I write more than the average bear and I try to write every single day no matter what. Whether it be a couple of sentences or my 750 words habit, writing is something that I enjoy doing. With the release of the iPad in 2010 there have been a slew of writers taking to…

For the longest time, I was too scared to publish anything on my blog. I had the debilitating fear of making a mistake – a simple error. What if somebody catches my mistake, corrects it and lets the world know? I would agonize over this problem. I thought my credibility as a Business Writer would be shot…

Readers of Tim Ferriss’s 2007 book The Four-Hour Workweek might be familiar with a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery that appears on page 65 of the book: “Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.”  This is especially evident in writing.  Free-writing is the process of assembling…

I’ve written about editing, eliminating distractions, getting started – it’s time to get down to basics. Too many people don’t know how to write. Period. Yeah, they can make marks on paper, but when it comes to making a clear, compelling, and meaningful statement, especially one more than 140 characters long…

The ability to write without errors is crucial, whether you are writing for the whole world to see, or just your department. Even a few typos can make a writer look beyond unprofessional — errors imply laziness and poor presentation in much the same way that a stained shirt shows a lack of effort…

Last week, I launched a new site I’d been working on for several months, dedicated to technology and the writing life. Since I’ve been eating, drinking, breathing, and sleeping "writing" all week, it seemed natural to pull together some of the tools, sites, and Lifehack.org tips I know of that can help make…

Teachers, business people, and just about everyone else it seems complain often and loudly that people today (usually “kids today”) don’t know how to write. I’m convinced, though, that a big part of the problem (perhaps the biggest part of the problem) is that people don’t know how to edit. We labor under…

Although you can write your articles in Microsoft Word or any such software, you might want to test the waters for some alternatives. Online and offline, there is a plethora of options in the blog editing/word processing field. ScribeFire Previously run at Performancing.com this editor runs within your Firefox browser as an add-on. There is…

“And then, when I tried to print my essay, it disappeared!”The technology of word-processing has made available a rich array of explanations, fictional and non-fictional, for students in difficulty with deadlines. Most teachers and professors have grown tired of these explanations, so that even a genuine one is likely to ring false. Truly, the computer…

Look at Dad take pictures of little Joey go down the playground slide. Wait – hasn’t he taken about 100 shots of that little boy this morning? Oh yeah – digital – our lives are digital now. Content is overwhelming: words, images, sounds. That same proud Dad uploaded this week’s most precious 150 images to the Joey’s Cute website, so all his dedicated fans can view the little darling.

Those phone photographers are in play too. The phone is now a ubiquitous capture device making no one immune from the serendipitous photographer documenting our most inelegant moments. Unedited, they’re thrown up on Flickr.com for your viewing pleasure – often for everyone’s viewing pleasure.

Pleasure? I’m not so sure. Just like those jokes we used to forward through email as web-neophytes, they swiftly become annoying. We learned only to forward those that were extra-specially, extraordinarily hilarious. The best ones traveled the internet like a virus, but as with a healthy immune system, minor viruses are cured. Who’s going to cure the information overload virus? Who’s going to help me edit my life?

Digerati University has asked Matt LeClair, the author of Photoshop in a Nutshell to contribute a pretty good article on some basic image editing. He introduces 8 steps, from crop, rotate and scale to improve sharpness. The step on fixing color and contrast using Curves tool is probably the single most important thing to…