Keeping up with advances in technology is a job all on its own. Every other day something new comes along, promising to revolutionize the way we work, socialize, or otherwise handle tasks that are suddenly crucial. Not every aspect of technology will help you in your career or your life, but there are definitely a few that you should know to keep up with the changing digital landscape.

Manage Your Online Reputation

The easiest way to manage your online reputation is to not post anything online that you wouldn’t want anyone else to know about. No matter what your privacy settings think of social networks as open systems.

Mistakes do happen though; it’s not out of the question for someone to post something without you knowing until its too late. Or maybe someone has an axe to grind, and you or your business happen to be the target. There are websites out there that can help make push unwanted things downwards in search engine results.  If you want to have some control over your own online reputation you need to get proactive. Here is a helpful post on how to manage your online fame (or infamy).

Be Search Engine Literate

Search engines are usually pretty good at finding what you’re looking for, but finding specific pages can prove tricky; especially if those pages don’t get much traffic. There are simple commands you can give search engines to make sure you find exactly what you want to. These symbols will allow you to find specific phrases, exclude certain words or differentiate search terms, all of which make research a whole lot easier.

Make Sure You Back Up Your Data

Backing up data is not a difficult thing to do, but it is an invaluable one. If your hard drive crashes and you didn’t have your data backed up somewhere, it’s gone. The easiest way to back up your files is to buy an external hard drive. A one terabyte (1000 gigabyte) external hard drive costs $100-$200 and has enough memory to back up all of your pictures from your summer vacation several times over.

Innovations like cloud computing can store your data remotely, allowing you to access it on any device whenever you’re online. The biggest challenge with backing up data is remembering to do it, so set a date every month or every two weeks to back up your files – it could save you a massive headache later on. Here is a helpful video highlighting the best ways to back up your data, and another one that teaches you exactly how to use an external hard drive.

Make Sure Your Data Is Secure

There are plenty of programs and protocols out there that can help protect your data from being stolen or otherwise compromised. These are a good start, but as Lewis Kelly wrote in his article last month, given enough time, a hacker can get into anything if they’re good enough. So on top of having good security programs, you should also take matters into your own hands, starting with not using the same password for everything. This post will help you with some more advanced data securing techniques.

Learn Some Search Engine Optimization Techniques

When you Google your name or business, what is on the first page? Where do you appear? How about when you Google your name and the city you live in? Is your name so common that you don’t show up until the fourth page? Search engine optimization will help you get noticed by pushing your page up in search engine results. Do it well enough and you might end up on top. If you do it right the other John Smiths won’t know what hit them. Google has a whole PDF devoted to teaching you how to optimize your results; it doesn’t guarantee you’ll make the top page, but it’s an excellent starting point. It also has a robot that has green hair and likes flowers, for some reason.

Learn Some HTML

HTML is a language all on its own, but it’s one worth knowing. It wouldn’t be wise to travel to a foreign country without first learning some basic phrases in its native language. The same goes for the web. No one is saying you need to know how to create a rival for Facebook in a day, but knowing how to fix minor problems with text or color on a web page can be helpful. With a little practice, you can improve the overall presentation and effectiveness of your websites and online documents and perhaps your reputation too.

Learn to Edit Sound and Video

In grade school, every so often classes get assigned video projects. Despite the amount of fun groups have, teachers must want nothing less than to suddenly be struck blind and deaf. When nine or 10 years olds are armed with video cameras, editing boils down to hitting record, stopping when their partner inevitably messes up, rewinding it back to the part where they started recording, and recording over it. Somewhat like this, only with nine year olds trying to sell rocket-powered rollerblades. Videos or podcasts without a reasonable amount of  competence won’t get taken seriously. Neither will you or your business. While you might not be producing it helps to know how the medium works.

If you want to be more technically competent than an elementary school kid, learning to edit video and sound is a good start. There are many programs you can download for free online that are relatively easy to use and will serve most of your editing needs. If you’re more serious, there are ones you can pay for that have more features. Not only is proper editing more professional, it can be a lot of fun to present things exactly the way you want to.

Presented in alphabetic order, we submit to you three girl geeks doing interesting and amazing things in the world of tech.

Jasmine Antonick – Connector

Splitting time between Calgary and San Franciso Jasmine Antonick was trained in public relations but fell into the technology world. Calling herself a geek at heart she helps connect startup founders with venture capitalists and angel investors in her position at Dealmaker Media.

Effectively the director of strategy and content for the small, six-woman shop, Dealmaker produces large-scale technology and startup related events. One of their most popular events is called “Under the Radar” which, as Antonick says, “is essentially American Idol for startups.”

She got into tech as part of a founding team of a small startup. Before heading down to Silicon Valley she did her homework and figured out who a solid connection would be. An adviser turned her on to Debbie Landa, a principal at Dealmaker and a super-connected person in the tech field.

Originally from Saskatoon, Landa “did a fantastic job connecting me with everyone that I needed to know to help grow my startup,” says Antonick.

