A few of those tips were: You must organize your inbox, archive items, separate them into tags/categories/labels, use filters to direct incoming mail into specific labels instead of receiving everything in the inbox. That reduces the clutter and allows you to focus on more important email first. (i.e. I redirect all newsletters to a ‘Newsletters’ label and automatically set them to ‘Read’).

One thing I mentioned previously was getting straight to the tasks and answering all email before starting with other work. This gets your mind off the issue of ‘pending mail’ and allows you to concentrate fully on other tasks. However, sometimes this is not that easy as there might be certain emails you must spend more time on, and you might need to get busy with other things at that moment.

My solution for this issue is to start a new reply to every single email you plan to address in the course of the day. Add a salutation, and save the message. In certain emails where you might have to formulate a proper answer you might want to do a sketch; type in the main topics and then just save it as a draft like the rest. Do this for all your pending email and then get them off your inbox.

That way you will have peace of mind that you have started the replies, and you can get down to other matters knowing that your inbox is now clean.

Do you have any special way of managing your inbox? Share your comments,

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Pending matters (personal or work) tend to stick to your brain through the day, even though you are not focusing on them. They are like a cancer that cuts off productivity, just like a person who is going through divorce or difficult times will have trouble coping with work and friends, this holds with any kind of personal activities that have been left pending.

• If you take email seriously, divide it into “personal” and “work” folders. Attend to personal mail before leaving to work each morning, or at night before going to bed.
• Write down task lists (Use Google Calendar, Outlook, Google Tasks or even pen and paper) and divide them into days. You can’t do everything in a day, so be realistic. Try to do everything that is personal at home, and everything that is work related at the office.
• When you don’t accomplish a pending task, don’t leave it “hanging”. Set it for a later time (after work maybe?) and remove it from the “overdue” list. If it was something urgent you couldn’t accomplish and it involves someone else, let that person know (email? phone?) immediately that it will take you another day to finish it.
• While at work, be sure to have your pending activities listed appropiately and go through them in order, remember you can’t do everything at once and it will only stress you out thinking about how much you have to do, specially when you have a deadline.
• If you read personal email at work, try to archive (or store) personal emails that arrive, and mark in your calendar that you must attend to those emails when you get home. If it is something urgent, reply at once that you will attend to the issue at a later time.

By following these steps, hopefully you will be able to clear your mind at work and start to focus on what you have to do, not what you had to do and didn’t do, nor what you have pending and might have to do later. Everything at its time.

Now get to work!

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2. Cooooontinue…
3. ididwork

I just read an interesting post that talks about cross-dressing as a method of overcoming the creative block, to be able to develop another “way” of thinking, as in thinking as the opposite sex would. It sounds interesting, however, I don’t think it should be necessary to reach those extremes. I live by a basic rule:

If you wouldn’t read what your writing down, you probably shouldn’t be writing it down in the first place.

If you run out of ideas, probably what you are doing right now isn’t interesting enough. The thing to do is find something you would really like to do, then blog about that. For example, go explore the world, take photos, learn a new language, start software programming, make your own website, learn to use photoshop, or a thousand other things come to mind.

Why? This is not only about blogging. Expressing yourself or your thoughts via a blog is only a way to reflect your own self on the web. So if your own self is boring, the best thing to do is to make your life less boring. And it is possible, it doesn’t matter if you work, or are too busy all the time, there is always a way to inch in a few things you would like to do. Think about it.

If someone managed to make a whole vlog series about “You Suck at Photoshop“, surely you can come up with something creative and blog about it. I don’t know, just evoke your wildest dreams, just think and act random, sometimes that’s the best way in enabling that creative part of your mind. That way you will never run dry. However, don’t blog without a reason. If you are not feeling it, then don’t go posting it.

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So, you might have heard a lot of talk/posts going around lately referring to Google Wave. So what is this “Google Wave” everyone is talking about?

It is a beta service from Google, hosted at http://wave.google.com, which currently is only available to 100,000 people. Those people are having their invitations sent to them by Google as a preview of the service. It is expected that the service will go live in X amount of time, possibly after they have determined that the system presents a low rate of bugs, and can hold up to the excessive demand on their servers (We don’t wait it dying like Gmail, do we now?).

