I have to confess, I still haven’t gotten into Twitter.  My Facebook addiction is bad enough.  I fear that if I add Twitter to my arsenal of time-wasting technology tools, I will never finish a book chapter or blog post again.  Nevertheless, Twitter is white hot.  Its chief advantage is being able to meet up with ...

Remember when you were a kid and stayed home from school because you were sick?  Remember how weird it was to watch all those daytime TV talk shows and think, “so this is how the other half lives.”  Remember how it was even stranger when you accompanied your mother on a brief errand or visited the doctor’s office and saw people out and ...

The HR Capitalist has a great post about the distrust of those working from home.  Are they really working, asks writer Kris Dunn, or are they simply squeezing 3 hours of work into an 8-hour day? More importantly, can a remote worker/telecommuter even go to lunch without having that ''gotcha'' feeling?  A recent Business Week online ...

Just when you thought the fad of forwarding silly or inappropriate joke e-mails to colleagues had run its course, along comes YouTube.   Now don’t get me wrong:  I think YouTube is the greatest entertainment invention since Nintendo.  My favorite YouTube video is the Montgomery Flea Market commercial, which I must have watched 100 ...

According to a new national survey by Harris Interactive for The Marlin Company, 10% of U.S employees say their company has used e-mail to fire or lay off employees.  And 17% indicated their boss used e-mails to avoid other difficult face-to-face conversations.   “E-mail has become the new shield of today’s business. Companies hide ...

  Will Schwalbe, a guest blogger at Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist, is senior vice president, editor in chief of Hyperion Books, and has just published a cool new book called Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home.  I’ve yet to receive my copy of the book from Amazon, but I have been following Will’s tips on the ...

When I saw this post about out-of-the-office auto-replies on the BNET Business Hacks blog, I couldn’t resist chiming in.  It all started with a scathing critique of the technology by PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak.  Said Dvorak: What's most annoying about AutoReply is that it amounts to spam, since the person is often looking at ...