After the startup was spun out and Antonick was looking for work she ended up at Dealmaker. There she produces content for the events and manages all of the marketing. She needs to have her fingers in many different pies. She needs to know what venture capitalists and angel investors are looking for. She needs to know who’s who in the world of startups, who is in their basements coding something that’s going to take the world by storm. She also needs to be aware of what the more mainstream group of executives for large media companies are thinking.

“Then my job is to find the gaps and see where the potential connections are,” says Antonick. “I create physical experiences for these guys to get in front of each other and connect.”

She’s essentially a business matchmaker for technologically inclined businessmen — and it is mostly men.

“I would say there is a slow wave of really amazing women in technology and I guarantee you in three to five years the ratio of men to women will dramatically increase,” says Antonick

“But I always kind of laugh, at a technology event is the only time where women have a shorter line at the bathroom than the men do.”

UL: Tell me about something you’ve created/built/founded that you’re proud of.

JA: I would say that one of the things that I’m most proud of was a dual effort with my whole team… the Grow Conference.

We had been asked many times by friends and partners to do something in Canada. The Olympics had just happened, there was a lot of buzz so we decided to go for it. We called up a bunch of friends in Silicon Valley and asked them to come up; angels, VCs and well-known technology founders from companies like Zynga, Zappos and Mint.

I thought to myself, will people fly from all over Canada to get together as a startup community and really invest in one another? We thought there might be 150 people but 450 people ended up coming last year in August 2010.

It’s always really fun to bring up the big name Silicon Valley superstars and put them on stage but what was most valuable and what I’m most proud of is the feedback I heard from these young CEOs who said it was more important for me to meet other startups that are in my own backyard that I never even knew existed.

UL: What are you excited about? What’s the next big thing in your field, in your professional life or in your industry?

JA: I’m a geek at heart and I actually didn’t know that until I stumbled into technology. I really thought I would end up working at some marketing firm. I really had no idea what the technology world would give to someone like me who isn’t necessarily a coder or developer but what I’ve realized is that it’s a really exciting world and there are a lot of big, game-changing ideas that pop up that really impact our daily lives. The big thing that I really want to end up focusing on is I want to make technology and the world of science more accessible and attractive to the next generation. So rather than just using your iPhone to play games, how can we create or develop technology that can actually make a bigger difference?

UL: What would you tell to people who want to follow in your footsteps?

JA: Network, network, network. It’s a very fast-paced community and it’s filled with a lot of A-Type personalities who are extreme go-getters who are used to building and hashing out ideas 24-7. So get out, talk and dive into what you’re passionate about. If you’re going to spend a lot of time working on a project you better be passionate about it so it doesn’t feel like a job.

You can follow Jasmine Antonick on Twitter @JasmineAntonick

Dana DiTomaso – Web Native

Dana DiTomaso got her start in tech working at a software company in Ontario in 2001. When the dot-com world went bust, she got laid off and started her own company with the severance package. She had been noodling around with websites when she got laid off . “I thought here’s my chance,” she says.

Now living and working in Edmonton, DiTomaso originally hails from Hamilton. She does design, development, search engine optimization, email marketing and social media consulting for multiple clients. She’s a bit of a general contractor for clients that need their website to do some heavy lifting.

“Someone called me a strategist and that’s a little too rockstar/ninja for me,” says DiTomaso.

New to Edmonton, she’s found a ton of value in a loosely organized group called Edmonton Girl Geeks. Now a co-organizer, she explains what they do.

“It’s a monthly gathering of nerdy women of all stripes, you don’t just have to be a computer nerd or a pop culture nerd, we like all nerds,” says DiTomaso.

“I’m really passionate about getting women out of their shells and more visible in the community. For example, the SEO conference I’m going to at the end of the month is 80 per cent male speakers but SEO, generally, is about a 50-50 split.”

“You don’t have to be humble all the time. Just talk about yourself a little bit more, get out there a little bit more and I think it will help with the equality issues.

When she first came to Edmonton she didn’t know a soul.

“I’ve met almost everyone I know in Edmonton through the girl geek dinners. Between the dinners and Twitter it’s been amazing to get to know new people in the city. If it wasn’t for the Internet I’d probably still be at home not knowing anybody.”

UL: Tell me about something you’ve created/built/founded that you’re proud of.

DD: My company. Working for 10 years in this industry is a long time. When I do seminars about running your own business I say, “Running your own business is like dog years vs human years.” Ten years of running my business feels like running a regular business for 70 years.

Being able to stay up-to-date and relevant in my industry is tough but fulfilling. I certainly don’t make websites the same way now that I did ten years ago. There weren’t even content management systems back then it was all by hand, all in Dreamweaver.

UL: What are you excited about? What’s the next big thing in your field, in your professional life or in your industry?

DD: I think Google+ is really going to change things. I think people are embracing it a lot faster than even Google was expecting. Obviously, they’re thrilled with the results. Their stock price has gone up and they’re cool again.

I think a lot of people are pissed off at Facebook and I think it’s going to show when a lot of people move over to Google+.

