Today I was excited to speak at BoCo, a great new conference developed by the Boulder Tech Community, especially Andrew Hyde. Rick Turoczy was there, among other awesome Portlanders, San Fransiscans, and Boulderites. It  was a sunny day and there were beautiful mountains all around. The morning sessions dealt with food and music and were very wonderful to listen to.

I spoke about Cyborg Anthropology, which is the study of human computer interactions and how technology affects the way in which we communicate with one another.

We Are All Cyborgs

When you read this, you are acting as a low-tech cyborg, because you are using a computer to view text that I have written. My writing is stored here in my website, part of my actor network of external technological devices that, when taken together, comprise my technosocial self. As cavemen, we began skipping evolution by crafting spears instead of growing teeth. We began making hammers as extensions of our fists.

My social self is part technology and part human. My technological self does a lot of networking for me through my social networking profiles and my Google search results. So do yours (if you have them). My technosocial avatar of a self networks for me when I’m not there.

Distributed Social Selves

Each piece of my distributed social identity leaves a geological trail of past self that my present self can interact with. These all comprise my future self, which your future self or selves will most undoubtedly interact with. The online optimization of self, when coupled with the analog optimization of self (i.e. real-life networking, person to person) is the creation of a stable identity that is uniformly distributed and presented all over the web.

Technology Resembles Magic

Technology is almost magical. Like the scrying pool of the past (or of fantasy novels), the iPhone or computer monitor allows us to view anything anywhere in the world through YouTube and Twitter, News sites and Facebook. We can summon up an image with a simple spell (a simple text entry into Google search or Twitter search) and we can extend our speech and ears across very large distances in seconds with the mere touch of a button.

Technology Gives Us Superpowers

Technology, when used well, gives us amazing superpowers. We are like gods, until we forget to charge our batteries. We are like gods, until we forget to upgrade our devices to the most recent operating system or device number. Our external prosthetic devices turn against us when they get old. Our old clothes go out of style. Our brick phones make us get laughed at in the streets.

From Physical Transportation to Mental Transportation

In the same way that cars transport our physical bodies, computers and cell phones transport our spiritual bodies. Don’t like the word spiritual? Use the word mind instead. We’re increasingly entering into a world of mental machines - mental transportation devices. These devices transmit our thoughts invisibly to others. They are taking up smaller amounts of space, until vehicles, who require increasingly large highways.

Mental Traffic Jams

We have traffic jams, too. Mental traffic jams. Jams on Twitter. Twitter fails. Rush hour around important events and deaths and wars and crises. We can now have multiple views of the same event.

Telephonic Schizophrenia

When telephone technology first came out, people felt it was crazy. The idea of going into a room and speaking into a machine sounded schizophrenic.

More

There is more: enough to fill up a hour and a half speech, but I’ll leave that to you to see the next time I speak. Until then, you can follow me on Twitter @caseorganic, or you can check out BoCo.

Being a webworker is a fun but challenging task. It calls for dedication, focus and the ability to not get distracted by all of the distracting stuff out there on the web.

Since taking on the challenge of working for myself, I’ve learned a few things about being productive online. If you’re struggling with productivity, or thinking of taking your work online, you might like these tips. If applied correctly, they’ll save you a lot of wasted time. If you’re your own boss, it’s sometimes difficult to keep on track. And more time is what you can get from working for yourself. That time is time spent traveling, or with your spouse or kids, or with your friends.

1. Make a To-Do list Before Using Your Computer

Before even looking at your machine, sit down with an analog piece of paper and write down what you really need to do. Organize these tasks into categories, like “time” or “finance”. Organizing the tasks will allow you to do all of the tasks related to finance at the same time, instead of switching around to different tasks. Do the easiest tasks first, and allow only one or two minutes for each. Tackle the most difficult tasks after taking a short break, or break up the difficult tasks into small pieces and attack those similarly.

2. Set a Time Limit

If you’re jumping on a task, set a time limit for yourself. Say, “I’m going to only work on this for 20 minutes. Let nothing else distract you for those 20 minutes. When the time is up At the end of 20 minutes see how much you’ve accomplished the task.

