If you, like me, are one of those “It’s new! It must be better” people, then chances are you’ve already enabled Facebook’s replacement of the Personal Profile page, which it calls Timeline.

Timeline, it turns out, sucks. It lets anyone dive way deep into your past online history much, much easier than before. Plus, it breaks many perfectly good browser extensions which help you control your privacy on Facebook — extensions like Better Facebook (soon to be called, thanks to a Facebook cease-and-desist letter, Social Fixer).

So, if you want to go back to the old profile, here’s how.

1. First, you need to have a Facebook developer account (which you do, because that’s how you enabled the Timeline in the first place).
2. Go to the Facebook Apps page.
3. Click on the app you have created where you have enabled Open Graph from the left hand side navigation menu.
4. Click on Edit Open Graph then delete all three Open Graph settings by clicking on the buttons shown in the below pictures (courtesy of dreamsrain.org)

Except in one case.

Most people don’t know this secret little trick in that Facebook “Approve App” window — one that can keep your email address away from the app developers!

I asked my Twitter followers the other day “What’s the best business advice you’ve ever received?” Here are their responses:

ricepoint1
“Be patient, wait for the buyer to change, die or finally give in and buy from you.”

williamvavrek
“Start small.”

wtoddkeller
“Don’t give up.”

sparks_on
“Never think you’ve made it. Continue to improve your skills.”

suzemuse
“Quit whining and keep working. It will pay off.”

mvboronowski
“Unless you’re an accountant, get an accountant.”

jenarbo
“Pay yourself first. And do free (donated) or full-price; don’t do discounts.”

dr_suze911
“Baby steps.”

RobboMills
“Run away screaming.”

Paulnixey
“Double-nothing is still nothing.”

TheSpitter
“Work for yourself.”

Note: This doesn’t work for all applications — some developers may choose to not make a trial version available — but most seem to.

Related articles

• Apple: No demo, trial, or beta software on Mac App Store (venturebeat.com)
• Apple Confirms no Trial Software or Demos in Mac App Store (slashgear.com)
• Ten changes we’d like to see at the Mac App Store (macworld.com)

Image via Wikipedia

I hate my mouse. Okay, not the mouse itself, I’ve got a fancy high-tech mouse. I just hate mouses¹. I know it seems silly, but I find it a waste of time for me to move my hand over to the mouse, move it, and return my hand to the keyboard.

I came from the DOS world, where mouses didn’t exist at all. Later, in the Windows era, I relied on the many keyboard shortcuts — like being able to pull down the File menu with ALT-F, something the Mac still doesn’t provide a shortcut for.

Needless to say, I’m not fond of bookmarks for that very reason. You can only get to them by clicking a mouse.

And then I realized something.

Last night, in a sudden spark of cola-infused inspiration, I realized that by creating subdomains on my company’s domain setup, I can provide our team with nearly instant shortcuts to the tools we use most often.

Take the online calendaring tool we use — Google Apps’ Calendar. The URL is https://www.google.com/calendar/b/1/render². Obviously, I’m not going to type that in, and while I do have it bookmarked (it’s even a link on my Bookmarks Toolbar) I tend to not click the link.

Here’s how it works.

I’ve set up the subdomain cal (as in cal.tmedia.com) to point to that long and ugly Google Calendar URL. This requires a tiny bit of technical knowhow — or, at least, being able to spend a few minutes on the phone with your domain provider’s tech support. But it’s not much more complicated than telling your domain the subdomain you want to use and where you want it to send people. (You can also “mask” the URL so that when people are sent to the site, they don’t see its “real” URL there. I don’t bother with masking.)

And presto! My team now has a whole slew of keyboard shortcuts. Some of them are (don’t bother trying to use them — you’d need to know our login accounts and passwords to get anywhere past the front door):

• projects.tMedia.com
• invoicing.tMedia.com
• mail.tMedia.com
• crm.tMedia.com
• conferencecall.tMedia.com
• home.tMedia.com (you can see a screenshot of our horribly designed home page if you’re curious — I’m actively looking for help making it easier on the eyes)

Better Branding for Clients

We use 37signals’ excellent Basecamp web app as our project management tool. One of the reasons I selected Basecamp was that nearly every page on the site has its own unique URL. This makes it easy for me to create a tMedia-branded subdomain which takes clients directly to their own portal within our project site — clientname.tMedia.com, for instance.

Action-Based Keyboard Shortcuts

Then I realized that some actions, like composing a new email in Gmail, have their own specific action URL³ and created newmail.tMedia.com to launch a blank new email compose window. Try it if you have a Google account. It should open up a blank new email.

Oh, and here’s one anyone can use if you need some quick lolz: lol.tMedia.com

Related articles

• How to add links with a keyboard shortcut (savvyblogging.net)
• I hate mice! (ask.metafilter.com)
• How To Navigate Google Search Results Using Your Keyboard Only (makeuseof.com)
• Switching from Windows to Mac? Here’s what you need to know. [TNW Apple] (thenextweb.com)
• Compose Gmail Messages with Automatic CC: and BCC: with Semi-Secret Shortcuts [Keyboard Shortcuts] (lifehacker.com)

1. I struggled with this one — “mice” or “mouses” in the computer context. Turns out the both are acceptable.
2. It’s the same URL for any Google user. If you click that link, you’ll probably get to your own calendar if you have a Google account.
3. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#compose to be specific

Like many nerds, I watched the live feed of Facebook’s announcement regarding its new messaging platform. I had high hopes for it but, alas, not only is their product fairly basic, turns out it’ll actually be bad for the Internet. Here’s why.