I’m trying to keep my clients up-to-date on what’s going on with this. A lot of them are not embracing social media because they’re afraid of it and I think that slowly it’s going to teach them to not just say “we’re the best” and just think people will blindly accept it. You have to really walk the walk because people will call you out on your BS. These announcement-only Twitter feeds and these one-way conversations are just going to stop happening and companies who don’t adapt are going to die.

UL: What would you tell to people who want to follow in your footsteps?

DD: Don’t call yourself a rockstar. That’s one of my biggest pet peeves in the industry is people who have 2000 Twitter followers, become social media experts.

Don’t get me wrong, there are needs for community managers. I have a friend who’s a community manager in Waterloo but it’s so much more than just being on Twitter all day. She’s a service agent, she’s writing blog posts, it’s a ton of different things, it isn’t just hanging out on Facebook and talking to your friends.

I think you need to know a little about everything. You don’t have to be perfect in everything but you do have to have the knowledge so when people ask you something you understand what’s going on. Getting a breadth of knowledge or being a renaissance person is the way to go.

You can follow Dana Ditomaso on Twitter @DanaDiTomaso and you can check out her website at http://danaditomaso.ca

Lori Olson – Renaissance Woman

When people ask Lori Olson what she does for a living the answer depends on who asks. If it’s a regular layperson she’ll just she’s a software developer but if someone in the industry asks what she does, well, it gets a whole lot more nerdy. You see, Lori Olson is a geek library and a force of nature when it comes to software and web development. When you list off the languages and environments that she knows and has worked it quickly becomes an alphabet soup of nerd: Ruby on Rails, Cocoa, Java, Swing, J2EE, JBuilder, WebLogic, Tomcat, JIRA, Trac, SVN, CVS, UML, HTML, XML and so on. “I’ve done a little bit of everything,” says Olson.

She’s also a complete and utter Mac supporter. “I switched over about six years ago and really have zero regrets,” Olson laughs. Her most-used gadget is her iPad which has supplanted her iPhone as her most used and most loved piece of hardware. This naturally extends into her professional life as well.

“The fun stuff has been doing the web development for mobile devices. It’s been kind of fun that I get to do development for my favourite gadget,” says Olson.

The principal at WNDX group and senior software architect at Labrador Technologies was schooled in the basics with a degree in computer science from the University of Calgary in the mid-80s.

“I came through in the golden age for women in computing. The number of women had reached 35 to 40 per cent going through computer science programs and getting hired and it’s done nothing but go down since,” says Olson.

“I think there’s not nearly enough women in development and I think they’re all being discouraged away from it which is a crying shame because there’s so much work to be done. We need more and we need more of a women’s point of view because I don’t want to use apps that are all designed by men.”

UL: Tell me about something you’ve created/built/founded that you’re proud of.

LO: Last year there was a news story about these people in a little town called Calmar where they had gas bubbling up in their backyard. Turns out they had an abandoned well in their backyard that wasn’t properly capped and that just made me mad because I deal with data in my day job all of the time. Why isn’t that stuff public? So, operating under the assumption that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission I developed a little web app called WIMBY for Wells In My Backyard. With it you can check anywhere in western Canada and do a search for abandoned wells and it will show you how many abandoned wells are anywhere from two to 10 kilometres from the location that you pick.

UL: What are you excited about? What’s the next big thing in your field, in your professional life or in your industry?

LO: There is so much happening around the new HTML 5 stuff, that is pretty exciting. You’re going to be able to do so many things as long as the browsers catch up, or rather, people can be convinced to leave the old browsers behind. Specifically, its ability to do local storage is one of the things that’s really going to make an impact because you can start caching stuff and it winds up having a lower impact data wise which is going to be a big concern for mobile devices at least in the near term.

UL: What would you tell to people who want to follow in your footsteps?

LO: I think it’s important to get a good grounding in the basics. The people that want to just dive right in and self-learn, that’s great, but sooner or later you end up learning all the hard stuff anyways so going to school isn’t such a bad idea.

You can follow Lori Olson on Twitter @wndxlori and find her Posterous here

Jeff Hamada has succeeded where so many web-savvy people have not. And he did it all by accident. Hamada took a blog, created a loyal, interactive online community and then monetized the whole deal. The result was Booooooom! – that’s seven Os – which gets 1.7 million visitors every month. A sign of how successful it is: GM advertises on the site.

Hamada trolls the net for work by virtually unknown artists and posts it under the sections Art! Design! Film! Music! Photo! Junk! and Projects! (exclamation marks are his). Unlimited talked with Hamada, a former Electronic Arts staffer who graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, about his unexpected international following.

How was Booooooom! born?
I took a year off school and worked at Electronic Arts. EA paid for my final year, but when I graduated, the company didn’t have a job open for me. I was sad about that. I started freelancing as a graphic designer about four years ago. I started Booooooom! about a 18 months ago as a personal blog to show all the art I made and the trips I took.