3. Don’t Try to Do More Than 2-3 Big Things Per Day

When I first considered starting a blog, I wanted to do everything in one day. I later realized that doing small things would be more feasible and stronger. If a beach is made of a trillion particles of sand, then a powerful web presence is the accumulation of millions of tiny actions, slowly building themselves into something over time.

4. Use Paper to Organize Your Thoughts

Before tackling a blog post or E-mail, use paper and pen to organize the main points you want to achieve. It will allow you to understand which pieces you’d like to cover, vs. which pieces are not.

5. Don’t Multitask

This is probably the most difficult piece. Multitasking comes naturally, but at a cost: the more fragmented a task becomes, the longer it takes to get completed. Pick simple tasks and do them in one sitting. Resist the urge to check E-mail. If you get stuck, walk around the room without looking at the screen. Try to keep thought processes in the realm of the mind, instead of externalized in Google. This will help the brain to stay agile when faced with problems that take critical thinking to solve. The activation energy it takes to complete a task is often higher than grabbing a search in Google, or a quick look at news feeds, but keeping that analysis internally will help to complete a task in a short period of time.

6. Don’t Bite off More Than You Can Chew

Many projects seem exciting at first blush, but turn into dull chores when actually tackled. Even the smallest of tasks can balloon into enormous projects if not organized correctly. Simplify and clarify before taking on a new task. Make sure to point out key deliverables and communication points. This keeps information from falling through the cracks. Be wary of clients who do not fully communicate their needs or expect you to do multiple processes you are not comfortable with. Simply your deliverables into a cohesive, actionable timeline, and let the client understand what the touch points are.

7. Turn Off the Internet

Forcing yourself offline will push you to reconsider your task list and what you’re really trying to get done online. Use an offline E-mail app like Outlook for PC, or Mail.app for Mac and compose E-mails and drafts offline. Use a piece of paper or a text document to organize tasks that you plan to do when you go back online. At the end of the offline working period, turn on the Internet and send out E-mails in bulk. Look at your tasklist and begin accomplishing tasks that require Internet access without checking E-mail, Twitter, or news feeds. If you need specific answers, feel free to ask your social network, but do not dwell there reading feeds. This is a goal that requires a lot of restraint. Feeds are created to be addicting, and it is often difficult not to sink into the fast-flowing river of news.

8. Don’t Compare Yourself to Others

While looking at what others are doing in your field good for informative or inspirational purposes, don’t dwell on what you’re doing in comparison to them. The Internet is a massive landscape, and it is okay to do things that aren’t as awesome as what other people are doing. If you’re not careful, comparing yourself to others can detract you from focusing on goals at hand. When it seems like every website or project has been completed in one day, reconsider. Success takes a while to accomplish, and the more you focus on your own goals, the more powerful you’ll become.

9. Check Your E-mail Twice a Day

Checking E-mail is one of the worst detractors from productivity.

10. Read the 4-Hour Workweek

Tim Ferriss might not be quite the master of what he preaches (I was told that he definitely works more than 4 hours a week), but he sure knows how to get things done and achieve his goals. If nothing else, his book is a great reference tool as well as an aid in creatively considering new avenues for innovation.

Tim’s ideas explain how to take normal tasks and compress the amount of time and space it takes to accomplish them. Although part of his book talks about outsourcing, the rest has a great deal of sound business advice that has really helped me out. And while it is often difficult not to constantly fragment my tasks and check my E-mail constantly, when I think before I act, the results are generally terrific. I highly recommend it.

Get it: Paper Edition of the 4 Hour Workweek.

Or get this one: Kindle Edition of the 4-Hour Workweek.

Looking for more tips?

Last year, I interviewed Feroshia Knight of the Baraka Institute about how she stayed productive online. She related 5 tips that can be used offline as well.

Read Lifehacker’s Top 10 Productivity Basics Explained. It’s a great post full of useful tips, including how to employ and develop Ninja-like research skills.

Image Credits

1st image: petecarr
3rd image:  cijmyjune
2nd image: kompott

You can find many more here: FutureBuzz - 50 Stunning Creative Commons Flickr Photos.

——

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online at @caseorganic

If you’re like me, you’ve probably run into the problem of having your Mac’s screen dim while watching a long video. Or while you’re trying to demonstrate something, like software or a cool new data visualization tool.

Caffeine is a freeware software application that solves this problem by placing a tiny coffee cup in the menu bar that you can click on to keep your Mac awake for longer periods of time.