Facebook Can Shut Your Email Off. Forever.

Let’s say you decide to use Facebook as your primary email service. Your email address of davesmith@facebook.com is entirely within the control of Facebook. They could, for any reason they like, disable or delete your account, preventing you from accessing your email. Facebook has been notorious for disabling accounts without reason or explanation. To this day, my account is banned from advertising on their service for a reason they won’t tell me. Since there was no mention of the POP mail protocol at the announcement, it’s an easy assumption that Facebook won’t support the downloading of your mail to your own hard disk.¹

Other providers are much less punitive. Plus, you can get your own domain (like my todmaffin.com domain) and use it as a pointer to your real email address. My actual email provider is Gmail, but I use a @todmaffin.com email address to forward emails there. But here’s the trick: Gmail will send my emails as if they’re coming from the @todmaffin.com address, meaning in theory my actual Gmail address isn’t locked in people’s address books.

Facebook’s new messaging system will almost certainly only send emails as the @facebook.com address, meaning if Facebook decides they don’t like your username (or any of the other hundreds of seemingly arbitrary account-deletion decisions they’ve made), your email just dies.

UPDATE: By total coincidence, today Facebook seems to be randomly disabling the accounts of women, claiming their profile isn’t authentic.

You Thought One Spam Folder Was Bad…

Facebook’s new email system actually introduces a second spam folder, called Other Messages. Basically, emails from your Facebook friends and people you manually designate will go into your inbox and everyone else will drop into an Other Messages folder where they’ll live in obscurity.

One More Island of Data To Search

We already have more islands of data to search through to find what we’re looking for. Our personal email, our work email, our phone’s text message history. This would introduce yet another island to search through.

In an attempt to keep my email all consolidated in one place, I’ve taken to responding to any Facebook email I get with a macro that says:

Thanks for emailing me on Facebook. This is an automated message. I have NOT seen your message.

I am trying to consolidate my email, so please send your email to:

EMAILADDRESS@todmaffin.com

I will not see your email if you don’t send it to the above address. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thanks.

Is it really automated? No. I paste that in manually. And of course I could very well read and reply right in Facebook, but I don’t want to have yet another place to search. (As it stands right now, the ability to search your Facebook messages is sorely lacking.)

Of course, you can’t simply turn off Facebook email. What I’d love is a way to set up a never-expiring vacation message that replies with the above, but it’s not there now, and it won’t be there in the next version.

Facebook Could Have Reinvented Email As We Know It

The system that drives the a lot of the Internet’s email is actually a relatively small Unix program called sendmail. Except for some security patches and minor updates here and there, it really hasn’t undergone an overhaul since its development. Compare that to the countless other web apps which keep adding features and functionality. (There’s a reason for that. sendmail exists in hundreds of thousands of places. Giving it a large-scale update would require all the other installations to upgrade as well, a task that would be a logistical nightmare.)

This is why Facebook, with its closed email system, could have reinvented email and really made it something useful. For instance, we could have the ability to “recall” emails if they haven’t yet been read (as some corporate email systems like Exchange and Groupwise can do), emails could have an expiration date/time where they just deleted themselves from inboxes if they expire, or any of the functions I wrote about in my article Email 2.0.

But, no. It seems Facebook’s email system is, essentially, Hotmail with a pre-populated whitelist. That’s it.

Get Ready to Be Drowned in IMs and Text Messages

Facebook’s engineering lead was positively giddy when he described how Facebook’s new email system will offer a “seamless” messaging experience. If you’re at your computer and logged in, replies show up as IM chat windows. If you step away, replies get delivered to your cell phone as a text message.

Frankly, I couldn’t imagine anything worse.

I rather like leaving my emails in an inbox for me to come back to. If I need to get someone’s email forwarded to my cell phone, I’ll set up a filter thankyouverymuch — big surprise: no mention of any filtering ability in Facebook’s system. Don’t hold your breath.

Can you imagine sending or replying to a half-dozen emails over the course of a morning, then watching your Facebook tab flash, your cell phone start chiming, your email box filling up. You’ll yearn for the days of Hotmail 1.0.

What do you think? Will you use Facebook’s messaging system?

1. They claim IMAP support is coming. I don’t expect this is high on their priority list.

Ok.. So even though we have the fan base now, I still need a stinkin phone number so Facebook can verify I am a human and then I can set the various url’s for both the account and the page.

Any clever ideas of who has an unused number? I already used everyone including _____’s… so.. yeah.. I’m at a loss here.. any suggestions?

Facebook seems to insist on having a unique phone number attached to every page. Or at least it seems that way.

Problem is, we’ve used all the phone numbers we have!

Does anyone know a way around this?

So I started doing it and, in a very low-tech storage strategy, simply rubber-band them together with a piece of paper on top indicating what group they were from.

But honestly, besides getting their email addresses to email them an abbreviated copy of the presentation, I’m not really sure what to do with them. The archivist in me, however, insists that I keep them.

Why? Should I throw them out? What do you do with the business cards you collect?

