy ways to gauge engagement includeTwittercounter, which can email you weekly stats; the Facebook Pages insights that are emailed to you by Facebook; or by using an application such asSwix Analytics.
2. The breakdown of your fan base.Analyze where you are getting not just the most fans, but the most growth. Determine what you are doing when you see spikes in the growth of your Twitter followers or Facebook fans. For example, does that spike in follower count happen when you follow more people on Twitter or when you reference other Twitterers? Does it happen when you use Facebook social ads to drive traffic to your page or when you added a Facebook promotional fan box on your blog? Do more of what works if you can.
3. The strength of your relationships.This is a bit harder to measure, but you need to assess whether you know your customers better because of what they say on your Facebook Page or what they address to you on Twitter or comment on your blog. Are you getting more people responding to you, commenting on what you say, repeating (retweeting,sharing) what you’ve posted? The stronger your relationships, the more influence you have, but having influence should not be your goal. Having strong relationships and earning trust should be.
4. The volume of feedback. While getting a great deal of feedback requires more resources in order to react and respond to it, more feedback means you are not doing business in a vacuum, and you are opening better and faster lines of communications with your customers through social media. Every piece of feedback you receive, whether good or bad, is an opportunity to connect. Always remember that negative feedback is an opportunity to do something better.
5. The conversion from fans to customers.How closely are you paying attention to how fans on your Facebook translate into actual sales? Iwrote about Swix Marketer previously, which is a tool that can help you monitor clicks, conversions and sales. Many monitoring tools help you listen to what is being said and manage your responses, but how are you putting mechanisms in place that help you correlate activity in social networks with actual increases in sales?

Get out of the mentality of targeting a certain number of tweets of Facebook updates per day. Instead, go with your overall goals, the needs and wants of your audience, and the content and flow of the conversations. Look more deeply into how social media is increasing your authority, building your connections, and streamlining your communications with all of the people who matter most to your business, whoever they may be.

What numbers do you focus on when evaluating your social media efforts?

stock xchng imageby mihow

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ChromaPaper Adds Offline Sync to Read-Later Service Instapaper: Online Collaboration«

Users ofInstapaper, a popular service that allows for the saving of online articles to read at a later date, should check outChromaPaper, an unofficial Chrome app. It adds some extra features to the Instapaper website, such as two-column pagination, but what makes it really useful is that it provides offline sync.

The app can bedownloaded from the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, a couple of new ChromaPaper links will be added to the top-left of your Instapaper account screen:

Clicking the“Offline Sync” link will download the unread articles saved to your Instapaper account to your browser’s local storage, meaning you can read them even while you’re offline; handy for being able to catch up while you’re flying, for example.

The“Options” link allows you to enable other ChromaPaper features, including two-column pagination and the ability to save the scroll position in each article.

ChromaPaper is free. Some of its features are still being developed, so you may find a few bugs while using it, but it’s worth downloading just to get the offline sync feature.

(Via Lifehacker)

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World IPv6 Day Is June 8. Should You Care?: Online Collaboration«

Most web workers have probably heard that“the Internet is running out of addresses.” In response,The Internet Society, together with such major players as Facebook, has announcedWorld IPv6 Day. What will this mean for web workers, businesses and individuals?

The Problem

A website address like gigaom.com is actually an easy-to-remember alias or nickname for a numeric address like 74.200.247.61. (GigaOM actually has several, to deal with the traffic that the website receives.) These addresses can be in the range 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255. Because some of the possible numbers are reserved, there are theoretically somewhat over 4 billion internet addresses available under this system, which is known as IPv4.

Unfortunately, it’s been known for some time that we’re running out of IPv4 addresses.By some measures, only 2 percent of the available addresses remain, and they will be exhausted in mid-February, in just over a month.

So the internet will need to move to IPv6 addresses, which will give us a bunch more possibilities: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 of them, in fact. There’s some great information available if you wantdetails.

Getting Ready

A lot of the infrastructure of the internet will need to be updated in order to support IPv6, but very little of it has yet been deployed. It won’t be possible to make the transition to“native IPv6″ in the time available. Therefore, a number of short-term fixes are in the works, but the FCC, in arecent paper{PDF}, calls them“kludges.”

The short term solutions are necessary because there is not enough time to completely migrate the entire public Internet to“native IPv6″ where end users can communicate entirely via IPv6….These kludges include more efficient use of the IPv4 address resource, conservation, and the sharing of IPv4  addresses through the use of Network Address Translation (NAT).  While these provide partial mitigation for IPv4 exhaustion, they are not a long-term solution, increase network costs, and merely postpone some of the consequences of address exhaustion without solving the underlying problem.