Just click to fill the coffee cup up with coffee, and you’ll be able to sit across the room and watch a DVD without having to touch the keypad every 5 minutes.

App Size

At 240 KB, Caffeine is a super-light app that won’t drag down your ability to run other processes (although if you leave it on, it will obviously drain your battery).

Download Caffeine for Mac

You can download Caffeine Mac App here (link is from Lightware software, Caffeine’s development team).

Turning Caffeine off and On

When you want your Mac to stay awake, simply click on the coffee cup and it will fill with awesome black coffee. And when you want to turn it off, just click the mug again, and the caffeine will disappear, giving your tired computer a much-needed break.

From a usability point of view, this simple on/off system makes Caffeine one of the simplest apps ever (binary sweetness).

I use this handy thing every day, so I figured I should probably let others know about it. Enjoy with a cup of real coffee.

—————–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Tech Blogger from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online at @caseorganic.

Today there was a Lunch and presentation at Nemo on using Ning for customized social networks. Dave Allen, Director of Insights & Digital Media at Nemo, introduced Rachel, who demonstrated the customized functions of Ning.

Dave Allen:
The purpose of this lunch and demonstration is to create a sort of town hall meeting.

Nemo is a 11 year old company that is unique in that it has managed to develop itself professionally without any sort of Press Releases or major media at all.

We have 5 blogs that function outside of Nemo, as well as an Private internal networking that we’ve been using to demonstrate the capabilities of blogs to our employees. It is a place for experimentation and messages.

We feel that in Social Media everyone is running around on different race courses. All are doing their own thing, but no one knows where the finish line is.

The five outside blogs are not integrated with each other. We hope to use Ning’s capabilities to create PR 2.0 and Social Media for Nemo.
We’ll be releasing the new version of Ning in September that will network all of these blogs together, and will serve as a force to expand Nemo’s online presence and capability.

BLOGS:

• Pampelmoose

• Social-Cache

• StudioNemo

• Strangebeautiful

• NubbyTwiglet

We hope to add:

• Ink Show

• Yourblog.com

And:

NemoHQ.com (coming soon)

In addition, other blogs will be linking to Nemo, and these blogs and our own will run through Ning, which provide linking to everyone in the world.

The Ning Presentation:

Rachel:

I’d like to talk about how you or a brand can use a social network. People are currently using social networks to connect with other people. The Internet can be used to replicate any sort of media. Newspapers, television, art exhibits and flyers can be duplicated and be functional online.

The truly native behavior of the Internet is two-way. So is a social network. In media terms, the Internet is the only place where people have a depth conversation of two way in many forms of media. In photos, media, discussion forms, and blogs.

Because of this, people are responding to social networks in huge numbers.

The early days of the Internet saw two major services; AOL and CompuServe. AOL was a fantastic service for the general public because it taught people how to be online — how to use chat and E-mail..

And when a company like Nike wanted to be on the Internet — it would post its page on AOL.

Then Netscape came around and allowed people to jump on the Internet from site to site without constraints.

Now we have Facebook and other applications that teach us how to be social online. They allow us to post videos photos, news feeds.

Ning is a platform for the creation of your own branded social network.

It allows you the opportunity to control and expand your brand to your biggest fans. When you have a Myspace page, that page’s community is comprised of Myspace members and friends, but the data is owned by Myspace. You don’t get to keep data on your own community, and your visitors are constrained to Myspace’s look, feel and format.

By having your own social network, you can show what your features will be and your member’s social information. You can have your brand really expanded.

You can thus have your own online hub. If you think about a brand, it’s really spread across the net. It allows the people who are talking about you on Youtube, and those who have found you through promotions with companies like Eventful, Facebook and Myspace.

General online fan groups comprise a very fragmented image. You don’t have any centralized space to really collect your tribe.

Centralization of data allows them to meet each together while connecting with you. It eliminates the barriers that divide fans up into different social services.

You can then use those different touch points across the web, on those different blogs, to gather them into a tribe on your own social network. Then you can give them access to RSS feeds, embed codes, and they can spread your image across the web as your own personal street team .

We’re three years old, based in Palo Alto California.

