I tend to curate a lot of content on Twitter that I think/hope will be useful to people and so here’s what I’ve shared over the past week.
Shared on May 18, 2012 at 6:04am via www.businessinsider.com – Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook, could have saved at least $67 million by renouncing his U.S. citizehip and moving to Singapore, where the capital gai tax is 0%. According to CNN’s Dana Bash, Saverin might pay those taxes after all. “He intends to pay all taxes he owes on us investments, despite renouncing us citizehip,” she tweeted. Earlier today, ……
Shared on May 18, 2012 at 5:52am via www.businessinsider.com – Let’s work backwards with your comments. About the lack of healthcare — it did not seem to bother those immigrants and othe who fed their families, educated themselves, prospered and went on to found major enterprises that employed othe. About that sweet tax rate: I will give you that the wealthy are able to hire lawye and accountants to protect their ……
Shared on May 17, 2012 at 8:52pm via www.lifehack.org – Most small and mid-sized businesses have joined the content marketing chariot to further reach potential custome. Ironically, some business entrepreneu are still in their comfort zone. They don’t want to take respoibility for growing their business. They don’t want to take action to expand their business. The Internet has ……
I’m a huge fan of Instagram and when you first join, the question is who do you follow. The best choice is to look for your RL friends and also people with similar interests — for example, I follow a lot of other Australian Shepherd owners on Instagram. But sometimes, in a moment of weakness perhaps, you might feel the need to follow a celebrity or two..
There are a number of celebrities now on Instagram and I am sure that the list will grow now that Facebook have acquired them, but here are some accounts to get you started. Most of these are relatively active and as far as I can tell, are using it themselves (instead of their PR agency).
I’ve added a full list of “celebrities” at the bottom – some of which are clearly managed by agencies, some are pretty inactive, and some.. frankly I am not even sure who they are.
Real Users (appear to be anyway).
Jamie Oliver – @jamieoliver
There’s a lot written in blogs and in books about Values – both corporate and personal.
Zappos, for example, created its 10 core values as the foundation for the entire company – their culture, their self-image, the benchmark against which each employee is measured. Values become the collective morale compass for a business. But its important that they are not owned nor defined by the marketing department.. the goal here should be to define how you and everyone behaves. They are, after all, what you “value”.
The same is true for you personally. What do you believe? What do you represent? Like I mentioned in my “You are what you do” post, you are not what you “say you are” – you are the sum of your actions.. but also of your beliefs.
PDA, we don’t even use that phrase any more – but I have been using a second brain for twenty years or so. Besides ”public display of affection”, the other meaning for PDA is – personal digitial assistant.
What do you get when you combine a PDA with a phone…
Today, we just call them “smart phones” – but before the iPhone, they were a separate device. One for keeping yourself organised – address book, task/to-do list, calendar, etc. And one to make phone calls. They started to merge long before the iPhone of course, but it is still somewhat surprising how long it actually did take.
Anyway, here’s my personal history of the PDA devices that I have used over the years.
1988-1996: Daytimer / Filofax.
One of my employees recently told me that he had 2750 emails in his inbox. I couldn’t believe it, no wonder he had problems keeping on top of tasks and felt “overwhelmed” at times at work.
Keeping emails in your inbox longer than they “need” to be there is the equivalent of having papers spread around your messy desk.. you brain has to either consciously or subconsciously scan those items every time you look at it and keep reminding yourself why you have it there. This approach will lead to lower levels of productivity and increased stress.
Many people seem to think that “InboxZero” is some sort of mythical beast or perhaps even an asymptote. The reality, however, is that it can be achieved more easily than you may think – with a pretty simple approach:
1. Do not use your inbox as a to-do list.
You need to change your attitude towards your email inbox and the first place to start is with its purpose. Your email inbox is a temporary location for incoming email.. email, as in communication. It is not a to-do list. I’ve written on personal productivity before, you need to start using a dedicated task management / to-do list system – and not use your inbox for this purpose.. it is not designed for it.
I tend to curate a lot of content on Twitter that I think/hope will be useful to people and so here’s what I’ve shared over the past week.
