It’s been a while since I’ve written my last post. And I’m terribly, terribly sorry for that but things have really changed during last months. Really, a lot.

I still love to write and since last weeks I’ve started working on something that I’ve always wanted to do: an ebook about Gmail, the email service provided for free by Google. Out there there are impressive resources about Gmail, where you can find answers to most of the questions you end up asking yourself as a Gmail user. That’s why I’m not writing about how to use Gmail, but something different about how to empower your inbox experience. 

With my ebook, you’ll be able to take a step further from your standard usage of Gmail. Let me explain my point.

Why am I writing an ebook about Gmail?

It’s easy: I love Gmail, from its starts to now. And, like many of you, my life is mostly Gmail-dependent: I have a standard Gmail address from which I manage several other email accounts (inbound and outbound). I’m also a Google App user for my @matteoduo.com domain and I couldn’t live without Gmail filters and its core features. In other words, I’m a Gmail #gmailaholic and I’m almost sure you’re one too.

Who is the perfect reader for this ebook?

Everyone who has been tremendously looking for ideas, tools, ways, to get the most out of his/her Gmail. I’ll come clear: it’s you and me. We both rely on Gmail so much that any time Gmail is down, even for less than 60 seconds, we look for a self-destruct button while banging our heads against the wall. It’s hard to be told that, but we’re in this together to help one another.

What does the ebook SPECIFICALLY talk about?

Gmail is a powerful tool for emailing, storing conversations and sharing files. You know already this. What you might don’t know is how YOU can take your productivity to a higher level thanks to the Google email service itself. How? With not-as-famous-and-kinda-hidden Gmail features you’ve never heard of and third-party plugins that enrich your Gmail.

As a power Gmail user, I’ve been using many  plugins in the past and I’m now collecting the best of them in a single ebook to let you enhance your Gmail experience as well.

I can’t tell you now when exactly the ebook will be available, but I promise it won’t take too much. If you’re interested in hearing more about my upcoming ebook, subscribe to this list.

Some hours ago I received an email from Linkedin, the social network for professionals, saying that “You have one of the top 10% most viewed LinkedIn profiles for 2012!” and that it now counts 200 Million members. For the record, this last news was previously given at the beginning of this year, specifically in January.

Top 10%, interesting. Let’s do the math immediately: 10% of 200 Million, is 20 Million.
And 20 Million is

• two an a half times the entire population of Switzerland
• twice the number of people who bought “The Dukan Diet”
• the exact number as of those who bought the music single “We Are the World”

Linkedin is happy for me because I’m 1 in 20 Million and ans asks me to share this result with everybody I know.
People at Linkedin have different understanding of a what a “delightful stat” is, when compared to me.

You presumably know I’m into emails. Let me explain: I’m curious on how some people manage their own time dealing with incoming email messages without feeling overwhelmed by a sea of requested replies. In other words, dealing with email is to me a very intriguing and puzzling daily activity that needs to be mastered by (almost) anyone working nowadays. For the record, I wrote a book (in italian) on how to survive the inbox nightmare last year.

Since I’m often asked “how can I use email better”, “are there any technique that could help me out”, and similar ones, I’ve come to the conclusion of creating “Fix Your Email” an online presentation that sums up basic principles directly related to this specific topic that could be easily converted into action as soon as the presentation ends.

As you’ll see, works from David Allen, Merlin Mann and less know services are fundamental to my point and therefore my presentation.
Hope I’ll help you get better and increase your productivity with these tips.
If so, let me know here.

How do you manage your incoming emails? What about writing email: do you use any of the services mentioned in the presentation? Share your opinion in the comments and with me on Twitter (@the_dandy)

When you need to create a presentation, you have many things to think about and, generally speaking, they all can be arranged into 3 macro-elements:

• message (what you’re saying)
• understanding (what attendees would take from you)
• goal (what you wish to accomplish with your keynote)

Creating memorable yet enjoyable presentations is more like an art, rather than simply a collection of putting slides one after another. Because of this, you need to practice this activity to become good in communicating with your audience.

Regardless of your target industry market, you should start with a unique principle in mind if you’d ever wished to get Steve Jobs’s way to host keynotes: you need to simplify things.

As a pattern to create presentations, simplicity gives you a really powerful tool to deliver a unique message, decreasing percentage of people who don’t get what you’re saying, and the best format to directly speak towards attendees, because they don’t need to process tons of information for every slide they look at.

In this regard, I’ve found a pretty interesting presentation from Ethos3 explaining how simplicity converts into actual effectiveness for presenters. The story behind is catchy because is based on a movie, specifically on “Up in the Air”, starring George Clooney playing the role of Ryan Bingham, a man paid by big companies to fire people around US and a motivational speaker “using the metaphor ‘What’s In Your Backpack?’ to extol the virtues of a life free of burdens like relationships with people as well as things, arguing that the best way to live is to travel light, with little to hold one down. (via Wikipedia)”.

What you should take from this: too much information evolves into congested communicative paths, therefore useless to you and your audience as well.

