JillFlorio

DAN WRITES: I am so cool with my huge widescreen monitor. But it’s a bit big for those little cafe bistro tables…

I love working in coffeeshops, drinking vanilla lattes and looking cool. My Dell Inspiron 17-inch widescreen monitor always attracts attention. Yeah, I enjoy the notoriety, and I get to tell people I’m being paid for my time, too.

It’s a super cool laptop, but it’s also a table hog. Those little bistro tables are totally dwarfed and my wife can’t see me from behind the screen. She says it’s like playing “You Sunk my Battleship!” with me, but far less social.

In spite of this point, I do get a lot of work done. I try to follow my own Dan’s Rules of CoffeeShop Laptop Etiquette, and to not to take over the free-spirited coffeeshop ambience with my technological terror of a work machine.

DAN WRITES: You can easily eat healthy hotel morning meals that won’t encrust your arteries, with a bit of care. Yoga and exercise while traveling certainly won’t hurt either!

After writing about hotels and the low carb diet, I have been asked to discuss low fat eating tips for business traveling. You can easily eat healthy hotel morning meals that won’t encrust your arteries, with a bit of care. This article describes common low fat hotel food options.

I also wanted to add that it doesn’t take much exercise to keep your heart tuned up - 20 minutes of even mild walking is helpful. I like to take a walk after a meal, if I can take the time. I do try to get out there, whether at home or on the road.

Yoga and simple stretching is another tip to keep your heart happy and healthy. Business travelers can become pretty Type A after a while. Travel is actually stressful! Yogic breathing and gentle stretching movements keep me both mentally and physically limber.

Plug your Business: Marketing on MySpace, YouTube, blogs and podcasts and other Web 2.0 social networks

This is a helpful book for navigating the waves of social networking. It’s a quick read, with useful links and helpful tactics for the non-geek to leverage the web in marketing their business.

Unfortunately, any book of this sort quickly becomes outdated - social technologies ebb and flow that quickly. A *huge* portion of the book is dedicated to MySpace, for example. One tiny paragraph is devoted to Facebook. As I am a FB user and don’t bother with MySpace, that means several of this book’s chapters are useless for me.

LinkedIn, Flickr, uTube and all other big networking sites also rate a tiny blurb, no more. Twitter isn’t even mentioned! This is a 2007 book and already out of date.

Useful chapters include setting up your website, starting to blog, and hooking your brand into the blogosphere. A few pages cover developing your blog content over the long haul. Using Technorati, Digg and Del.icio.us is touched upon.

I found the passage on building a guest column interesting. The viral video/podcasting chapter has decent, albeit bare bones, basics. I also appreciated the nuggets on using Amazon, analyzing traffic stats and monitizing your site.

Overall, anyone already familiar with the basics of MySpace, tagging, developing a blog, using Amazon’s review system, setting up RSS and so on won’t learn much from this slim volume. On the other hand, this book offers an easy introduction to web 2.0 marketing that social network newbies won’t find intimidating.

Plug Your Business! Marketing on MySpace, YouTube, blogs and podcasts and other Web 2.0 social networks

This dummies book provides a good grounding in the uses of Facebook. As with all technology books, it’s *already* a tad dated, even though it’s publish-date is this year (2008!). Applications and their popularity ebb and flow - some of the third party applications they’ve mentioned I have not once encountered (ie - Fluff Friends), and some daily requests I get deluged with are not mentioned at all. I can’t turn around, for example, without someone sending me a Lil’ Green Patch, guilting me into sending out more green patches. It’s like a charity virus.

What the book is really for, though, is a novice through beginner’s journey into the social network that is Facebook. The guide begins with how Facebook started, what the term “face book” means (hint - it’s a college thing) and things you can and cannot do on this site.

What can’t you do? Troll. Lie about who you are. Be under 13. Upload illegal content or porn - sorry!

What you can do - post a profile. Add photos, find friends, join groups, make pages for your business, plan events, mess with all kinds of fun apps, join up to five networks, make a newsfeed, sell things and buy advertising.

It’s useful that some mention is made of how many friends to acquire. Do you be-friend everyone who asks? The book suggests quality over quantity - always useful advice in making friends in the meat world too. What exactly Facebooking is, in practice, is laid out: how to find friends, how to “poke” them, and how to manage your ever-growing FB friend lists.

The Adding Photos chapter is pretty comprehensive and moves on into adding videos, writing Wall posts and giving “gifts.”

One thing I found interesting and useful was the section on setting up FB with cell phones, something I had not tried prior to the reading. Of course, young people who’ve grown up with texting won’t find anything new here.

The book has a great section for business people who have not been weaned on social networking - there is a chart advising when to make profiles, pages or groups, what you can do with events, how to set up ads and find/nurture “fans” of your business. This information should be extremely useful for anyone with a small or home business wanting to explore the amazing potential of free marketing/networking with Facebook, which is, honestly, a pretty intuitive site to dive into.

One thing I would have appreciated: some more insights from the authors on how FaceBook impacted their lives and the lives of people in general. FB is a huge world and I am still learning the etiquette - how long is too long to be polite when answering wall posts and messages? Sometimes I don’t get to it for weeks/months. Do I always need to return gifts/fairy dust/karma? How do I get people to stop sending me said gifts/fairy dust/karma? What about people in the real world who want to know about my life and *aren’t”* on Facebook - how do I let them know I don’t have time for updating them and that REALLY if they care, they need to follow me there?

These are the kind of things I would really like to know and would improve the book considerably. In a sense, Facebook for Dummies is mostly a regurgitation of the how-to instructions you can glean yourself from the FB website. But a very nicely laid-out regurgitation.

Facebook For Dummies