Category: Journal

I’m about to go to bed here in my hotel room in Baie-Comeau, Quebec.  It was a long day driving from London, Ontario, but I had to share this cool little story before going to sleep.

We all want to engage our friends, our audience, our clients, our tribes.

Much like a cocktail party, we want to talk to people, make new friends, network, share useful information so interaction with you is seen as beneficial and people will come back for more.

Twitter is a great tool for achieving this engagement.  It is everywhere, millions of people are on it, including a lot of the people you want to interact with.  Besides being a tool for carrying conversations, I find it is a great way to provide information I come across during the day.  I get email messages that are worth sharing, I have insights that I want to convey to other people, and I subscribe to a myriad of RSS feeds that provide me with lots of information worth sharing.  Twitter provides a great way to easily share all of this with my relationships.

I find, however, that it is a bit hard to take full advantage of Twitter based on my daily workflow and schedule.  That’s where today’s tip, Buffer, comes in handy.

I was never a cat person.

Cats seemed distant, arrogant, egocentric, aloof.  They get sick on your carpet, eat your unattended food, and protest when their bathrooms are not cleaned on a regular basis. Differently than bratty human guests, we can’t ask cats to help with the chores, pay rent, pay for damages, or kick them out. Cats were all demand and no delivery. I always thought I’d never bring such a jerk into my house.

Life had other plans for me, however.  When I married Amy, I inherited Casey, her 9-year-old tabby.  Being slightly allergic to cats and slightly annoyed for having to attend to one, I immediately proceeded to impose new rules for him in my household. There would be no Casey in my bedroom, no Casey on the couch.  Casey would not eat from the dinner table, and behaviours such as pawing on doors, scratching the furniture, and howling outside my door at 4 in the morning were to be strongly discouraged.

Last night I fulfilled a childhood dream.  I drove 120 miles to the Motor City to watch Sir Paul McCartney in Concert.

Multilingual people like me are usual in a tight spot on Facebook.  When large percentages of your list of “friends” speak different languages, how do you choose what language you will use when posting something?

Facebook offers no solution to this conundrum.

Google+, with its “circles,” allows you to organize your contacts in different groups.  When making a post, you can choose which “circles” you want to share it with.  In fact, you can even select the audience down to a single individual.

What are your first thoughts on Google+?