Related articles

• Fictional business cards to fill your scifi Rolodex [Concept Art] (io9.com)
• Geeky Business Cards for Fictional Companies (geeksaresexy.net)
• Edible business cards? (izitso.net)
• Why Your Business Card Is Crucial To Your Business (ronmedlin.com)
• How to Network Without Business Cards (epiclaunch.com)
• Cartoons drawn on the back of business cards (lostateminor.com)

1. he does this by offering to send a copy of the presentation to anyone who gives him their card

Audio Player: This creates a tiny Flash audio player in the post. All you have to do is add the URL to the MP3 file you want it to play. Great for simple podcasting.

Facebook Like: Facebook’s massive online domination makes this almost a mandatory these days for bloggers. Some blogs report their traffic boosted considerably when they started using it. This creates a small Facebook-style “Like” button on each post. When a reader clicks it, a note goes up on their wall saying they liked the article. This alerts their Facebook friends who might come check out your article too!

RSS Footer: This creates a footer at the end of all your RSS-distributed posts. In case some bot is scraping your content, this at least lets you force a message pointing people back to your original post. Despite its name, you can have the message appear at the top of your post, if you want to deliver a harshly-worded “If you’re not reading this on yoursite.com, this site is stealing my material!”

This is what my footer currently looks like:

TinyMCE Advanced: WordPress’s visual editor is okay and its toolbar does have quite a number of tools, like Bold, Upload Photo, and Styles. This plug-in adds even more to that toolbar, like Advanced HR, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Full Screen, IESpell, Layer, Media, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters, and XHTML Extras.

Editorial Calendar: This is such a cool idea — rather than displaying your draft posts as a simple list, this gives you a calendar where you can schedule your upcoming posts by just dragging your stories from one day to another. Chris Brogan has a great description of it. Here’s what my current upcoming editorial calendar looks like:

I make no promises that I’ll keep this schedule, but it’s really neat to be able to see it all laid out like that.

WordPress Footnotes: I believe footnotes were society’s most important discovery. After penicillin, of course. This makes it crazy-easy to make footnotes. Any text you enclose in double-parentheses will show up at the bottom of the post, along with a numbered and linked (!) footnote at the insertion point. Here’s an example:¹. This is what that text looked like in my editor:

WordPress Super Cache: A recent article of mine was lucky enough to be featured on Lifehacker.com, an incredibly popular web site. Even if you have a fast server, the volume of traffic that Lifehacker sends can be crippling to an unprepared web server. Because WordPress uses dynamically-generated pages, it takes more time to serve them than static HTML pages. Super Cache essentially creates phantom static pages so visitors don’t notice any slowdown.

Bonus: Zemanta: Zemanta isn’t actually a plug-in for WordPress, it’s a plug-in for your web browser. It reads your post as you edit it and suggests images and related articles that you just click to instantly add! The Lifehacker image above got there by me just clicking the Zemanta box.

The image to the right shows you some of the articles it suggested for this post, and indicates that I clicked on two of them (which you’ll see below).

Zemanta places a plug for itself in the form of a small orange logo at the bottom-right of your post. I’ve left it in for this post, but you can easily just delete it if you’d prefer not to have it there.

Related articles

• 10+ Must have Plugins that are Ready for WordPress 3.0 (tripwiremagazine.com)
• How to Dislpay Related Posts in WordPress (chasingeyes.com)
• 20 Useful WordPress plugins, widgets and social media blog … (anw.in)

1. To make this example work, I actually placed this text in double parentheses.

Like a lot of folks in the social media space, I follow a lot of blogs, Twitter feeds, YouTube accounts, and other content. According to Google Reader, I average 537 articles a day. I don’t just skim them, I actually have a pretty well-defined system for organizing, reading, and taking action on many of the articles. I call it the “four buckets” system. Here’s how it works.

Organize

I subscribe to feeds in Google Reader — a very versatile feed reader that can even subscribe to pages without RSS feeds and let you know when there’s been a change on the page.

My feeds are organized into a dozen or so folders. Each folder name is preceded by a number so they sort in order of priority. In this way, if I don’t have a tonne of time, I’ll just start at the top and be assured I’m getting what I need.

• 1 Top List
  My #1 priority feeds – blogs and Delicious feeds from my closest friends, MacZot, Lifehacker’s Gmail category, a couple of public radio blogs, The Oatmeal, and so on.
  .
• 2 Daily Business News
  Some technology and social media news sites: Mashable, Techcrunch, MarketingProfs, Techvibes Vancouver, eMarketer, and more.
  .?
• 3 Friends
  This one’s self-explanatory. In addition to blogs, my friends’ Flickr feeds, Delicious feeds, and YouTube feeds¹
  .?
• 4 Companies I Follow
  This is where I put official company blogs. Besides the blogs of the main online players, I also try to subscribe to the blogs of the makers of software I run on my system. This is a great way of finding out about updated versions.²
  .?
• 5 Weekend Reading
  This is where I put my fun reading – stuff I want to follow, but know that if I read it on a weekday, my productivity level would dramatically sink. Stuff in here includes: Holy Kaw, Improv Everywhere, Noise to Signal, Photoshop Disasters, the Ryerson Review of Journalism, and more.
  ?.
• 6 Sharpen the Saw
  I use this category for content that helps me improve my skills.³ Copyblogger, ViperChill, Zen Habits, and similar sites fit in here.
  ?.
• Other topics: I’ve got some miscellaneous topics as well that I don’t visit that frequently but still want to keep track of.