According to Google Wave’s short about page, a Wave is the following:

• A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
• A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
• A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

However, Wikipedia goes on to explain a little more in depth what Google Wave is:

• Google Wave is “a personal communication and collaboration tool” announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages, and numerous other extensions.

So I hope this has cleared any confusion as to what the service is, what we can expect from it, and how reliable it is going to be. We all have our fingers crossed that it will turn out to be what we expected (and that it wont fall down as much as Gmail).

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1. Facebook in challenge to Google – BBC News
2. Why Google Buzz is brilliant | Christopher S.
3. Social Media and Marketing… Where are we?

Social Interaction: Lego People

Advances in Social Media are changing the way we market our products, services, or ourselves. It’s not all about *the logo* any more, it’s not about what your company represents, it’s about what your customers represent to you, it’s about how will your customers benefit from your service, and how can you learn from their experiences to build up on your products, and deliver better service.

One platform isn’t the future. One platform isn’t even better than another. A platform is a tool, and us marketers must know how to use these tools to reach our customers, without aimlessly devoting everything towards one specific platform. Today it might be Twitter and Facebook, tomorrow Google Wave, and the next day who knows, but we must always keep in mind that it’s the person that makes the platform useful, not the platform that makes the person useful.

Chris Brogan is an expert. I don’t usually call someone an expert unless I really mean it. He recently gave a speech at New Media Atlanta (which I obviously did not attend to), and he just posted the video capture for the whole speech on his blog. If you have a spare hour I recommend you give it a good listen.

So what are your thoughts about Social Media? Where do we go from here?

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English, particularly, is much more complex than I thought. As you may already know, I am rather into AI. One of the fields of AI is Natural Language Processing which involves speech recognition, syntactic and semantic organisation, separating words into parts of speech, language understanding, and finally speech generation, amongst others.

I genuinely used to believe there were only 8 parts of speech in English: Verbs, Adverbs, Nouns, Pronouns, Adjectives, Preopsitions, Conjunctions and Interjections. I stand corrected by Wikipedia. There are about 17 different types if we classify them correctly.

The open word classes:

• Adjectives
• Adverbs
• Interjections
• Nouns
• Verbs (except auxilliary verbs)

According to Wikipedia, “an open class (or open word class) is a word class that accepts the addition of new items, through such processes as compounding, derivation, coining, borrowing, etc.”

The closed word classes:

• Auxiliary verbs
• Clitics
• Coverbs
• Conjunctions
• Determiners (articles, quantifiers, demonstrative adjectives, and possessive adjectives)
• Particles
• Measure words
• Adpositions (prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions)
• Preverbs
• Pronouns
• Contractions
• Cardinal numbers

According to Wikipedia, “a closed class (or closed word class) is a word class to which no new items can normally be added, and that usually contains a relatively small number of items.”

Now, I was not aware of such classification, but this for sure must have an impact on language parsers. I am currently starting to write my first Language Parser, and thought I would start out with an SQL dictionary structure. I will be posting my findings in this blog as I get along with this.

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You see it everywhere. People locked within their social barriers. I am not talking about total loss of social control, nonetheless, I am talking about freedom of speech, and freedom of action, within respectable values, moral, and behaviour.

Us humans set limits for everything. For our thoughts, for our actions, for our writing, our drinking, our eating, and all sorts of things. While some of these limits are clearly good for our bodies, some of them do not exactly create a benefit for us. They create limitations as to how far we are willing to go, how to deal with certain situations, how to run our lives.

More than once I have seen people fall into imaginary illness, thinking they have all kinds of problems, all kinds of stress, and everything is going down for them. I’ve heard very good advice for two people in the past concerning getting rid of these annoying barriers. One person once told me that we can cope with everything in life, every little ‘problem’, as long as we take the right attitude towards it.

