Open Source Blogging

Over the last few weeks, I have been reflecting on how many members of my rather close extended family are either near high school graduation or are in college right now. They have so many great opportunities ahead of them in the next few years - and so many chances to botch things, too. Stephen, Brittany, Robert - these are some of the stupid things I did in college that I wound up regretting financially for … Continue Reading

This morning the replies kept crossing my screen. They look like this:

Just started using http://twply.com/ to get my @replies via email. Neat stuff!

Aaarrrrrggggghhhhh.

To me this marks this company forever that it’s a spammer. I will never try this tool just because of this. It is why I am increasingly finding myself unwilling to put my twitter address and password into a new tool. They can use that access to hurt you and your reputation.

But, on the other hand, this is brilliant. It is spreading so fast that in the three minutes it took to bang out this post … Continue Reading

“Babauta has become a powerhouse of online productivity for good reason: his mantra works.” - Timothy Ferriss, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

Just in time for the New Year: I’m thrilled, overjoyed to announce that my new book is now available in bookstores and fine online book retailers near you: The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential … in Business and in Life!

You can order The Power of Less today:

Amazon.com… Continue Reading

Yesterday Mike Arrington took us off the rails and into the idiot land.

Listen, I’m as egotistical as the rest of them. I can say “follow me” along with the best of them. According to Loic Le Meur and Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, I have more authority than either of them because I have more followers on Twitter. Their words, not mine.

That idea is patently idiotic. We have been derailed from the promised land of smarter conversations on Twitter and have moved into the idiot land if that’s the way we think.

Even worse, my post yesterday about this got … Continue Reading

We had so much fun last year digging through the most popular articles on the blog and on Junta42, we wanted to do it again.

If content marketing was just starting to gain momentum last year, this year content marketing came into its own. Experts such as Seth Godin and Chris Brogan used the term, and Copyblogger Brian Clark regularly preaches the effectiveness of content … Continue Reading

Article by Zen Habits contributor Jonathan Mead, follow him on twitter.

We all get stuck in ruts from time to time. We get off track and lose sight of the life we meant to live. I know I’m probably not the only one who has wished that I could find a reset button for life.

While we can’t exactly travel back in time (flux capacitor or not), there’s certain ways we can “reboot” our lives.

With the New Year right around the corner, it’s a perfect time to get a fresh start on an area of your life you’ve … Continue Reading

Each Monday, The Simple Dollar opens up the reader mailbags and answers ten to twenty simple questions offered up by the readers on personal finance topics and many other things. Got a question? Ask it in the comments. You might also enjoy the archive of earlier reader mailbags.

As usual, we’ll start things off with a few links to older articles that directly answer questions I’ve heard recently. Here are some Christmas thoughts from years past on The Simple Dollar.
The Day After: Six Ways to Deal With the Post-Christmas Money Blues - And Plan Ahead for Next … Continue Reading

The real time web is coming at us very quickly, but it exposes major problems in our RSS/Atom infrastructure.

What is the real-time web?

You can get a small taste of that by watching the 5,300+ people I’m watching in Real Time on friendfeed.

The first time I saw the real-time web, I saw it when my tweets showed up on Twitter search and friendfeed within minutes. Sometimes within seconds. Now, imagine a world where everything worked like that. That’s the real-time web.

The problem is that our blogs don’t participate in the real-time web. They publish via RSS. RSS is … Continue Reading

I care about news. It’s why I love talking with Gabe Rivera, the guy who makes TechMeme and a bunch of similar sites, like I did in Paris France at the recent LeWeb Conference.

I told him that TechMeme has grown cold for me, which is why I wanted a new system — one where humans bring me the news instead of algorithms.

Rivera countered that he wanted a page that — no matter when you looked at it — would be filled with news from the most credible and authoritative sources from around the world.

And that nailed why it’s cold … Continue Reading

The other day, Gary Shapiro, the guy who runs the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, dropped by and left a comment here. There were a few problems:

1. My commenting system caught his comment in moderation, so people didn’t see it posted until I took it out of moderation right now.
2. No one probably knows who Gary is and thinks he’s just another random commenter. Some comments ARE more important than others, but there’s really no way for me to point out Gary’s comment without doing a new blog post. Even then, if you happen only to see … Continue Reading