Read

For whatever reason, I’ve always found it difficult to stay focused while reading feeds in Google Reader itself on the desktop. That’s why I do most of my reading when I first get up (and, sadly, usually before I even get out of bed) on my iPad with the most excellent Reeder app (Gizmodo review | iTunes link). It’s $5, but well worth the money.

First, Reeder is beautiful. A light grey background, thoughtfulness paid to typography and leading, and intuitive controls to help you move through a river of news. A forceful swipe down pulls up the next article, while you’re scanning the headlines a left-swipe marks it as read and a right-swipe ‘stars’ the article.

More importantly, as you can see above, when you click the Forward icon, a menu flies out where you can send the article to any “bucket” you have set up (see below). In my case, I use Note (Google Reader shared items), Delicious, Read It Later, and occasionally Twitter.

Here’s a video demo of the app:

Act On (the “four buckets”)

It’s not enough to just read, though, if you’re not going to do anything with the content. I have four “buckets” into which I place articles that I am going to use or want to store. Here’s how it works:

• Bucket 1: “Act On Today”
  Star: This is my highest priority flag. I’ll ‘Star’ posts that I plan to take some kind of action on, like use it as background for a blog post, remind myself to call the author, read in more detail that day at work, and so on. I’ve set Google Reader to first open on the Starred page. This means when I sit down at my desk and open up Google Reader, it first shows me a list of items I had flagged to take action on today. I try to clear the Star list by the end of the day. ((Sometimes I Star a whole whack of stuff; in those cases, I rely on the Postrank plugin to help show me which items are gaining the most traction.)
  ?.
• Bucket 2: “Share With Others”
  Share on Google Reader: Items that I don’t need to act on, but want to share with people who may follow me, get shared on either Google Reader (business topics) or my Posterous blog (fun stuff).
  .?
• Bucket 3: “Don’t Lose This Information”
  Send to Delicious: If there’s an item that I don’t need to act on and doesn’t warrant sharing with people, but I still want to keep track of it in case I need to reference it again some day, it gets put in my Delicious account (subscribe to my Delicious feed). What I especially like about Delicious is the ability to add “tags” to items, making them easier to find again. What was that site with great Facebook stats? I just do a quick search on my Delicious page for the tags Facebook and stats and up it comes.
  .?
• Bucket 4: “Read This Later”
  Send to Read It Later: Sometimes there are articles I want to read at my leisure, don’t need any action, and I don’t feel like sharing the content with anyone. They get sent to my Read It Later list. Read It Later is exactly what it sounds like – a place to store articles you plan to get around to reading one day. They’ve got a great mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Blackberry, and have extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari.

This might sound like a complicated system but once I got into the habit of flagging things in this manner, the number of articles I could process increased, as did my productivity in using them.

What system do you use to keep track of all your feeds?

1. YouTube doesn’t make feeds of its users’ videos easy to find. Here’s how to subscribe to feeds in YouTube.
2. If you’re a Mac user, the excellent AppFresh is a great automated tool to update your software.
3. The phrase is taken from the Stephen Covey book Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and means continuous improvement.

Many years ago, when I was enslaved to the Windows platform, I used ACT! — a great contact and task management tool. One of the things I loved about it was you could easily create a follow-up task each time you contacted someone. Then, if you haven’t heard from them for a week or so, you could ping them a reminder.

After losing track of too many emails I needed to hear back from, I developed this system in Gmail. Here are the steps you need to set this up.

.

Setup (you only need to do this once)

.

Step 1: Create the 1 WAITING label

In Gmail, Click the Settings link in the top-right of the page, then click Labels, as below:

Look for the Labels section down the page. It will look like this:

• Type 1 WAITING into the box and click Create. (You’ll wait to put the 1 in front so that it sorts to the top of your labels list, making it easier to click.)
• Go back to the main Gmail page by clicking the Mail link in the left navigation area.
• Look for 1 WAITiNG on the left and click the small box to its left. Assign it a colour. I recommend white text on bright red background so that emails you’re waiting for really stand out in your inbox when they arrive.

.

Step 2: Set up Multiple Inboxes

To keep your eyeballs on emails you’re waiting for a response from, use the Multiple Inboxes feature in Mail Labs. Here’s how to set it up.

First, click the Mail Labs icon at the top right of Gmail (it looks like a small green beaker to the right of your email address):

Scroll down the long list of labs features until you find Multiple Mailboxes.

Click Enable. Scroll down to the very bottom of the page and click Save Changes.

Click the Settings link at the top of the page again, then click the Multiple Inboxeslink.

Type in the information exactly as it appears below:
is:1 WAITING — note: make sure there isn’t a space between is: and 1.

Click Save Changes at the bottom, then ?bo back to the main Gmail page by clicking the Mail link in the left navigation area.

.

Usage

Now that it’s all set up, here’s how to use it.

Step 1: Send your email as usual

.

Step 2: Apply the WAITING label in Sent Mail

• Go to Sent Mail and find the email you just sent (it’s probably the one at the top).
• Click the checkmark box to the left of the email.
• Pull down the Labels menu.
• Click the box beside 1 WAITING.

Your email should look like this. Notice that it now has a bright red 1 WAITING label.

Go back to the main Gmail page by clicking the Mail link in the left navigation area.

.

That’s It!