Most users won’t see any immediate effects when the IPv4 addresses run out. But large site operators, like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, will be affected, so they have agreed to test their readiness for IPv6, or at least the short-term solutions being worked on today, on June 8. In the long term, major infrastructure upgrades will be needed. As the FCC paper says:

{T}he short-term solutions are problematic. The“solution to the solution” is to complete the transition to a native IPv6 network. A native IPv6 network will restore end-to-end connectivity with a vastly expanded address space, will improve network performance, and should decrease costs. Completing the transition of the public Internet to IPv6 will take time.

As for the rest of us, we probably won’t need to do anything in the near future. It will be up to our internet service providers to make the necessary changes to their systems. A few people may need to reconfigure routers and VPNs, and web hosts will need to add some new DNS records.

If you’re interested, you cantest your connection here. But don’t worry if you get results like this one.

It just means that your ISP hasn’t assigned you an IPv6 address yet, which will be true for almost everyone.

By the way, Google and Facebook will still be available via the current IPv4 system on and after June 8. So don’t panic. You’ll probably hear from your ISP in coming months, but it’s unlikely that you’ll lose service.

How are you and your colleagues preparing for IPv6?

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Track Staff Time With TimeDoctor: Online Collaboration«

There have been a number of recentproductivityapps to help individualstrack where their time goes. For many people, it’s very easy to lose time to unproductive tasks.TimeDoctoroffers to do the same thing for companies, including those with remote teams. By tracking the time that remote employees spend on different tasks, a manager can tell how well her team members are using their time, and can help them make better use of it.

Tracking and Record Keeping

TimeDoctor focuses on tracking how employees spend their time. The software also includes monitoring and record keeping features. You can see at a glance what your team is working on, and can receive reports on what your team has accomplished in specific time periods. The program effectively acts as atask managementtool, as well as tracking software.

The monitoring tools incorporated into TimeDoctor are not entirely automatic. While the software can automatically monitor the use of certain websites, the developers are still working on adding application tracking. Employees will also need to report the specific projects that they’re working on. TimeDoctor randomly takes screen captures to ensure that team members’ reports match reality.

The developers of TimeDoctor also provide time-management tips to help employees make better use of their time during working hours.

You can access a free beta version of TimeDoctor through itswebsite. Once it exits beta, the developers plan to charge 20 cents per work hour logged. The program is available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

The Question of Motivation

I do have a concern about the problems that using a tool like TimeDoctor may create. Team members could easily see such tools as an invasion of privacy. It’s common for employees to feel that it’s okay to take short breaks from their work— in a way, Facebook breaks have become the new smoke breaks.

Managers need to bring in a tool like TimeDoctor with some sensitivity to this issue. Otherwise, it could lead to poor morale, team members attempting to circumvent the system, or less efficiency, because employees feel like they must be always on task. Since TimeDoctor requires interaction by the employee (turning on the software, entering project information, and so on), simply requiring employees to start using such a tool would be problematic at best.

It is absolutely necessary to present software like TimeDoctor as something that will be helpful to employees.  Such tools shouldn’t be used to punish underperforming employees, but should be ways to help employees identify their own work habits and make them more productive.

How do you track your time, and your team’s time?

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Hamachi VPN Now Available for Mac: Online Collaboration«

For several years,LogMeIn Hamachi²has been one of my favorite tools for creating a VPN that allows me to connect to my network remotely. I can create and access secure virtual networks on demand, across public and private networks.

It’s easy to install; each computer is assigned a unique identifier. Users can then create password-protected private networks, or join existing ones through an AES 256-bit encrypted connection. The unique identifier is in the format x.x.x.x, so it looks like an IP address to the operating system. Thus, once the Hamachi network has been set up, you can use standard tools to communicate between machines. Shared drives will display in Explorer or Finder, and you can use Remote Desktop Connection or Apple’s Screen Sharing app.

Until recently, the Hamachi client for Windows has been way ahead of the rudimentary command-line tool that was all that was available for Macs. That’s changed. The new Mac version 2.0 sports a spiffy GUI, plussome featuresthat were previously Windows-only, including a way of sending private chat messages between connected machines. There’s also abetacommand-line version for Linux.

Hamachi is one of several related products from LogMeIn. We’ve talked aboutLogMeIn Ignition, for accessing computers from mobile devices;LogMeIn Central, for managing multiple machines in a corporate environment; and web conferencing systemJoin.me. The LogMeIn website has a wizard for helping users decidewhich product is appropriatefor their needs.

