“Are you on Twitter?”

If your answer is “No,” then this is for you. And if you’re over 45, chances are that’s your answer. But before you write off Twitter as a time suck, or a toy for kids, you should know that most Twitter users are between 26 and 44. Grownups like it, and for good reason.

For quite a while now, reading my Twitter timeline has been one of the most gratifying and important activities of my day. But back in 2008, this was what I had to say about it:

You know those sci-fi movies where some guy suddenly has the ability to read the minds of everyone around him and his eyes roll up in his head and he collapses in a heap, frothing at the ears and utterly insane because he can’t handle the flood of inanities? That’s why I’ve been avoiding Twitter.

At the time I wrote that, Twitter was still young, and the prompt its founders had come up with to get people to use it was “What are you doing?” In response to this we got a lot of sandwich eating and jogging in the early days. This drove many people nuts away.

Read the rest of How Twitter Became My Morning Paper on the Huffington Post.

It’s been a blast, and I’ll keep doing it because it’s a passion. But writing for these blogs is preaching to the choir.

I’ve decided it’s time to pay some attention to the flock. Despite everything I said (see my last few posts), I’ve gone ahead and started writing for HuffPo. It’s for a good cause (or at least that’s my rationalization). There’s a new channel — Huff/Post 50 — for Baby Boomers (which in the US means people born between 1946 and 1964), and I want to evangelize to this demographic on the joys of the Internet.

They need it. It will help make the second half of their lives more fulfilling and less lonely. It’s a resource for enrichment and expression and connection unlike anything any generation of seniors has ever had. And most of them don’t know how lucky they are. Yet.

A number of events big and small influenced my decision. My mother (71) buying an iPad and returning it because she couldn’t figure it out, then buying a Galaxy and returning it because she couldn’t figure it out, then deciding to try an iPad again, but to wait till I can show her how to use it. The fact that I got sick and have had to slow down a bit for the last year. A tweet I saw (just to name a few):

You should be able to buy a kit to build yourself an inner world to counteract the loneliness and isolation of old age.

As I said in my article The Web is a Room With a View, the Web is bursting with such kits. And blank canvases, and blank pages, and curio cabinets, as well as other people and other people’s gardens to pick flowers from. This is what I want them to know.

You can follow Huff/Post 50 on Twitter or subscribe to that channel by RSS. You can find all of my posts here and you can also subscribe to just my posts by RSS. They are published in HuffPo’s 50 and Tech channels.

Instagram appeals to the idealistic part of me, that withered little corner of my soul that is some days barely clinging to life… Here’s why:

…Instagram is much more than a toy. There are two things about it that really make my heart swell. First, seeing pictures taken by people all over the world, being privy to moments friends and semi-friends and total strangers find exceptional enough to record and share, really makes you hyper aware of the beating heart of humanity on this planet. The other six-plus billion souls cease to be an abstraction when you see that somebody is living a moment in a dusty street in a Korean village or on a beach at sunset while you sleep or wash dishes. It’s exhilarating, extraordinarily moving and, on some level, reassuring. When the “other” becomes real, we’re less likely to destroy him.

Read the rest of this post on frogblog.

We do love our business cards, though. We’re still passing them out at even the most high-tech conferences. They’re little bits of art, tiny extensions of ourselves, especially if you’re lucky enough to not be a cog in the works of some giant corporation. 

When I get home from a conference and sift through the stacks of them I’ve collected, I feel the way I did after my elementary school Valentine’s Day card exchanges.

Now there are a couple of platforms you can use to create something resembling an online business card. I doubt they’ll replace the paper versions any time soon, but they can be fun and practical. Read about them in my post About.me and Flavors.me: Online Calling Cards on GigaOm Collaboration.

Upon reflection, I was surprised that I was surprised that people had no idea that Facebook has, from Day One, been subject to scrutiny and criticism for its morally questionable actions, blatant fuck-ups and lack of respect for users and their personal information. Of course (lightbulb)! Ordinary people don’t read about the Internet, they just jump right in and use it. And Facebook banks on that kind of lemming-ness.

Read the entire post on frogblog.

But although Posterous makes it easy for you to spread your Internet finds around, this doesn’t appear to be its primary goal. I have reason to believe that the people behind the app don’t want you to use it solely as a personal “cloud,” even though that’s how I suggest it be used in my article. The fact that all the content you send to your various social sites also appears on a Posterous site tells me that Posterous wants to be a blog unto itself and a stand-alone element of your online presence. Plenty of people do use it that way.

But Posterous is rather late to the blog game and, with its limited theme options I can’t see choosing it over WordPress, or even Blogger, if you want to publish a good-looking blog with some spiffy functionality without having to code. A community of designers will undoubtedly spring up around Posterous, which will make it a more attractive option.

In the meantime, try it anyway. It’s exceptionally usable and useful, with close to zero learning curve.

Speaking of fatigue, I saw the expression “social media fatigue” for the first time in a while the other day, just a few days after announcing to my husband “I’m bored with the Internet and Twitter right now.” Maybe that’s what I’ve got.

And of course, with what’s happened in Haiti, the expression “compassion fatigue” is on my mind, especially since I can’t seem to inspire even 188 Francophilia members to donate five bucks each to reach my $1,000 donation goal for earthquake relief. Inspiring is hard work. It’s making me tired. They must be fatigued too…

It’s something I’ve been thinking of doing for a while now. You see, I’ve been on the web/tech/startup circuit for a couple years here in Paris, and the girlpreneurs are just not visible enough IMHO. And I have a very good idea about why that is…

I told a geek guy I know that I was thinking of working with The Next Women, so he went to the site to see what it was about. He read a quote from an interview with a fondatrice (the feminine form of “founder” in French), who was talking about her startup, which has to do with beauty products. He laughed. Read another one about shopping. He laughed. Another one about renting designer handbags. He fucking laughed.

And that’s the problem. Women entrepreneurs and their ideas are sometimes brushed off with disdain by people with junk. So we need to support each other. Like Girl Power 3.0, like CyberElles, like Girlz in Web, like Paris Girl Geeks, like The Next Women, like Women 2.0… Any others you’d like to tell me about?

Why the name Fondatrix? The suffix -trix is a Latin feminine form, and where the French -trice came from. In English, there’s pretty much only one word we associate with that ending… And trix suggests tricks; Web girls are clever girls… Then there is Astérix, the diminutive Gallic hero who symbolizes French strength and determination. All the Gauls’ names end in -ix. Of course, the female characters are all either harpies or bimbos, as far as I can tell. Of course. I used one of them (above) for the Facebook group. For now.

So if you’re a woman in a startup, come join me in Fondatrix. Nobody will laugh at you.

(Closed this group in May, 2010 before I unliked Facebook.)

Do you have a content strategy for your own social media presence? If you’re a professional, you probably should. Too many small business/startup blogs and Twitter feeds are too inwardly focused, all about features and updates or the founder’s views and activities.

I give some tips for getting a plan and making your content valuable in my Web Worker Daily article Taking Content Strategy Personally.

Don’t know what content strategy is? Find out in Paris next April at Content Strategy Forum 2010, “for anyone who develops, manages, or delivers content within their own organization or for their clients: user experience designers, information architects, business analysts, technical writers, web project managers, documentation managers, translators, web marketers, practicing content strategists, and those looking to break into the field.”

• Learn more and register (tickets are very affordable!)
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