You’re all set up! Your screen should look something like this:

You now have two areas on your screen — regular emails and important emails that you’re still waiting for a response from. I like this view because it keeps those emails front-and-centre in my mind.

When someone replies to one of these marked emails, it’ll show up in your main Inbox as per usual, with the bright red flag. Reply as per usual and, if you no longer need the flag, just select the Labels menu again and click 1 WAITING to turn the flag off or click the X beside the red label.

Enjoy!

I’ve been lucky to have been speaking professionally since 1997 (when I was nearly chased off stage by the audience of teachers for suggesting the model of classrooms segregated by ages was outdated). Along the way, I’ve made my share of mistakes on the circuit.

Here are ten things that I wish I had known when starting out:

Attend as much of the conference as possible.

If your schedule permits it, be there for as much of the event as you can. Even if you have to cover hotel and other costs on your own dime. Clients really appreciate it when you’re up to speed on what’s been presented earlier, so you can tailor your comments to make the day feel more seamless for attendees.

Though it doesn’t happen often, occasionally a speaker before you will use similar material — you’ll want to remove or change that material in your own presentation. By total fluke once, a speaker after me happened to select the same case study I presented and for five minutes basically duplicated what I’d already said. I guess the event organizer thought it would be too awkward for someone to let him know, so he continued and pretty much lost the audience for the remaining hour he had after that.

I also like to stay after my presentation as well. This is prime time to connect individually with attendees who may have been too shy to ask a question in session.

Really, there’s no downside to attending the whole event if you can.

Ask to speak to groups in the same city.

If you’re looking to promote yourself and get more gigs, when you have your first conversation with the organizer ask them if there are any local business groups who they’re connected to that you might be able to speak to (without fee) when you’re in the city. Often there’s a marketing association, Rotary group, or Chamber of Commerce that would be more than happy to host you to present one of your prepared keynotes to their group. They get great value, and more times than not there’s someone there who is connected to a group that has a budget for pro speakers. If nothing else, you can collect business cards to add to your newsletter.

Record your pre-event client calls.

Of course, it goes without saying to always have at least one pre-event call with the event organizer. In that call you’ll confirm details like the time they want you there for an A/V check, how long they want you to speak for, expected attire, and so on. I spend a lot of time with them learning about specifically who’ll be in the audience — main age groupings, gender split, and what their jobs are.

I used to do the calls while trying to take notes, but I’m just not that skilled at it. I always insist on placing the call (as opposed to them calling me) so that I can call with Skype and use the great Call Recorder app to record the conversation. And I do not take notes during the call — I just focus on the conversation. The goal is to extract as much information as you think you’ll need down the road when putting the presentation together.

Don’t hand out copies of your slides.

Almost always, someone will ask for a copy of your slides. I almost never give them out. This is for two main reasons:

1. Most of my slides are images, not text. A copy of the slides would be meaningless without the commentary.
2. I use a lot of licenced stock photography and video in my slides. I’ve licenced them for presenting it to a group, not for distributing them to others.

Don’t forget that sometimes people want your PowerPoint/Keynote slides so they can basically give your presentation back at their company. Wouldn’t you rather they hire you to give the presentation, instead of giving them part of what they’d need to do your job?

If they insist on getting a copy, don’t put the slides up on your site. Instead, collect their business card and, when you email them the deck, ask them if they’d like to join your newsletter.

Give them something in exchange for their email address.

Though I don’t usually give out my slide decks, I do prepare a PDF document with some notes on what I presented. It’s often about four or five pages long, contains a summary of some highlights, links to things I presented, and so on.

At the end of my speech, I’ll invite them to drop their business card off on a table near me and will email this document to them and add them to my newsletter mailing list. (Always be sure to disclose that they’ll be signed up to your list in exchange for getting the summary, but that they can unsubscribe with a single click at any time.)

Keep a separate copy of each slide deck.

I used to have one basic deck of slides for each presentation, and I’d customize it and save it as the latest version. But this meant that I couldn’t go back years later and see the exact slides I presented to a client. If you have a main deck, open it then save it as a separate file for that client alone.

Record every single presentation you give.

Though most of my clients and audiences don’t realize it, I record the audio of every presentation I give. That way, if I ever need to go back and hear something, I can.

Besides helpful for listening back to yourself so you can improve, it may also help resolve more difficult situations. One time, a client complained, saying an audience member was offended because she heard me use the racially charged “n”-word; I was able to go back and reassure her I’d actually mumbled the word “figure.”

You don’t need any fancy equipment or hookups to the room’s sound system for this. Just start an audio recording going (I use QuickTime) in the background when you leave your computer on the lectern and let it capture whatever it hears through the mic. Even if you don’t speak at the lectern, it picks up the sound system fine. Then convert it to MP3, put it in that event’s folder, and forget about it until you need it.

Backup, Backup, Backup!

This goes without saying, but it surprises me how few speakers have redundant backups. Just last month, I was keynoting a conference and had to go on stage early because the presenter before me couldn’t boot her computer and she had no accessible backup.

Here are the backup methods I use and recommend:

• Turn on auto-backups in your presentation software, that way you always have two copies of your slides; in case your computer crashes while saving it, you’ll always have the most recent uncorrupted version.
• Sign up to Backblaze — it’ll back up everything on your hard disk automatically without you prompting it. It’s only $5 a month. Backblaze is the only system like this I found which can restore a Mac file to a PC and vice versa, if that’s important to you.
• Before leaving, upload the slides to Dropbox.com or something similar.
• Finally, if you’re on a Mac, tell Keynote to also save an additional copy as a PowerPoint presentation and upload that to Dropbox.com too.