It’s changed a lot, though.
It changed early on. I didn’t think it was interesting for people to hear what I was doing, so I started posting art I liked, mostly work by lesser-known people on Flickr. I’d post something, email the artist to say I like his work and that I’d posted it on my site. The artist would get excited about it and mention it on his website. It became a conversation for art admirers. The site grew mostly by word of mouth. About six months in, everything went crazy, and now I get 1.9 million page hits a month. I wasn’t trying to make it grow. I just lost control.

Describe Booooooom!
It’s a daily inspiration site about photography and drawing. It’s different than a lot of other sites out there. I find artwork that I like by artists all over the world and I post it on the site, like an online art gallery. I really want to create a collaborative community.

I have another side to the site where we do group collaboration projects. I come up with an idea for a project and ask people to contribute. It’s an avenue for people to get inspired and make stuff that inspires others. I hope it becomes more of a focus of the site.

Could you describe a few group projects?
The last group project was a music video. Everyone downloaded the same music, filmed their own footage and submitted it. I stitched all the footage together. (See the footage here).

How much time does it take to maintain the site?
Now it’s a full-time job. I spend eight to 10 hours a day working on it. When I had freelance clients, I’d work on the site all night. I set it up to have three posts a day, so no matter where someone lives, when they go to the site there’s something new for them to see.

Jeff Hamada’s own art work. Hamada has worked for clients such as Converse.

How does the site generate revenue?
This is something I’m still learning about. There are three ways to make money: You get paid to write about a product. I’ve never done that and I’ve turned down a lot of opportunities. Or you can run advertisements from networks. I work with three or four networks that represent a bunch of companies. They pitch campaigns to me and I pick ones that work for the site. The third way is by having local companies in Vancouver sponsor the site. This is a one-to-one relationship.

The trickiest partnerships are with networks, because the products a network wants to advertise on your site are not always a good fit. They also want to sign long-term contracts, meaning that you lose control of what ads appears. But I can be pickier the more popular the site becomes.

Why do you think the site is so popular and continues to grow?
I am obsessed with analyzing the site and improving things that aren’t getting lots of hits. I paid a friend to make it more searchable and the topic I chose helped. No big sites are collecting the work that I’m collecting and there’s nothing going on for the community side of a lot of blogs. I put a lot of time into the site to make it feel alive.

There’s a stigma about art that only experts can talk about it. I try and make art inclusive. No matter what your expertise, you’re allowed to comment about the stuff you see. You don’t need credentials. I think the overall feeling is open and accepting.

Content-wise, I was uncovering a lot of unknown people, like people with only 30 followers. But when I mention one artist, he tells all his followers and then 30 people are checking out the site.

What would you like to see Booooooom! become?
I want to take it offline. I want to see some of the art on the site be shown in a [bricks-and-mortar] art gallery. I want the site to generate interest in the artists I feature. Beyond that I want to travel and meet the artists I cover and write about it. I want to publish a book of art. I don’t want to get rich. I’m not a business person that started this site thinking I could make money from it. The site is a lot bigger than the site I originally imagined. I’m definitely missing an opportunity to monetize completely, but I don’t want to be the mega-corporation of art sites.

Why?
My audience is a tricky demographic. It can get turned off by advertising if it isn’t done right. I could lose credibility really easily, especially if I include some covert ads. U

To view the interactive version, click here.

1. Simplify your to-do list with “I will do one thing today” stickies from Pretty Bitter.

2. Take a sabbatical to reset your creativity and improve your work. For encouragement, watch über designer Stefan Sagmeister’s TED talk about the power of time off.

3. There is a time and a place for a stiff drink. The time: Friday at 4 p.m. The place: your office. This break made possible by a desktop cocktail chemistry set.

4. Make a mind map. This is not an extracurricular activity at Burning Man. Mind mapping uses visual brainstorming to think about a topic – say, how to ask for a raise – when you’re lost for words.

5. You probably spend more time in your office chair than you do in your bed, so get a good chair. The classic Aeron chair will keep you nimble, help prevent lower back pain and last you through many job changes. Take it with you when you move on to your next one.

6. Eat breakfast – even if you don’t want to. A little nosh first thing in the morning will improve your performance at work and make you less likely to overeat later in the day.

7. Sweeten up your next presentation with a chocolate pie chart.

8. Give and ye shall receive. Volunteering has inherent personal benefits, of course. Giving your time can also be a good way to expand your network – and maybe even find a new calling.

9. Follow your passion. For inspiration, read musician Kris Demeanor’s award-winning story, “Get a Real Job.”

10. Words to live and work by: “I don’t think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can’t do.” – John Updike

11. Deskercise! Unlimited’s personal trainer lays out the moves to keep you fit at work.

12. Ignore everybody. Find this and other keys to creativity in Hugh MacLeod’s cartoons, which he doodles on the backs of business cards.

13. Sometimes the world is too complex to render in mere words. Enter London-based author-designer David McCandless’ clever book Visual Miscellaneum. Think of it as a visual coffee break.

14. Save money. Not as simple as it sounds, but our Rich by Thirty columnist has suggestions on how to build a reserve. Because someday you will want to retire.