We raised 60 million dollars back in May. If you build a social network on Ning you’ll know that you’ll be online for a long time. We’re not just going to evaporate. We have about 65 employees, almost of which are geeks. Your network is up fast, and runs smooth. We have a large engineering team. This team is always thinking about what social networking features you need in order to have the most social network for your brand.

—-
Case Study: The ImSaturn Social Network.
Saturn simply went to Ning.com and created their own social network without even calling us. Saturn has really created their own social universe.
Events and Bloggers

They have a lot of events they sponsor. For instance, they’re a sponsor of Project Runway. They recently sent one of their advertising directors out to blog about the experience. They have a Saturn blog/event/picture of the day. They’re running many different groups. There’s the Saturn Tuners Club, which was actually started by Saturn blogger. His blog is advertised on the front page.

The Saturn community space is really respectful of the Saturn community and helps them to get their own words out. They’re very respectful of the universe of different bloggers and clubs. How can they take these different groups who are part of different parts of the web and bring them all into this world.

Saturn sponsors a lot of events. You can see these events “Rally Customer Appreciation Day” on the event calendar.

At this point a freelance designer sitting next to me said, ” ‘Have a Saturn experience!’ That’s marketing right there.”
Widgets

Then there is a page to give their members all sorts of different widgets. Photo, video, and music players can be added to your site as well. These allow your brand’s supporters to share your videos on Facebook, or add them to MySpace.

——-

Case Study: AskPatty.com

Kiss my Astra (Patty is a women’s car dealer blogger. She’s pretty popular, so you can start to create news about what you’re doing on your own social network.

–

Case Study: Greekster.tv

Greekster is a Pizza Hut branded social network. It’s just targets to college students and those who are a part of fraternities and sororities—the ones most likely to order pizza. It’s very event focused. There’s a Hot or Not section for that allows members to become stars on the front age.

—-

Case Study: The Good Charlotte Network: Beating Paparazzi to the Punch

Good Charlotte’s main website is actually built on Ning. Two members of Good Charlotte are using their blog while on the road. They are also currently dating Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. This means that they are constantly getting harassed by camera crews and media.

To combat this, they’re blogging and taking pictures themselves and posting them on the social network in order to control their own stroy. By controlling media first, through Ning, they are beating Paparazzi to the Punch.

Now news outlets like Press Magazine are going back to the Good Charlotte to get the news, instead of taking the news themselves.

The latest blog pot is about a move about the Bra Boys, a epic about Australian Surfers. They use the Ning portal to point to the Bra Boys website from Ning, thus acting as a promotional interface.

Merchandise

They use the social network to sell all of their own brands, like the DCMA Collective, and band merchandise is linked to their Ning Site.

Good Charlotte’s page uses Ning’s capabilities to form the questions that one can asks their members when they set up their profiles. You can ask certain questions to really let he members to express themselves.

People are allowed to modify their own CSS on the page.

Then there’s the Good Charlotte Facebook page. This page links back to www.goodcharlotte.com, and a Ning photo player shows the GC’s photos on the Facebook network page. They work in unison to for more powerful promotion.

Case Study: Maloof Money Cup

Maloof Money Cup, the World’s Greatest Skateboarding Competition, is based in Orange County.

They embedded a bunch of YouTube videos come from their social network which runs on Ning.

And there’s my.maloofmoneycup.com that only allows people who are competing in the skateboarding event to become members of the page.

There’s the latest activity feed. Just like on Facebook you can see what your friends are up to.

Case Study: The SXSW ‘08 Insiders Guide.

Those who were attending South By Southwest were able to use the website I created by Ning as a community device.

Another good part about the database is that you can export all member data by .CSV and import it into a php email database.

People fill that out and you can export it into you own CRM database.

http://www.SXSW.ning.commain/feature/add

There are tons of featured widgets that allow you to bring pretty much anything into the applications. From the main page, a widget can be edited or modified.

In the end it adds up to a very concrete CMS.

It really gives you the ability to make your own experience online and really bring people into your own space.

—-

Questions from the Audience

CMD Agency:

You look at the big sites like Myspace/Youtube/Fllickr. That’s where the eyeballs are. Lots of clients want their own community, but there’s a question of how to balance the control you get from a privately branded site like on Ning vs. the social focus that is available on Myspace (which is where all of the visits are focused).