But backups aren’t just for files — I carry my own backup wireless mic, fresh batteries, and a separate cheap GSM cell phone, so that in the event mine craps out I just have to pop my SIM card into the new phone and I’m back in business again.

Carry a paper introduction at all times.

Every once in a while, the only introduction I get is something like “And now, here’s our next speaker, Tod Maffin.” Ugh.

The introduction you receive prior to taking to the podium is more important than many speakers realize. It’s what establishes credibility in the minds of your audience. A bad introduction can have your audience write you off as a know-nothing before you even utter a single word.

I prepare a separate introduction for each client (the introductions vary and highlight different parts of my career depending on the topic I’m speaking about) and be sure to meet the person giving the introduction. Nowadays, I just give it to them without asking if they already have one. Always better that they use your material than something they’ve come up with on their own.

Have hidden stat and screen-shot slides

Every single one of my slide deck contains slides that almost never see the light of day. They’re charts or stats that back up some point I make in the main presentation, and screen-shots of web sites I mention.

They’re there because every so often, during a Q&A session, someone will want you to elaborate on a point you made. It really blows the audience mind when you can jump to one of these slides to bring up.

It takes some learning in PowerPoint or Keynote to do this, but it’s well worth the effort.

What are some of your lessons learned on the speaking circuit?

This is a great little app that for people who have lots of videos on their computer, but want to watch them on your iPhone, iPod Touch, and an iPad. Previously what I had to do was to convert the videos to MP4 (often a very slow process), import them into iTunes, and tweak the metadata. Only then could I watch the movies I have on my iDevices. That still wasn’t a great solution, since those videos then took up space on those devices.

This app is really a tiny file server that runs on the same computer on which your videos are stored. You can point it to any number of directories containing your videos, including attached servers, and it’ll stream them live to any of your iDevices. The other great bonus is it’ll convert from basically any video format — on the fly. Brilliant. Appfresh – Free

I’ve always been an early adopter and, probably to my detriment, I always want to try the latest versions of programs. Appfresh will scan your Applications folder and compare your versions with the latest versions. Within a minute, it’ll have a list of programs that need updating. You can always pick and choose which to update — it suggests beta versions, so if you’re not up to a pre-release version, you can opt to not update that app.

Keep vigilant, though, for big upgrades to paid programs (i.e., from 3.1 to 4.0) — they may drop a new version that wants you to pay for an upgrade, leaving you to manually find and re-install the old version (if it’s still available on the developer’s site!). Caffeine – Free

Several years ago, I was speaking at a conference in the afternoon and I had time to attend the whole day’s events. The fellow doing the morning keynote had his notebook up on the stage and he had slipped out the back to make a last minute visit to the restroom. As his computer had been waiting there through a 15-minute coffee break, his screen saver kicked in. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except it was one of those photo slideshows of everything in his iPhoto collection. He didn’t have much in there, except racy photos of he and his wife! I’ve never seen a conference organizer run up to the stage so fast to slam the lid down on the notebook.

Caffeine puts an icon in your menu bar that, when activated, prevents your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen, or starting screen savers. It’s a toggle switch so you just click it again to go back to normal settings. I use this when my MacBook Pro is sitting on stage waiting for me to get up and give a presentation, so I don’t suffer a similar fate. Call Recorder (Skype) – $19.95 U.S.

This is such a great little app, I tell as many people about it as I can. It’s a tiny recording window that pops up any time Skype is activated. Whenever you place any kind of Skype call (Skype-to-Skype, Skype-to-phone, or videocall) it records it as a .mov file on your hard disk. You can tell it to not record calls that are fewer than, say 30 seconds long, and it comes with a MOV to MP3 conversion tool. (The problem with that tool, though, is it resets the timestamp of the file. The program really should offer a save-in-MP3-format option.

I now do all my pre-event client calls using Skype. Once the recording is finished, I just save it into that client folder so I can review it whenever I want. (Another nice touch: It can also save automatically to an iTunes playlist.) JumpCut – Free

Whenever I re-install my operating system (luckily, this has been a pretty rare necessity since switching from PC to Mac) JumpCut is the first app I reinstall.

JumpCut is a fast, low-memory clipboard alternative. Instead of using Command-V to paste, if you do Shift-Command-V and keep that combination held down, you can use the cursor keys to navigate between the last 99 things you copied to the clipboard. Release the keys and it pastes your selection in place as if it were the last thing you copied.

Another nice, probably accidental, function is if you use the regular Paste, the Mac will paste using the formatting of the originally copied text. If you use the JumpCut Paste, your pasted text will inherit the destination formatting. JustNotes - DonationWare

CatherineOmega has been talking up the great little web utility SimpleNote. Simplenote replaces the Notes app on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. When you download Simplenote, you get free access to their web app, so you can access your notes from anywhere. Simplenote really is just a simple online database.