15. When it comes to workplace philosophy, we defer to Groucho Marx: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.” In other words, be flexible.

16. Don’t check email first thing in the morning. E-interruptions will only bog you down and make you less productive. Get started on your real work and clear through the little stuff later.

17. While the Japanese have codified the business card exchange to a high art, North Americans treat it more like speed-dating. Enter this stylish Russell+Hazel binder solution. Fill it with three-ring note pages and schedulers to track contacts, die-cut pages to hold business cards and record handwritten notes, making meaningful follow-up a snap.

18. To reduce stress and improve focus, take a deep breathe. Really. Sit up straight and breath deeply from your diaphragm, just below your lungs. Repeat as needed.

19. What goes around comes around, so recycle your gadgets. An estimated 140,000 tonnes of e-waste is dumped in landfills in Canada each year. Donate your old cellphones and computers to groups like the Canadian Diabetes Association’s Project Redial.

20. Have experience? Become a mentor.

21. We’re firm subscribers to the maxim, “There is no such thing as too many books.” Books for learning, books for escaping, books for… see, we get carried away. Where better to put all those books than on Ikea’s classic Billy bookcase? To celebrate Billy’s 30th birthday, Ikea has created a bunch of decorative options. Cheap, cheerful and perfect for the home office.

22. The Philanthropist Briefcase from Apolis Activism re-imagines what has long been a symbol of corporate mores. (In fact, the word briefcase is related in etymology to the word budget.) Apolis Activism’s limited edition cases use cotton from independent farmers in Northern Uganda, and are just one example of a gift that gives and receives.

23. If you’re self-employed or run a business on the side, go to Moo for customized business cards.

24. Smile! ’Nuff said. U

Stuart Bailey is a private person – at least when it comes to work. In agreeing to speak with Unlimited about his job, for instance, he cheerfully and apologetically said, “I can only speak for myself, not for the government.” That’s because Bailey is an information management and privacy strategist for the Ontario Ministry of Finance, where he navigates the complex, sometimes intangible and often confidential world of data. Not that he’s necessarily trading in top-secret information – “I don’t have a lot of sensitive material,” he admits – but for someone whose work is all about managing, sharing (and sometimes not sharing) information, Bailey is sensitive to the challenges of describing what he does without saying too much. He gives it a try.

The Man Who Wasn’t There: Stuart Bailey’s official office at the Ministry of Finance

“My job is to help regular people in different program areas integrate practice and information into their daily work.” Huh? “Really, it’s helping people deal with information overload,” Bailey adds. Oh, right.

That could range from helping staffers manage email to helping colleagues understand the logistics and legalities around sharing information. “Storage is cheap, but finding it is very expensive,” Bailey says. A gigabyte of storage might cost only 20 cents, but a company will have to shell out another $1,300 or so to manage, share and protect that information. “It’s not just about an object sitting in a space.”

“The type of work I do is about understanding broad abstractions. Information,” he points out, “is always part of something else that you do.” In that sense, we are each de facto information managers, even though we might not consider this part of our real jobs. It is always, Bailey explains, wrapped up in our other tasks.

After earning a BA in cultural studies and philosophy from Trent University, Bailey went on to complete a master’s in information studies at the University of Toronto. Warm and engaging, his philosophy background quickly surfaces. “A large part of the work I do is – pardon me for lapsing into code – to understand basic metaphysics, entities, attributes and relationships. I have to operate in abstract areas. Privacy is not a monolithic object. It’s not a like a shoe,” he says. “A shoe will have certain dimensions, it goes on your foot, you can wear it in certain weather. But privacy could be a whole range of things.”

Bailey’s Virtual Office

Bailey, whose official mailing address is for the Central Agencies Cluster at the Ministry of Finance in Toronto, in actuality divides his time between three offices.

Bailey telecommutes from his couch-office

+ This office in the picture is where I’m stationed, but sometimes I work with the rest of the team in Oshawa. I also work at home. My employer has a great teleworking project and a lot of flexibility. I spend more time focusing on work and less on additional stressors like whether I’ll make it home in time to pick up my daughter before her daycare closes.

+ I have one computer and BlackBerry. It’s not like I produce a certain number of widgets a day. Where I’m located is sometimes not as important. I don’t always have to be tied to a desk, but I do have to ingest, analyze and provide comment on information for colleagues.

+ Yeah, sometimes I can’t find things. It’s like asking a ditch-digger where you put the shovel. Well, you can just find another shovel.

+ That’s a tennis ball on my desk. I bounce it around to relieve stress or think about things in a different way. Sometimes the best way to focus on an abstract problem is not to focus on it. You have to let the brain refresh and let your mind wander.

+ Those boxes are filled with paperwork. Although I work a lot with electronic media, I like the tactile quality of reaching for an article. I have to stay on top of new developments such as the use of wikis or policy development or a recent court decision. I make sure I don’t keep more around than I need. U

Jeff Hamada has succeeded where so many web-savvy people have not. And he did it all by accident. Hamada took a blog, created a loyal, interactive online community and then monetized the whole deal. The result was Booooooom! – that’s seven Os – which gets 1.7 million visitors every month. A sign of how successful it is: GM advertises on the site.