The fact is that there is no real reason to keep putting yourself down over stupid situations. As long as you are alive, you are breathing, and you are striving for the best for you, your loved ones, and society, then there should be nothing more to worry about. Illness comes, and goes. Work issues come and go. You might have made mistakes in the past, but don’t judge yourself too hard, as you’ll only get bitter, grow older, and fail to progress in what could have been a wonderful life.

But we certainly are free to think beyond the walls we self-build around our brain. We certainly are free to go far beyond traditional human thought, in the search for what is it that makes us live, breathe, think, talk and communicate, interact socially. We certainly are free to create the pathways for our lives, to explore our cities, to explore our minds, to explore society, and to live freely and act accordingly. That’s the beauty of life, we can do whatever we want, whatever we pursue.

So if you have been in a situation similar to this one, as I certainly have been before, remove the stigma of what others may think of you, and do what you really want to do, as this is the only way to truly open barriers in your mind and in your life. Do not let yourself be put down by the behaviour or thought of others, as this only creates more barriers for you. First of all , be sure of what you want to accomplish. Then accomplish it. And if this stands in the way of others, do not hesitate and take the appropiate action.

You can only do as much in life, and if you waste time thinking about the consecuences of well-funded, well-behaved, and well-thought actions you may want to strive for, then what is the point of creating a life plan? what is the point of striving for things if you hesitate? Do not hesitate.

It may sound cliché, and I am aware that it is only a tag-line for a brand, but just do it.

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“Google look out, Facebook knows the real money is in real-time search,” said respected blogger Robert Scoble.

“Google is the king of regular search. FriendFeed is the king of real-time search. This makes the coming battle over this issue much more interesting,” Mr Scoble told the BBC.

“FriendFeed is well known for having some powerful and intelligent technology that allows users to aggregate everything they do online and do it all in real time.

What does FriendFeed do?

• Friendfeed lets users bring together many of the accounts they have on social media and networking sites such as Facebook and Flickr
• Updates posted on those sites by a user and their friends are echoed on FriendFeed.
• A built in chat system lets FriendFeed users instantly comment or start a conversation about an update.
• These feeds of what friends are up to can be embedded in webpages or fed out to services such as Twitter.
• FriendFeed works with almost 60 sites including Delicious, Reddit, LinkedIn and NetVibes.

“With this acquisition, Facebook is gunning directly not only at Twitter, but at Google. This is a warning shot to those two companies,” Mr Parr told BBC News.

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Facebook in challenge to Google.

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The popular site has been subject to a so-called denial-of-service attack, according to the firm’s official blog.

Denial-of-service attacks take various forms but often involve a company’s servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.

Facebook has also said it is “looking into” possible problems with its site.

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Twitter site reopens after attack.

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This is the world as I see it:

People are tending to flock towards online lives, social networks and chat instead of the telephone, live conversations, excercise and real life.

People are becoming more violent, we are also starting to swear a lot more. A lot of people are losing respect for their elders, siblings and even friends.

People are tending to buy more things every time. Technology has led to more consumer-oriented marketing. A lot of people can’t live without the latest items. Status division is becoming a serious rising issue.

Education is going down. War, greed and control is increasing. A growing percentage feels their life is worthless, boring or monotonous.

Why is all of this happening? How can a few generations change so much the aspect of life itself. Is technology the sole factor in the systematisation of people?

It sickens me. Greed? Envy? Violence? Need for Control? Lack of respect? Murder? Lack of respect? Indiference?

Many of these are claimed to be “natural instincts”. Many think they are embedded in us, as animals we are. But then on the other hand, we claim to be civilised, we claim not to be animals.

So then what are we?! If not animals. We sure act as such.

Our past generations had a greater sense of decency. We are falling fast into constant degradation. I remember in primary school, there seemed to be a constant battle for who was the worst student. The best ones got rocks thrown at.

So as I see it, there are those who strive for knowledge, and there are those who prefer to live indiferent unknowledgeable systematic-consumer lives. By doing so not only are we finishing off with out earth and our resources, but with the little hope for knowledge and progress we have.

Maybe it’s not all our fault, but the education system, the goverment and the social laws and restrictions. But nonetheless, where is our curiosity? Why not leave the box? Why not chose to become aware over staying behind.

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