While, of course, you can access your notes by logging into the web site, this service really shines when you access it through simple desktop apps like JustNotes. Catherine uses Notational Velocity on her Mac to access her notes, but I prefer the cleaner UI of JustNotes. Both sit in your menu bar. Click it to see your notes, use the simple search function, and any changes are automatically synced back to the web database, so your iDevices are kept in sync as well. My grocery lists moved here when I first started using them and they haven’t left. Levelator – DonationWare

If you do any audio work — especially when there are uneven levels — you really need Levelator. This program analyzes your audio file and carefully adjusts the volume of all elements so they’re more or less the same. This is a process called “normalizing” in the audio business. Levelator’s normalizing is one of the smartest I’ve seen — it even slowly starts to fade up a level in advance of low-level portion of audio, so that you don’t really notice any background audio changing suddenly. Very clean and simple operation — just drag your audio file onto the window.

There are two downsides. First, the program only handles uncompressed AIFF and WAV audio files. You’ll have to convert any other files, like MP3, to another format before processing, then re-compress after processing, losing a bit of fidelity, depending on how compressed you’ve set your MP3 compression. Second (and I know this is picky), you can only drag the file onto the window the app creates. You should be able to keep Levelator in your dock then drag files on top of there, have Levelator open, process the files, then close. Nothings perfect in life though, right? RescueTime - Free for basic account

In case you’ve ever caught yourself on a Friday thinking “Man, where on Earth did this week go?!”, RescueTime can tell you exactly where it went. This tiny menubar app quietly watches what you do on your computer — which web sites you visit (um…), which programs you run, how much time you take away from the keyboard, and so on. Then, you can pull a report at any time.

What’s even more cool is you can set “productivity levels” for each activity or web site. For instance, when I surf tmz.com, it scores that as -2 productivity. When I’m working on my own web site, it scores that as +1. When I’m in Keynote, that’s +2 productivity. You can even set targets — very cool when it emails you to say you just achieved four hours of productive time (which, oddly, makes me want to call it a day!). RSS Menu – Free

Like most avid blog readers, I use a RSS feed aggregator (Google Reader, in my case) to follow my favourite blogs. But there are a handful of blogs that I want to be alerted as soon as they publish. That’s what RSS Menu, another menubar app, does. You just give it the RSS feed URL of the blogs you want to track, and it’ll check them every few minutes (you control the frequency). If there’s new content, it’ll alert you via Growl (and optional speech) — click on the notification and it’ll take you right to the new post.

RSS Menu is donationware and can integrate with iTunes podcasts and Safari RSS feeds. XSlimmer – $14.95 U.S.

Back when Apple switched from Motorola processors to Intel processors, all the applications had to switch as well. The way most developers did this was to distribute a “universal binary” which contained the instructions to run on either microprocessor.

It’s been years since any Motorola processors were used to run Macs and there’s a 99% chance you’re on Intel. (Any Mac bought in the last five years or so runs Intel.) But many apps still contain the universal code. Xslimmer basically checks to see which applications still contain the old code and removes it — recovering disk space (sometimes a significant amount!) in the process.

Xslimmer is very safe. It has a blacklist of programs it knows about which can’t handle removal of the old code, and I have never once had a problem with any “neutered” program. Bonus: DropBox – Free for basic 2GB box

Dropbox is basically your own personal hard disk on the Internet. When you drag files to the Dropbox folder on your computer (it looks just like any other folder) those files are automatically synced with your Dropbox folder on the Internet. Then, you can access them from any web browser, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, etc. You get 2GB of storage free just for signing up — if you haven’t got an account yet, sign up free here and you and I will both get 250MB of extra space!

A number of providers can do this for you — it’s likely that your phone company offers this kind of service, where people leave a voicemail and the audio is emailed to you.

I use a great service called PhoneTag that goes one stage beyond that — it actually transcribes the message for you. You forward any calls you miss from your office or cell phone to the special number PhoneTag gives you. To the caller, it sounds like any normal voicemail, complete with your voice prompting callers to leave a message. When they do so, a human being somewhere transcribes their message and that text is sent, along with an MP3 of the actual voicemail, to your regular email box.

Google Voice and others offer something similar, but their systems rely on a computer program to try to decrypt what someone is saying. As such, it doesn’t know when a comma or period goes, can’t figure out when someone is spelling out a name, and so on. The people at PhoneTag are usually very good at trying to accurately transcribe the message. They’ll even put [?] after guesses if it’s not clear. If you’d like someone else to take a whack at transcribing the voicemail, just hit Reply and Send.

I’ve found voicemails come to me transcribed less than five minutes after they were left. I never, ever actually “dial in” to pick up my messages.

The other advantage to this is that because it arrives in your email box, you can store the message and audio forever. Search your email for someone’s name and you’ll get their emails and voicemails sent to you. It will even put their actual name in the From line of the email if you upload your address book to the system.

PhoneTag comes with unlimited voicemail box storage, you can still dial-in and pick up messages if you like, and 24/7 customer support. You can pay in any of three ways:

• $0.35 per message

• $9.95 per month for up to 40 messages a month ($0.25 for each message over 40)
• $29.95 for unlimited messages

Whether you are in a meeting, showing off a home with a client, or on the golf course, you can instantly see who called, what they said, and you won’t have to listen to all of your messages to find out about an important missed call. I often hit Forward and reply via email to the person who left the voicemail. They’re often pretty amused to see their words in text form.

That might look like a three-inch wide JPG on your screen right now, but imagine that about two-feet wide and a foot tall. Because that’s what it was in front of the audience.