Hamada trolls the net for work by virtually unknown artists and posts it under the sections Art! Design! Film! Music! Photo! Junk! and Projects! (exclamation marks are his). Unlimited talked with Hamada, a former Electronic Arts staffer who graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, about his unexpected international following.

How was Booooooom! born?
I took a year off school and worked at Electronic Arts. EA paid for my final year, but when I graduated, the company didn’t have a job open for me. I was sad about that. I started freelancing as a graphic designer about four years ago. I started Booooooom! about a 18 months ago as a personal blog to show all the art I made and the trips I took.

It’s changed a lot, though.
It changed early on. I didn’t think it was interesting for people to hear what I was doing, so I started posting art I liked, mostly work by lesser-known people on Flickr. I’d post something, email the artist to say I like his work and that I’d posted it on my site. The artist would get excited about it and mention it on his website. It became a conversation for art admirers. The site grew mostly by word of mouth. About six months in, everything went crazy, and now I get 1.9 million page hits a month. I wasn’t trying to make it grow. I just lost control.

Describe Booooooom!
It’s a daily inspiration site about photography and drawing. It’s different than a lot of other sites out there. I find artwork that I like by artists all over the world and I post it on the site, like an online art gallery. I really want to create a collaborative community.

I have another side to the site where we do group collaboration projects. I come up with an idea for a project and ask people to contribute. It’s an avenue for people to get inspired and make stuff that inspires others. I hope it becomes more of a focus of the site.

Could you describe a few group projects?
The last group project was a music video. Everyone downloaded the same music, filmed their own footage and submitted it. I stitched all the footage together. (See the footage here).

How much time does it take to maintain the site?
Now it’s a full-time job. I spend eight to 10 hours a day working on it. When I had freelance clients, I’d work on the site all night. I set it up to have three posts a day, so no matter where someone lives, when they go to the site there’s something new for them to see.

Jeff Hamada’s own art work. Hamada has worked for clients such as Converse.

How does the site generate revenue?
This is something I’m still learning about. There are three ways to make money: You get paid to write about a product. I’ve never done that and I’ve turned down a lot of opportunities. Or you can run advertisements from networks. I work with three or four networks that represent a bunch of companies. They pitch campaigns to me and I pick ones that work for the site. The third way is by having local companies in Vancouver sponsor the site. This is a one-to-one relationship.

The trickiest partnerships are with networks, because the products a network wants to advertise on your site are not always a good fit. They also want to sign long-term contracts, meaning that you lose control of what ads appears. But I can be pickier the more popular the site becomes.

Why do you think the site is so popular and continues to grow?
I am obsessed with analyzing the site and improving things that aren’t getting lots of hits. I paid a friend to make it more searchable and the topic I chose helped. No big sites are collecting the work that I’m collecting and there’s nothing going on for the community side of a lot of blogs. I put a lot of time into the site to make it feel alive.

There’s a stigma about art that only experts can talk about it. I try and make art inclusive. No matter what your expertise, you’re allowed to comment about the stuff you see. You don’t need credentials. I think the overall feeling is open and accepting.

Content-wise, I was uncovering a lot of unknown people, like people with only 30 followers. But when I mention one artist, he tells all his followers and then 30 people are checking out the site.

What would you like to see Booooooom! become?
I want to take it offline. I want to see some of the art on the site be shown in a [bricks-and-mortar] art gallery. I want the site to generate interest in the artists I feature. Beyond that I want to travel and meet the artists I cover and write about it. I want to publish a book of art. I don’t want to get rich. I’m not a business person that started this site thinking I could make money from it. The site is a lot bigger than the site I originally imagined. I’m definitely missing an opportunity to monetize completely, but I don’t want to be the mega-corporation of art sites.

Why?
My audience is a tricky demographic. It can get turned off by advertising if it isn’t done right. I could lose credibility really easily, especially if I include some covert ads. U

In 1714, the British government used the power of crowds to solve one of its most bedevilling problems: how to navigate ships across oceans and seas. Any competent sailor could use the sun to tell latitude, but determining longitude was a bit tougher. This was pre-GPS, when captains relied on dead reckoning. That’s the official term. In other words, they launched into vast dark waters with little more than educated guesses to guide their ways. The government offered 20,000 pounds to anyone who could reliably determine the longitude of a ship at sea. This was an early form of what we have come to call crowdsourcing. Back then it went by a name you might expect in a Herman Melville story: the Longitude Prize.

Fast forward roughly 300 years to 2006, when writer-turned-media clairvoyant Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing in an article for Wired, and then wrote a book on the topic. Quick definition: Crowdsourcing takes a job traditionally performed by an individual or small team and outsources it to the “crowd,” a large, undefined group of interested people. (Howe has a much more exact definition on his website.)

