Twitter isn’t just a tool, though; it’s a community — one that will stop paying attention if it feels like you’re exploiting it. One way to make Twitter users feel exploited is to open an account and immediately start blasting out your latest press releases. That kind of headlong behavior could conceivably strike back against you, leaving your brand and your reputation in tatters.
Twitter for business: 5 ways to tap the power of the tweet

spy :: visualizes the conversations on Twitter, Friendfeed, Blogs and more.

Very handy to get a “right NOW” view of what the “twitterati” et al are thinking and saying about any topic.

Great list of handy tools for business bloggers, or bloggers who are in business, or even bloggers wishing to make their business by blogging. The resources are broken into categories including

• Blogging Platforms (I suggest WordPress),
• Design and Content (including great links to WP templates, Photoshop tips, and content help),
• Blogs about Blogging,
• Business Blogging,
• Forums and Networking,
• Search Engines,
• Stats & Analysis,
• Money Making Tools and
• Tools & Misc.

As a bootstrapper, you know that clients equal business. Without them, you’d just be another one-man (or woman) shop with an office trying not to go into debt. Fighting for and retaining clients against your competition can be a struggle, just like recruiting new employees or searching for a job yourself is a frustrating battle.

Bootstrapper » 52 Creative Ideas for Finding New Clients

How To Increase Business While Beating The Summer Heat | Freelance Folder | A Blog For Freelancers And Web-Workers

In a digital world, the race goes not to the person with the most information, but the person with the best combination of low-volume and high-relevancy information. The person with the least inputs necessary to maximize output.

I admit I used to use RSS, but I stopped using it as soon as I started using tabbed browsing in Safari (and now Firefox). It’s so simple to just call up all my favorite sites by “opening all tabs” that I just stopped using RSS altogether. However, I’m missing the key timesaver of RSS feeds now –the ability to only read new posts, and skim content on multiple sites simultaneously.

On to the tips, from Ryan Holiday:

Using RSS Effectively:

1) Don’t Use Categories
Organizing all your feeds by genre is tempting but will burn you out.

2) Don’t check it on the weekends

3) Clean House
If an author isn’t delivering consistently, cut them out. If they ever improve enough to be worth reading again, you’ll probably hear about it.

4) If it Piles Up, Throw it Away
Just click “Mark All As Read” and move on. If you’re utilizing Delicious and StumbleUpon correctly, both later in this article, all the important stuff will come back to you.

Stumble Upon Tips

I haven’t used StumbleUpon yet — but from these tips, I think I will:

StumbleUpon is a valuable tool as a reader or a blogger. As a reader, it allows you to hierarchically rank the Internet–thumbs up or thumbs down, Gladiator style. Based on your voting history and interests, it lets you “stumble” on to pages that you’ll like…

1) Actually Joining the Community
… your votes won’t mean anything if you haven’t voted often and voted well for other pages you actually think are worthwhile.2) Guide, but Don’t Direct
…go through your archives and make sure anything that has been submitted is in the right place. By keeping up on this, you can optimize your site for the traffic it deserves.

3) Dial in Your Interest, Let Computers Do Your Work
Every time you vote, tag, and review a story, the Stumble Upon algorithm gets to know you that much better. Start by voting in all your favorites, sites who’s feed you subscribe too, and writers you read everyday…

4) Use Only the Essentials.
…Go to “Toolbar Options?Position Options” and place it anywhere you want …  thumbs up, thumps down button– [is] everything that you need.

Del.icio.us tips

Although (IMO) stupidly named, I actually used del.icio.us for awhile as my personal bookmark aggregator (before I started using Google Browser Sync to handle the same task). When I was using delicious, seems I missed the social part a bit:

Delicious, if you use it right, not only makes your bookmarking system [highlighting good pages for later reference] portable but it hires all your friends as personal news shoppers for you. If you were looking to outsource your morning read, but didn’t want to pay those Indian MBA’s, this is how you do it.

Making your Bookmarks Del.icio.us:

1) Use the “Links for You” section
Delicious’ killer app is its ability to facilitate sharing. When friends read a story they think you’d be interested in, they tag it to you and it shows up in your account to be read at your leisure.

2) Give to Receive
While you’re doing your regular read, keep your friends in mind. If you see an article that’s relevant to a friends business, tag it “To:UserName” and it shows up in their account.

3) Mark them “To_Read”
When you see something that you know you have to read, but don’t have time for now, set up a category that delineates that you’ll go back to it. Think of it as a DVR that saves the stuff you need to watch but didn’t want to be chained to the clock for.

4) Be Simple
Use the Classic Del.icio.us buttons and nothing else. In Firefox, it puts them right next to your navigation bar, one for tagging and the other to view your bookmarks. Use as few tags as possible…  And lastly, only befriend people who provide quality material. The last thing you need is the website equivalent of chain-emails showing up in your account.

Here’s to more efficient browsing!