Rachel:You have to think about what’s most appropriate for your client. They are using our photo player here to populate their Facebook page.They have 67,000 pans of Good Charlotte on their Facebook page.

This makes Good Charlotte capable of gathering an audience on their Facebook page and gather their audience which also happens to be on a Facebook page.

A lot of Saturn members are blogging. Saturn found some Saturn members that were good bloggers, so then they featured the blog posts of these members. Ning allows you to use your community to generate content for you.

AlphageekTV: Why did the skateboarders lock the community to members of the competition only?

Rachel: I imagine they anted to make the competitors be the celebritities of the site and have hte members forcus in on them ..

Big Deal PR: What I’m always curious about is the flexibility of a system. What kind of programming help do you need in house in order to adapt it, and how adaptable is it? Is it at all possible to optimize it for search engines/?

Rachel: We’re constantly updating all of the tabs and widgets like so that search engines can always find it. When we upgrade we don’t just do it once — we constantly improve it, so that because search engines are always changing.

If you know a little or a lot of CSS, or you’re a PHP developer, you can use our API’s get access to our source code and really ad in your features.

That’s our job, to really help link you into your community through a completely customizable interface.

Angie, Freelance Designer: How long does content remain up and live, and the space parameters?

Rachel: Content goes up as long as you want to. Not sure of the dimensions, bur can ind out that information for you.

Question: Bandwidth limitations on your site?

Rachel: Secret: We’re not charging for bandwidth and storage right now. Everyone will get 100 gigs of free bandwidth and 10 gigs of storage. After that, you’ll be charged $9.99 a month for an additional 100 gigs of bandwidth and 10 gigs of storage.

Question:
As an Admin can you limit the size of uploads that users can upload?
Do you also have the ability to link back to other sources to use their bandwidth?

Rachel:
We give you 10 text boxes, and you can embed in any third party information in them. We’ll be putting our fill weight behind OpenSocial. We’ll be supporting third party social applications. The members of your social network will be able to add an open social app onto the first page.

Question: Can you do custom Javascript in those text boxes?

Rachel: Yep — custom javascript, custom hacks … hack away!

—–

That was the event. Overall, I learned a great deal about how brands can use multiple sites to set up campaigns/communities across formerly disparate social networking sites.

If you currently use them, RSS feeds are a great way to accumulate timely information from reliable and influential sources. RSS feeds are one of the best ways to keep up on social trends, new tech gagets, people, and business ideas. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, there’s a 3.75 minute Commoncraft Video called RSS Feeds in Plain English.

One of the most useful ways I’ve been able to use RSS feeds has been through the use of an RSS aggregator as a search engine. My favorite platform to use is NewsFire (click to download) for Mac, but other RSS readers exist for Windows, Linux and Gmail.

The best part about Newsfire is that it has a search feature at the bottom right corner of the screen. The search tool allows many blog posts to be searched through at the same time.

This search feature can be used to search through all aggregated RSS feeds.

Categorizing Data:

Newsfire makes it easy to categorize data into groups. I chose Lifehacking-type blogs, Tech News, Design News, SEO, Marketing, Business Development, Usability/Architecture, Local Portland Groups, and Mail/Personal. I grabbed mail my mail from Gmail and my @caseorganic Twitter ID from Summize.

The only limitation is that you cannot rearrange the categories. This will hopefully probably be fixed with NewsFire’s next release.

The key to using RSS as a Search Engine is going out on the web and finding the best sources that aggregate the best data, and then storing it all in your NewsFire feedcapture device. Then, wait for the data to accumulate. Go to NewsFire –> Preferences –> Feeds, and set “Delete items” to “Never”. If you use Spotlight, you can enable indexing of content so that you can use Spotlight to search your feeds as well.

With this structure in place, I can search my RSS reader for “local SEO”, to check news related to these terms. Another option for maxxing out your RSS reader is to subscribe to Twitter topic feeds via Summize. That way, you not only get the topics that are being blogged about, but what everyone in the world is saying about those topics.

Twitter. Like any Web 2.0 app, it can be used productively, or it can suck the time out of your existence. (If you’ve never heard of Twitter before, check out the brilliant Commoncraft Video Twitter in Plain English).