Ever since Howe introduced the idea, companies have been refining their techniques to harness the power of crowds. The following organizations have used crowdsourcing to improve the customer experience, find gold and, of course, make money. They’ve done it through cash rewards, appealing to a vocal niche of people who wanted a hand in creating the products they consumed and by building vital online communities.

Threadless

Nobody makes money off of T-shirts, right? Well, Threadless does. Members of its online community submit T-shirt designs that are put to a public vote. A small per cent of the most popular designs are selected for printing and sold through the organization’s online store. Designers of those T-shirts receive cash, store credits and positive reinforcement from their peers (go, team, go!). Threadless has sold out every line of T-shirts it has produced and generated $17 million in revenue since 2006. It sells an average of 90,000 T-shirts a month. In fact, the Calgary-based crowdsourcing platform Chaordix gave them a perfect rating in its case studies of crowdsourcing campaigns.

Why it worked: Threadless has a built-in positive feedback loop. A designer who has their design chosen not only gets the cash but he or she tell anyone who will listen about the achievement. The company’s advertising and new customers come from the people who design the product they sell. Simplicity itself.

TomTom Map Share

GPS navigation system TomTom uses the wisdom of the crowds to provide a better map for customers. Its Map Share program lets users collectively update and fix maps. Changes are submitted, verified by TomTom and sent to Map Share community members, improving the quality of the maps that TomTom customers use. In December of 2008, Map Share recorded its five millionth map improvement. “To put this five million milestone in perspective: a one-hour trip made anywhere in North America or Europe will be influenced by 20 to 30 Map Share updates,” president Jocelyn Vigreux said.

Why it worked: Map Share has a simple interface that pays it forward – if everyone fixes problems, everyone gets a better map.

The Goldcorp Challenge

Goldcorp was a struggling Toronto based gold mining company beset by labour trouble, high costs due to mining inefficiencies and anxious shareholders, until CEO Rob McEwen did something no other mining company had ever done. McEwen published the geological data of Goldcorp’s 22,260 hectare Red Lake Gold Mine on the web and ran a contest with $575,000 in prize money to participants who submitted the best speculation about where to look for gold. The challenge spread throughout the geological community and more than 1,000 people participated. Contestants identified 110 possible targets and more than 80 per cent led to gold for both the company and contestants. Since the challenge started, Goldcorp has found eight million ounces of gold – an excellent return on its $575,000 investment.

Why it worked: This hefty cash prize captured the imagination of thousands of online prospectors. If we were talking about, say, molybdenum instead of gold, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Dell – IdeaStorm

Dell asked customers how to improve its products and service via Ideastorm.com. The Linux community responded with a loud, organized cry for computers without Windows. Dell listened and now it has a foothold in a small but growing market. The company has sold computers with Linux for the past two years, and while Dell hasn’t released exact numbers, “If the program wasn’t successful, we wouldn’t be able to continue it,” its Linux expert Matt Domsch told Computerworld.

Why it worked: The company listened and followed through on the ideas its customers presented. Ideastorm website also has an area that keeps tabs on the progress of its crowdsourced suggestions.

Netflix Prize

This movie rental company wanted to improve the predictive software that recommends movies to customers based on their preferences so it turned to the masses with a challenge: design a program that is 10 per cent better than Netflix’s in-house software and earn $1 million. Over three years, thousands of teams tried to solve the problem. The final winner saw multiple team mergers and the prize came down to one submission being in 20 minutes earlier than the other. Netflix immediately announced a second contest.

Why it worked: The prize of US$1 million brought out the software developers, but the leaderboard and vibrant online community built around the challenge kept their interest.

iStockPhoto

Stock photography was an expensive, time-consuming way to purchase photos until upstart iStockPhoto came along. With the proliferation of high-speed networks capable of handling larger files and easy-to-use digital cameras, iStock jumped in with a $1 price point and thousands of photographers eager to contribute and make money from what was often just a hobby. iStockphoto was eventually sold to Getty Images in February 2006 for US$50 million in cash.

Why it worked: It invented the microstock industry, fostering a loyal and active community through forums, emails and face-to-face events. Startup Review suggests its success is thanks to “the financial livelihood of a segment of [its] users. One reason that iStockphoto has such an active community is that their power users have personal, financial ties to the overall success of the company.”

What did I miss? Tell me your best examples of businesses using the power of crowdsourcing in the comments. U

Good Reader ($0.99, v.2.2)
Why you’ll like it: Do you need to review e-book-like documents when you travel? Do you need to review huge images as part of your work? Good Reader lets you read enormous documents from PDFs to JPEGs to MS Office (PowerPoint docs with too many embedded images anyone?).
How it works: Upload a file to the device or download it from the net.
What we like: Neat trick: if you find a giant file online and want it sent to Good Reader, just type a ‘g’ at the beginning of the URL and you’re good to scroll. Screen readability is decent and page flipping is easy. In other words, the Good Reader will tide you over until you can get a Kindle.
What to fix: Jargon in the help/setup instructions (the computer version of trying to assemble Ikea furniture). Apps should be intuitive and accelerate your work, not slow you down as you figure them out.
Bottom line: The popular reader AirSharing works if your file sizes are average, but if you deal in design review or need to read book-length documents on the go, Good Reader is, well, a pretty good option.