START DOING

1. Work out every day — starting small, then building the habit
2. Implement GTD fully — next actions, 2-minute rule, projects lists
3. Implement a 4 Hour Workweek “muse”
4. Blog regularly here

STOP DOING

1. Procrastinating

DO MORE OF

1. Reading business books
2. Eat healthy foods
3. Play with the kids
4. Go on dates with the wife
5. Visit with friends

DO LESS OF

1. Snacking on junk food
2. Surfing the web without a specific purpose
3. Taking on projects with little/no ROI

Have any others I should add, or care to weigh in on what you would DO? Let me know!

It takes a ton of time to do the routine things if you don’t keep close tabs on what you’re doing. In light of Tim Ferriss’ brilliant “Four Hour Work Week,” here’s some suggestions from Michael Hyatt to bring big time savings into your day without jumping off the grid or hiring a company in india to do your taxes. My favorites:

1. Limit the time you spend online. In my experience, the Web is most people’s #1 time suck. Yes, I know it is a wonderful tool for research, blah, blah, blah. But I often catch myself and my family members mindlessly surfing from one page to another with no clear objective in mind. Before you know it, you can eat up several hours a day. The key is to put a fence around this activity and limit your time online. Set a timer for yourself if you have to.

I’ve taken to timing my web surfing into 15 minute slots, often as “reset points” between big projects. It’s way too easy to burn an hour or more if you don’t stay mindful of what you’re doing.

2. Touch email messages once and only once. Okay, let’s be honest. How many times do you read the same email message over and over again? Guess what? The information hasn’t changed. That’s right. You are procrastinating.

One of my biggest challenges — I still tend to keep things in my inbox as long as they’re “undone” — leads to way too much rework. GTD and do/delegate/defer, along with the 2-minute rule of handling (“just do it if you can complete the next action in 2 minutes or less) would save me hours a week. My big challenge for ’08.

4. Stop attending low-impact meetings. If there’s one thing we can probably all agree on, it’s that we go to too many meetings. Either the meeting organizer isn’t prepared, the meeting objective isn’t defined, or you can’t really affect the outcome one way or the other.

I still have a lot of these on my calendar — and am actually getting rid of three of them as a result of this thought.

5. Schedule time to get your work done. This is crucial. As the saying goes, “nature abhors a vacuum.” If you don’t take control of your calendar, someone else will. You can’t spend all your time in meetings and still get your work done.

Instead, you need to make appointments with yourself. Yes, go ahead and actually put them on your calendar. Then, when someone asks for a meeting, you can legitimately say, “No, I’m sorry, that won’t work. I already have a commitment.” And you do—to yourself!

Biggie. I have some dedicated slots — mainly at the beginning of the week, mid-week and then at the end of the week to check in with myself and then hammer out next actions.

7. Engage in a weekly review and preview. Part of the reason our lives get out of control is because we don’t plan. Once a week, you have to come up for air. Or—to change the metaphor—you have to take the plane up to 30,000 feet, so you can see the big picture.

Keeping control and planning can seem like a lot more work, and if you’re already strapped for time and stuggling to keep up it can seem insurmountable to take on “one more thing” in your calendar. But if you don’t plan for completion and add some structure to how you handle your tasks, it’s only going to get worse.

- Sanscrit proverb

I’m a finalist in the True Value “Do it Yourself Allstar” competition. My wife was nice enough to submit an entry for me. I made it to the top 20, and now it’s up to voters to get me in the top 4, and then I’ll be judged by a panel for the final decision. Winner gets $1,000 to use toward a project (I’ll use it to finish the inside of Max and Sally’s play-house), and gets a 2-hour consultation with Steve Watson, the guy from “Monster House” and who has a new show on HGTV called “Don’t Sweat It.”

Here’s the entry Jen sent in (click the link to vote!):

My husband took a couple months last summer and built the ultimate backyard playground and park for our kids! He had a treehouse as a child, and wanted to recapture the magic for our then-three year old son and newborn daughter. After collecting ideas and remembering his childhood club-house, he sat down in front of the computer with a mini CAD program, and laid out the components. The “house” sits 5 feet off the ground, and is designed with the same materials as our real house. It features a 7’ x 7’ play area with a sleeping nook above the porch. There is a 7’ tall deck (with a tube slide for getting down quickly) off the back of the house overlooking the pond in our backyard, and other “amenities” include another slide over a clatter-bridge, two swings, a tire swing, and a rock-climbing wall. Though the project took a full two months, our son helped swing the hammer a bit, and they both had a grand time building a place for the kids to retreat. His next project is to finish the inside of the house and build an “interctive” sandbox underneath so the kids can flex their imaginations in the shade. The pictures speak for themselves – and the kids love it! We now have the “neighborhood park” right in our back yard.

http://www.startrightstarthere.com/displayEntry.aspx?entrantId=82

Check it out and vote if you want!