Hamachi is available for $199 per year. Thelicenseincludes the ability to create multiple networks of up to 256 computers. There is also a non-commercial version that’s limited to networks of up to 16 computers, and a14-day free trial.

How do you and your colleagues connect remotely?

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3 More Google Analytics Tips: Online Collaboration«

I’ve recently written a couple of blog posts related to analytics:You Blog, But Does Anyone Care?and5 Simple Ways to Get More out of Google Analytics. It appears (based on the analytics, of course) that quite a few of you were interested in this topic, so I thought I would follow-up with another post and a few more tips. When I wrote the earlier post, I had a hard time narrowing it down to just five tips, so here are three moretips onGoogle Analyticsfeatures that you might not have used before.

1. Advanced Segments

Don’t feel limited by looking at your data through the segments that Google Analytics defines as defaults. While all visitors, new visitors, and returning visitors are certainly interesting, you should try defining some of your own. I have created a segment for looking at the behavior of frequent visitors, meaning visitors who have come to the site 5 or more times in particular time frame. It’s possible to compare such a custom segment with other segments, so I can see if frequent visitors spend more or less time on the site, and visit fewer or more pages than new visitors, or other returning visitors.

You can create some very detailed segments, too. For example, I created two test segments: both are from Western Europe, but one segment isFirefoxusers, and the other isChromeusers. I compared the two, and found that people from Western Europe using Firefox spent more time on my site and visited more pages. You can even use these advanced segments on the custom reports that I mentioned inmy previous post.

You can define a custom segment by going to the“My Customizations” box and selecting“Advanced Segments.” Once you have an advanced segment defined, an“Advanced Segments” drop-down menu will appear in the gray bar at the top of your reports.

2. Navigation Summary

The Navigation Summary lets you look at any page on your website, to find out what page they came from, and what page they went to next. This provides interesting information about whether key pages are fulfilling their purpose.

For example, my blog has a“Starting Point” page that was designed to help people find articles that I’ve written. The Navigation Summary shows that from my Starting Point page, most people go to my page on Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks. I suspect this is because of the way the navigation on the page is designed; I can use the analytics data to reorganize the navigation to make my content easier to find.

You can get to the Navigation Summary by visiting the“Content Overview” page and clicking on“Navigation Summary” in the right column, underneath the graph. On the Navigation Summary page, select the“Content” drop-down box to see navigation data for any page.Dennis Graham has written an in-depth explanationof some other interesting ways to use this data.

3. Views

Detailed data in Google Analytics is shown as a table by default, but you can also see the data as a percentage pie chart, performance bar chart, comparison chart, or even a pivot table with all kinds of interesting data about your visitors. For example, a pivot table could be used to compare visitors from Google in Asia who are new or returning.

Looking at a pivot table of my top content, it was interesting to see that people who land on certain pages fromTwitterspend much less time on the page than people who arrived from some of the other sources.

To access the various views, go to any page with a table and look under the right side of the top graph or just above a table to find a“Views” section with five icons representing your different views.

What are your favorite Google Analytics tips?

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Buffalo CloudStor: Another Option for Remote File Access: Online Collaboration«

TheBuffalo CloudStor, just announced at CES, is an external drive that has built-in capabilities allowing you to make its contents available outside your own network. As with thePogoplug BizandPogoplug Video, which we’ve written about previously, users will be able to make the contents of the Buffalo CloudStor available anywhere with an Internet connection. In fact, the CloudStor uses technology from Pogoplug to make these connections possible.

CloudStorwill be compatiblewith Mac, Windows and Linux, and won’t require installation of any special software, although the drive will come preformatted with the EXT-3 file system. Since this format is not readable by Windows PCs, Buffalo will provide a free application allowing Windows users to access their data.

None of the content on the device will actually reside in the cloud, so there will be no monthly storage charges, and you will be able to decide which content you wish to make available. Of course, you will be able to limit unauthorized access.

In addition to its Internet capabilities, CloudStor offers many traditional network attached storage features, including support for private network sharing. Plus, CloudStor has an integrated backup system that will allow Mac users to use Time Machine to back up multiple Mac systems to the drive.

The device will include two drive bays. The first will be filled with either a 1- or 2 TB drive; you will be able to install a compatible 3.5” SATA hard drive into the spare bay. The installation will require no tools or hard drive trays.

The Buffalo CloudStor is scheduled to become available in Februrary, and will be priced at $169.99 for 1 TB, and $269.99 for the 2 TB version.