If used wisely, Twitter can help you network like a jolt of amphetamines, keep you up to date on local news, traffic jams and construction work, and provide data on all the bars your friends are at. You can use it to get business advice, new clients, and joy and happiness.

Or, you can get lost in followers, following others, endless updates about tooth brushing and new hair colors without really getting much out of the whole experience.

For best results, follow Twitter Etiquette.

Provide Relevant, Descriptive Links to Awesome Resources:

If you think the information is really useful, then provide a description of that information and a shortened link to that information. Else, you’re wasting the time-value of your followers and your own credibility.

Don’t Overmarket:

If you write 10 new blog posts a day, don’t post them all on Twitter. Don’t even say that your blog has a new post when you link to it. Just provide a useful description of what the post pertains to. If people want to click on it, they will.If they don’t, craft better posts. Posting objectively will allow you to rank your posts based on content, not coersion.

Use Short URL’s:

Tinyurl, Snurl, and is.gd are all quick and easy url snippers.

• is.gd is my favorite, because it provides the shortest url-length.

• Tinyurl has a Firefox plugin that can be downloaded here, although it is not yet available for Firefox 3. The plugin allows you to right click to shorten the url, and it saves the url to the clipboard.

Real-Life Networking:

Tie your online experience into your real life. One head is good, but thirty are better. Using Twitter to network is all about shared resources and experiences. If you have a service to provide, provide it. You’ll undoubetly be rewarded for your generosity.

Twitterers are known to be extremely friendly and social both online and off. It is just a matter of finding where they meet up, and then hanging out and having a good time. Use the Twitter in junction with local event calendars like Yahoo’s Upcoming Calendar to find events in your area. Attend the events, make friends, and  exchange Twitter ID’s, resources, and business cards. Following them on Twitter will allow you to learn about new events, parties, and bar meetups.

Patience:

Sometimes you lose followers. Sometimes you gain them. Sometimes people that follow 3,000 people but who are followed by nobody ask to follow you. Sometimes you don’t feel like Tweeting for a few days, and sometimes you make 40 updates in a day. The key to it all to have fun and enjoy. Tweet happily, and the whole Twitter world will benefit. Else, you might feel lonely on the powerline.

Want to come to Tweet-ups and other Portland networking events? Feel free to follow me on Twitter.

One of the problems of this information-chocked world is that answer-seeking becomes too quick to be well-refined. Artificial Intelligence pioneer Herbert Simon explains this problem very well with his term “Satisfice”.

Satisfice: a hybrid word formed from satisfy and suffice, referring to the tendency of time-starved, information-overloaded users to select the first good-enough solution that crosses their path. Users often use satsificing as a triage strategy, based on the time and effort a more comprehensive search might entail.

How does one avoid making mediocre choices due to last-minute information needs? The solution is to predict what future information will be needed, and then create networks of experts based on those future needs.

Where to start?

• A good place is Linkedin.com Answers (when people you don’t know answer your questions well, add them to your network).
• Facebook notes (tag friends in a note and ask for experts, blog reccommendations, and books).

In this way, your network researches for you en masse, and you can simply wait for the information to return. In the future, your network may rely on you for your specific expertise in order to avoid their own Satisfice on the subject.

Definition of Satisfice taken from Bob Goodman’s Usability Glossary.

What is Coworking? It is simply working side-by-side with more than one person. No one has to be working on the same project or talk to each other. Simply being there with someone else negates the lonliness of working from home, or working in a hostile corporate environment.

Coworking is successful in corporate environments, especially startups, and is also ideal for entrepreneurs who need a support group while they develop independently.

It’s also useful to have others to bounce ideas off of.

Ingredients for Coworking. Shared working. Time sharing. Think sharing:

1. Large wooden table.
2. Large room with high ceilings.
3. Next room and kitchen with access to food and coffee.
4. Bathroom.
5. Powerstrips.
6. Computers on swivels (for screen sharing).
7. Good lighting.
8. Good window.

Shared working 2.0:

Costs: Space, and a projector to put computer screens onto wall.

Benefits:

• Others can watch media.
• Others can choose to show others media.
• Processes can be shown in motion.

Image below shows shared working space during the day and at night. This is what the dining room of the Woods house in N. Portland looks like. We set it up like this, and it works.

The same concept was written about in the NYTimes. Here.