Internet & Technology
Advice: MyTwitBook – a parent’s guide to social media – Part Two
Last month, I outlined what social media is, and began to give you, the parent, a quick primer on some of the big players (if you can’t get a hold of last month’s Bellarines Best, just head to rebusiness.com.au for a quick recap). We covered SMSs, MySpace and the wonderful world of Blogging, but we saved the best till last…
Advice: MyTwitBook – a parent’s guide to social media – Part One
Part One: Baby-boomers, Gen Y, Gen X, Gen *whatever* – one thing I know for sure is that the generations are slowly becoming separated by the tyranny of new technology – more so by the pace at which new technology evolves. For parents, the issue is two-fold: 1) where are my children going on the internet? and 2) what harm/good my children be able to do?
Advice: Psst… what’s the password?
Passwords, PIN numbers and security access codes – they seem like the bane of 21st century living. It’s so easy to forget which combination goes with which web site or with which credit card. Remembering passwords is almost a skill in itself. But with more and more of our lives going online, the first and foremost line of defence against unwanted intruders is the strength of our passwords.
Advice: Bowing to a higher authority
I’d suggest that as an individual, we don’t need to be able to amass 100% of the skills we need all by ourselves – in fact, we simply can’t – and that apart from the odd moments of epiphany, we gain our skills and experience by absorbing information from other rich sources – our own stable of mentors. So – who are my own ‘rich sources’ of pure gold? Who are my mentors? Let me introduce you to a couple…
Advice: How to turn web visitors into web customers
In 1943, Abraham Maslow proposed his “hierarchy of needs” – food, safety, love, respect & acceptance – a series of 5 levels that were the building blocks for every human’s existence. In 2009, I’m proposing a new set of 5 ‘needs’ to be able to turn a web visitor into a customer.
Advice: Twitter 101: A primer…
So… what is Twitter? Ah, the multi-million dollar question… Perhaps it’s easier to answer what Twitter is *not*, first:
• Twitter is not exactly like a chat program (MSN, iChat, Skype, etc), but it does let you communicate back and forth with friends
• Twitter is not exactly like sending an SMS from your phone, but it does let you broadcast news and other messages to many people
• Twitter is not exactly like a blog, although it does let you get to know people over time
• Twitter is not exactly like Facebook, although it does let you find people and see what they’re up to
• Twitter is not just a fad – it fills the otherwise empty niche of ‘real-time written communication’ – although it seems to be the mainstream media’s darling this year!
What Twitter *is*, is a free system of writing messages of no more than 140 characters, so that anyone in the world who is also on Twitter can *follow* you, and thereby follow the stream of messages you’re writing.
Advice: Stuck sending emails with big attachments? Get Dropbox and let the magic happen…
It’s happened to the best of us – we try to send an email to a client, colleague, or family member, and we cram in one too many attachments. We press ’send’, and wait for the progress bar of life to tell us that our email is on it’s merry way when – uh oh – it bounces back to us with a gibberish technical message saying, in effect: ‘too big, try again’.
Let me show you an awesome bit of *free* technology that lets you send and recieve files of any size across this Internet – and it all happens as if by magic.
Advice: Skype 101: A primer…
Have you heard of Skype but were afraid to ask about it…? Don’t panic – it’s been a mainstay of voice communications for computer-folks for a long while, but there’s still lots of you (us!) out there who need to be introduced to the concept… one step at a time…
Advice: Two screens are better than one
What used to be the height of luxury for computer professionals has now become an affordable and very real productivity boost for small businesses: adding a second monitor to your computer.
Advice: Photos 101: Everything you ever needed to know about working with photos.
Two of the most fundamental interactions we have with computers and the internet are ‘words’ and ‘images’. By that I mean, mastery of creating and editing text, as well as that of capturing and handling photos.
By all measures, we’re all very well capable of handling the ‘words’ component – yet capturing photos in digital form and handling the resultant images is a rather new skill – and totally new language is required to describe them.