Shared on May 11, 2012 at 8:09am via techcrunch.com - The UK housing market has been on shaky legs for a while now — with tight lending conditions, unemployment and general consumer confidence all playing their part in slowing things down — and that is having the inevitable knock-on to sites built up to serve that sector: today brings news that Zoopla, one of the UK’s bigger property sites, is buying up a smaller ……
Shared on May 11, 2012 at 7:03am via searchenginewatch.com - Based on the happenings over the past few weeks, and especially given that Google is sending warning messages about unnatural links to webmasters it seems almost inevitable that the next great link building business scam will be promising to clean up linking messes for websites, so those sites will have a chance to get back in Google’s good graces. ……
Shared on May 11, 2012 at 6:57am via www.distilled.net - On May 7th, Mozilla announced that Aurora (Firefox’s public beta) is beginning to roll out their HTTPS-by-default Google search behavior. It won’t be long before this is default in Firefox. As their announcement states, the user will be none the wiser (save for that tiny ‘s’ after http, and the secure lock icon). Webmaster’s on the hand – let’s just say ……
I currently subscribe to 760 blogs. I find them invaluable for keeping informed and for spotting industry trends. Some of them, many of them, are quite entertaining too.
I use Google Reader to primarily control and centralise my subscriptions. I also use Google Reader to read these blogs when I am on my PC, but I prefer reading them on my iPad using the Reeder app.
Social media in its “firehose” format is a terrible way to keep up to date with blogs in my opinion. Someone can write a blog, announce it and then post a tweet (or whatever) about it and unless you constantly have your eye on your feed, you could miss it. For blogs that I want to read each and every post, I prefer RSS and Google Reader.
Social media, however, is excellent for “content discovery” – especially if you use apps like Flipboard or Zite. You follow people on Twitter (or whatever) who you think will share interesting and relevant information and so it makes sense that if they share some content, you would be interested to see it. Flipboard is perfect format for consuming these shares.
I posted last July that I like to listen to AudioBooks and how the iPhone Audible apps is oh so spectacular.
My preference is to listen to non-fiction books – business, personal development, etc – and read fiction. One of the reasons for this is that non-fiction can be delivered in a scientific or somewhat unexciting way. It takes a great deal of commitment to sit down and read something when most of your energy is being spent on trying not to drift off. With an audiobook, you can do other things – walk, run, drive, chores. I’ve found this the most effective way of absorbing some amazing content.
The problem is that some audiobooks are just as dry – if not more so – than the material they are written about. It sounds like this is such a chore and that I don’t enjoy it – the opposite is true actually. But here’s this book containing all this information and knowledge that I would like to learn and understand and it then gets delivered by a voice actor with a calm, relaxing, soothing, regular, …. zzzzzzzzz.
So there are two ways to get the most out audiobooks and extract this awesome information in the most effective, least coma-inducing way.
The first is what I mentioned above – do something else while you are listening. Walk the dog. Listen on your commute to work. Riding the bike. etc.
The second is… speed it up.
Do you want to be more successful – at work, at home? Do you want to be more relaxed, less anxious and happier? One of the most powerful ways to achieve these is to make a life-changing choice – and that is to simply be.. accountable.
We all know people who go through life as victims – perhaps you are one of these people too? I’m not referring to true victims – victims of crime etc – but people who never seem to associate their own actions or behaviour (cause) with the results, the outcome (effect). Everything seems to happen to them. It was never something that they did; they are simply unlucky. If they are not accountable, if it is not their fault – then they have not failed, life failed them.
Personally, I find this sort of attitude unpalatable and the reason is that it is simply a state of mind. It has nothing to do with ability, intelligence, social background or education. It is a mental habit that can be changed and once done it will be the most liberating experience of someone’s life. You reap what you sow.
There’s two parts to this post really – first, did you know that you can synchronize your iPhone/iPad photo stream with a Windows PC? and second, how to get the iCloud syncing it to work properly because it is sort of flaky to get set up. Also , don’t forget that you will need an active iCloud account.
If you have both an iPad and an iPhone and have configured the iCloud on both devices, you’ve probably noticed that photos taken on your phone will appear in the “Photo Stream” on your iPad (and vice versa). But how can I get those photos – my Photo Stream – on to my Windows PC too? The answer is with some free software from Apple called the iCloud Control Panel.
Don’t install it yet!
I couldn’t get it to work properly at first and after several failed attempts, I finally found the solution – and it requires a little configuration ahead of time.
You’ll be creating two folders on your Windows PC. One of these will be the “Downloads” folder (aka “Photo Stream” folder). This will mirror the Photo Stream on both your iPad and iPhone. The second folder is for “Uploads”. This will be similar to the “Camera Roll” on your iPhone. Anything you place into this folder will be copied to your downloads/Photo Stream. Notice that it will be copied and not moved.. just like your camera roll, you will have two copies of the photo and will have to delete from the “uploads” folder manually.
You need to create these two folders ahead of time, because you will have to set some permissions on them in order for the “upload” sync to work properly. I’m not 100% sure why, but I tried every other option before finding this solution — and there appears to be hundreds of users hitting this same issue (at least at the time of writing this post).
OK. So, here are the steps to get this installed and working:
Copyright © 2012 Matt Hopkins. All rights reserved.