Jott (free, but $3.95/month for a mandatory online account)
Why you’ll like it: Just remembered something you forgot to do but you’re walking from your office to your car? This app records your voice, transcribes the task, asks for a due date and can send the entry to your Google calendar as well as a reminder to your email. Jott also created versions for salespeople and admin assistants.
How it works: Sign up for an account online, download the app and start talking.
What we like: The transcribing works extremely well and the interface is intuitive – all making for a short learning curve.
What to fix: It’s still not clear why you need a pricey Jott account. Make this effective app a little slimmer feature-wise so it can stand on its own, and don’t pretend to be free when you’re not.
Bottom line: VoiceMemo shipped with the iPhone 3.0 upgrade should have been there in the first place. Still, Jott makes the process easy. Raise your hand if you know what MMS means. If you don’t, you’ll need to study up on VoiceMemo. Jott’s service makes it easy, so don’t bother wrestling with something as easy as talking to yourself.

TimeManagerPro ($0.99, v3.0)
Why you’ll like it: This task management app is robust, flexible and it only costs a buck. Use it to track billable hours or make grocery lists. (There is also a free “light” version.)
How it works: It’s pretty standard. Enter, categorize and schedule tasks. Run a timer if you want to know how long tasks are taking, instead of trying to remember later and entering data from memory or scraps of paper.
What we like: Help files on every screen and online chat support! The stats module will help you figure out where your time sinks are (and you can send reports to your email). Most of us have some blurry space between work and home, and this app gets that with a category to manage your personal time.
What to fix: Intuitive integration with desktop calendars like Outlook or Google Desktop would make this even handier.
Bottom line: Understanding where the time goes is the first step to effective time management. TimeManagerPro’s task analysis takes it to the next level. See everything on your plate at once and reprioritize your time. U

All apps were tested on an iPhone OS 3.0.

Today’s worker is awash in a tsunami of information. Basex, a research firm that helped create the first Information Overload Awareness Day, estimates that “by 2012, the typical knowledge worker will receive hundreds of messages each day via email, IM, text, and social networks.” Some of us already do.

Here are five time-saving ways to capture and organize information so you can actually work instead of shuffling around digital paperwork.

Nerdy Merit Badges offers this one to anyone who empties their email 71.4 per cent of the time.

Master Your Inbox
Be ruthless: read, respond (if necessary) and then swiftly file or delete each message. Or “fail faster,” as the folks who publish Inbox Zero put it. The modern packrat who keeps everything in one central inbox is working with a recipe for disaster, as is the one who interrupts himself every time a new message arrives.
Strategy: Set aside time to deal with email instead of dipping in and out of it during the day. Your inbox should be reserved for items that require attention now or soon. Move messages to appropriate project or topic folders (such as travel, personal, expenses etc.). And use the delete key often for unnecessary correspondence. If you do this 71.4 percent of the time you can buy a Nerd Merit Badge for US$3.99.
Toolbox: For a detailed description of inbox management, read Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero.

Track Tasks
The paper-based list has been upgraded. Now you can easily create and maintain a running list of tasks and appointments using free web-based applications.
Strategy: Organize tasks by category (work and personal, for example) and project, and also attach deadlines, priority levels and reminders.
Toolbox: Two of the best web apps for this are Remember the Milk and Todoist. Both let you embed your list of tasks in a Gmail account or as a sidebar on Firefox, keeping your to-dos front and centre.

Take Notes
Ever had a brilliant idea or essential piece of information pop into your head and disappear five minutes later? We all need a way to capture and categorize our ideas and notes, but scattering them in multiple notebooks or computer documents is inefficient and frustrating.
Strategy: Put down the idea right away in one web app you can access anywhere.
Toolbox: Enter Evernote, a free application (they also have an ad-free paid version) that is like an extension of your brain. You can organize thoughts and notes into separate digital notebooks and add photos or clippings of web pages.

Organize Your Bookmarks
What’s the point of bookmarking a website if you can’t easily find that really interesting one, that, you know, the one with the article that you’d read last week?
Strategy: Amass a collection of links organized by relevant keywords.
Toolbox: Delicious is a free and easy way to organize and share your bookmarks, not to mention save and tag them. For example, while researching this article, I tagged bookmarks with the words “productivity” and “unlimited.” Then, while writing, I opened my Delicious page and selected those tags to view my links. I didn’t waste time searching through an endless list of bookmarks in my browser.

Streamline Your e-Reading
It’s important to track the latest developments in your industry and profession, but you need to do so in an efficient way.
Strategy: Use an RSS reader and bring the news right to you.
Toolbox: Google Reader and Netvibes are two of my favourite free applications that let you subscribe to RSS feeds from blogs, news organizations and other sources of information and organize and read them all in one place. New content automatically appears in your reader, so you don’t have to visit the same sites multiple times a day. U