The CloudStor may be less expensive than buying a Pogoplug Biz plus similar-sized standard external hard drives, and its integrated design is likely to be simpler and more attractive. But if you need significant amounts of storage, the CloudStor doesn’t give you the option of attaching up to four drives, as the Pogoplug does.

How do you make your files available outside your internal network?

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It’s Okay to Work at the Kitchen Table: Online Collaboration«

In a recentpost by Chris Brogan about family balance, he says he might be perceived as someone who lacksbalancebetween work and home. But he says,“I’m more home, more connected, and more a part of my family’s life than…ever before” thanks to what he calls“kitchen table companies.” Such companies“can operate from a kitchen table, get talked about around the kitchen table, and get {workers} home in time for dinner.”

This got me thinking about how much my beliefs about business have changed in the ten years since I started my own company. I used to agree with the common recommendation that lines should be clearly drawn between one’s business and personal space. The advice was that you shouldn’t work from your kitchen table, and that you should have a separate space for your business.

From a balance perspective, it seemed only natural tocompartmentalize, and to have clearly-defined boundaries between work and home. After all, wasn’t that how it worked with“regular jobs”? So when I created a business, I attempted to maintain clear boundaries between it and my home life.

But I began to see that my life as an entrepreneur was very different from those with“regular jobs.” For me, it was a struggle to determine where my work life stopped and my home life began. I thought that something was wrong with me for a while, but then I realized that I actually liked the blurred lines. I liked‘living’ as much within my business as outside. Since that was true, why was it so necessary to separate the different parts of my life?

I’ve come to accept that I like having a“kitchen table business.” Like Chris Brogan, I have way more time with family and friends now than I ever did before starting a business. I haveflexibilityto work when I’m able: around sickness, around unpredictable bouts of insomnia, and around the even more unpredictable ebbs and flows of life. So while I used to believe that having a“kitchen table business” would set me up to become a workaholic, I now see it as a way to live my life exactly as I want.

Does my business haveboundaries? Yes, but they’re more like gray areas. I’m a web worker, but I also have Internet-free days. There are days when I work eighteen hours, and other days when I work three. Sometimes I work in my pajamas from the sofa, but I can crave the structure of my office. In the end, it all evens out, and for the most part, I feel I’m able to maintain a semblance of balance.

How do you balance your life and business? Do you set clearly defined boundaries, or are you able to work successfully at the kitchen table?

PhotocourtesyFlickr userMuffet

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Stuff I’m Still Using: My Favorite Products From 2010: Online Collaboration«

One of the fun things about writing here is that I get to experiment with a bunch of apps and devices that I might not have tried otherwise. A friend recently asked how many of the products I wrote about last year have made their way into my everyday work life. I checked, and here’s the list, in no particular order:

Devices

• TheOverdrive Mobile Hotspotfrom Sprint. I’ve been very impressed with the simplicity and usefulness of this device while I’m on the road. I took it on across-country train triplast summer, and was able to get a 4G or 3G signal in many large and medium-sized cities. I’ve had to exchange this device twice: The first one stopped booting, and the second one had a defective USB port. But Sprint was very good about replacing them, and the current version came with updated firmware and seems to be faster and more reliable than the original one.
• TheHTC EVO 4G, and most of theAndroid apps I wrote aboutin November. I’m still discovering more cool apps, and have added some like theofficial LinkedIn appthat was recently released.
• TheZaggSPARQbackup battery chargerfor USB devices. Much as I like the EVO, I have to watch its battery use, so having some extra power in my pocket is awfully handy.
• The third-generationKindle. I find it so comfortable that I forget I’m using an e-book reader.

Apps

• TotalFinder, the Mac Finder replacement that adds tabs and other enhancements. The latest version has added cut and paste, a real necessity.
• TheFirefoxadd-onsthat require secure connections over wi-fi networks. I’m still using Firefox, thanks to theadd-ons I still can’t live without. Most are now available for Chrome; I might be able to switch once something likeGmail Manageris available for that browser.
• My web-design company is using theGoogle Font APIfor embedding fonts into websites.
• The“Call from Gmail” function thatGoogle Voicedebuted in 2010.

I tried some really great hardware and software last year. There are some other products that didn’t make the list, not because I didn’t like them, but because they didn’t fit my workflow for one reason or another.

The innovations from 2010 were quite impressive. I look forward to seeing more great stuff in 2011!

What cool new apps and devices did you discover in 2010?

Image by sxc.hu usercoscurro

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