Clearly, I’d forgotten to turn my instant messenger app off and I got hit by a roaming spambot. Along with 2,200 unsuspecting nice human resources executives.

It taught me two lessons:

1. Never authorize a friend request from suziewhore83; and,
2. Turn off all TSRs (IM apps, applets, online backups, email notifiers, etc.)

The only thing you want running when you’re giving a presentation is your presentation software. Nothing else.

Remembering to Shut Them Down

The hard part is remembering to shut all the apps, applets, and widgets down before you press Play on your presentation. That’s why I use the same first slide on all my decks. Here it is:

The slide is never shown to people in the audience. It’s just there to remind me to turn everything off. (A “TSR” is a throwback to DOS days — it refers to any program which launches, then hides, but stays in memory doing things or stays ready to become active at any time.)

Force Quit: Make Sure Everything Is Closed

Don’t just assume that because your Windows Taskbar or Mac Dock is clear of other running applications you’re ready to go. Those TSRs hide everywhere, and often invisibly. Here’s how to make sure everything is closed.

On a Mac, quit all the applications in the dock. (You won’t be able to quit the first icon called “Finder.” That’s okay.) Now, press Command-Option-Escape. A list of applications will appear. It will look something like this:

If you’ve done it right, there shouldn’t be many (if any) applications in the list. If there are, go to that application, save everything, and try to close it. If it won’t close, highlight its name in this dialog box and press “Force Quit.” (This is similar to the Ctrl-Alt-Del method to force Windows applications to quit.) If you’ve done this and things still pop up during your presentation, launch Activity Monitor and force-quit the offender from that program.

On Windows, right-click on the Taskbar and select Task Manager. You’ll get something that looks like this:

As with the Mac example, select the program that you want to quit, then click the End Task button.

• Do you stop posting any personal comments like jokes, updates about your family, etc.?
• Or do you post only business information from now on, irritating your friends and family?

There’s a better solution, and it’s called Friend Splitting.

In these five short videos, I’ll show you how to split your friends into different groups (“lists”), send different status messages to different lists, prevent certain lists from seeing updates (e.g., prevent your business colleagues from seeing information about your personal life), and more.

This is a small portion of what I present during my popular “The Eight Keys to Marketing Online: Get More Leads and Close More Sales” seminar.

I hope you find these useful!

If you found these videos helpful, you may want to consider signing up for my free low-volume newsletter.

Or better yet, I’d be pleased to come to your association or company and present “The Eight Keys to Marketing Online: Get More Leads and Close More Sales.”

We were both in Toronto last week –me for some CBC meetings, and you because you were being scouted for a sports team. I’ll get into how I know that in a bit.

As I was rummaging around my documents folder at the hotel, I noticed another computer pop up on the same network we were using. It was yours. Normally, all you can do is see the computer name like DAMIAN04. My computers are always named WOPR or Joshua or some variant thereof.¹ But in your case, you gave your computer your own name. Bad move.

Worse than that, you left many of your key folders, like Documents and Music, wide open for anyone to explore.² Since you had a fairly unique name and I had some time to kill, so I let my fingers do the Googling.

Here is what Google told me about you — a random stranger who was obviously staying at the same hotel as I. I learned even more about you later because I friended you on Facebook and you added me. Even though you don’t have a clue who I am.

• You just graduated from a major University. Yes, I know the name.
• You are very well ranked at your sport. Three weeks ago, the local paper said your instincts were “prophetic.”
• I know the address of your home. And the fact that you hate your landlord. (Really, maybe you shouldn’t post that sort of stuff.)
• Your girlfriend’s name is Sarah. And dude, she’s way too young for you. Listen to your mother.
• Speaking of which, sorry to hear about your grandma. I’m glad she’s out of harm’s way.
• I know how much your scholarship was last year.
• I know where you work on weekends, when you got the job, and roughly how much you make.
• You hate speaking in front of crowds.
• You have three siblings. You really hate your youngest brother. I can’t say I blame you. That trick he pulled with your car was crappy of him.
• I know what songs you listened to last Friday night, at exactly what time, and in what order.
• You have an unnaturally strong crush on Alyson Hannigan. This is something you haven’t told your girlfriend yet.
• I know where you do your banking.
• I know where your dad works. Since I also know his position, I can get a pretty good bead on how much he makes too.

For the record, I emailed “David” — not his real name — and cleared the publication of this with him. He said he had no idea his computer was open and is rethinking his policy of friending anyone who asks. Remember, I didn’t open a single document on David’s computer. I got all this information from a Google search and his Facebook page.

This reminds me of when I spoke to an audience of security experts in Stockholm. To demonstrate how even experts forget the “little things,” I opened up a computer I found on the network³ in front of the audience, and walked through his files, including opening a marketing flyer for his security company, promoting how they’re experts at locking computers down. Hilarity ensued.

Oh, and for the record, David ended up signing a deal when he was in Toronto. I’d have bought him a drink if I’d have known where he was going to be. I do, after all, know what he looks like.

Have you ever been at the uncomfortable end of someone knowing more about you than you realized?

1. If you were born between 1966 and 1976, you’ll probably get the joke.
2. For the record, I looked at the list of your files, but didn’t open any. Even though offers.xls was awfully tempting!
3. I found the fellow who owned the computer and cleared this with him first, but his computer was genuinely open when I found it.