What do you think: is simplicity a fundamental principle for creating presentations? Which others do you think are the most important? Share your opinion in the comments and with me on Twitter (@the_dandy)

I can’t imagine anything as powerful as storytelling, a way of telling stories and anecdotes in real life that gather emotions, images and informative content all together in a peculiar way.
Storytelling in recent years has become one of the mostly used format for advertising and communications agency to attract new customers (or interests) around brands focusing on “telling” stories, not just writing press releases.

Behind this powerful way to communicate there are fascinating scientific proves that Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer, has collected in a very interesting article.

Let me quote a paragraph:

“When we are being told a story though, things change dramatically found researchers in Spain. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain, that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too.
If someone tells us about how delicious certain foods were, our sensory cortex lights up, if it’s about motion, our motor cortex gets active”

If you, like me, love words, stories and sharing them with other people, you won’t regret reading it.
Enjoy!

What do you think about storytelling? Share your opinion in the comments and with me on Twitter (@the_dandy)

Yesterday night was the 57th U.S. Presidential Election and Barack Obama won against his mormon opponent Mitt Romney. Since this early morning everybody in the world talks about Obama’s re-election, making this photo the most-liked Facebook photo of all time as well as this (following) tweet the most retweeted tweet of all time, among other things.

Four more years. twitter.com/BarackObama/st…

Four more years. twitter.com/BarackObama/st…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) Novembre 7, 2012

 

Barack Obama is the new President of the United States of America in 2012, like four years ago in 2008.
But what about all past US Presidents? Who won? How federal states expressed their preferences? I’ve found all data, numbers and visual map that can answer to all these question.

If you need to get information and data related to the past U.S. Presidential Elections, I found something that might come in handy: 270towin.com.

This project collects data and historic relevant information about all past U.S. Presidential Elections. In addition to votes, percentage and historic facts, you’re able to get interactive maps of every single election showing states’ preferences, all the way from 2012 Obama re-election back to the first one in 1789 from wich George Washington was the winner.

Not bad, uh?

Do you know any other project that collects U.S. Presidential Election data or interactive maps? Share your opinion in the comments and with me on Twitter (@the_dandy)

I’m going straight to the point, because there’s no room for anything but this: any company in the world needs to talk to its own customers. No matter whatever business it’s based on.

Often those who run their own company forgot that customers are people, not stupid chimps, with feelings and a natural need to understand what is going on when they don’t get what they paid for. Customers and clients are like themselves not just like how you think they are.

If you look from a wider angle, all of this isn’t just the “give’em some awesome customer support” principle. It’s more. It’s so much more than this.

Talking with actual customers or leads is about the most intimate, yet powerful and effective action men can take: it’s all about communicate your product’s value.

To stress how this concept is so important in a startup environment, as well as in any other company, Jason Fried from 37signals dedicates an entire chapter of ReWork, his latest book written with David Heinemeier Hansson, friend and co-founder of 37signals as well, to the importance and value a great writer can create within a startup or any company:

Hire great writers

If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn’t matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever; their writing skills will pay off.

That’s because being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate.

Writing is making a comeback all over our society. Look at how much people e-mail and text-message now rather than talk on the phone. Look at how much communication happens via instant messaging and blogging. Writing is today’s currency for good ideas.

If you need more on this, I can bring you some real examples on why you need a writer in your company. As Matthew Bostock pointed out in his post, writers will help your company in creating a unique voice which stand out from competitors and will try to find new meanings in what you’re doing and communicate them to your audience (sort of “do not talk about features talk about benefits” sales copy principle but deep).

In addition a great writer (or a good one) could be very useful when paired to your creative crew, i.e. when creating an elevator pitch or a keynote presentation.

As I always say with words you can:

• spread your love
• sell your product
• make people appy

Words create value. Communicate with the best words. Or leave the game.

If you need someone with proven writing experience that can do all of this for your company, contact me.

Google has recently released a new gmail compose feature that enables users to create an email message right within inbox, making the experience smooth as well as faster.

Many times you need to look for an old email to get back on topic.
Now, while you’re searching through your emails, you’re able to write a new email directly in your inbox while even scrolling your messages on the back.

How Gmail New Compose Works

As you click on the “create” button, a small window pops up at the bottom of your screen where you can write your email, add recipients and attach files.

The killer feature is that you’re now able to have more messages at once, saying you can open more than one email window without any right-click solution to get a new browser tab. That’s really useful.

Google is rolling out the new Compose to its users and it still working to implement the following features in the next months:

• Insert emoticons and event invitations
• Print drafts from the More menu
• Add labels to outgoing messages from the More menu
• Send read receipts (Google Apps users only)
• Canned responses

You can find detailed information in the support page.
Gmail is still the best tool for everything about productivity.

The Next Web, one of the most followed and loved blog about technology, start-ups, lifehacks, etc., is working on a brand new version of its website and I had the pleasure of being invited to see it in the private beta.

If you don’t want to read, just have a look at my gallery: The Next Web’s Next Website [Gallery]

Colors
Orange, light grey and white are the brand new color palette The Next Web is going to use in its upcoming new website. Cool, I like it because it makes everything look easy to read, thanks to the mouse overing that brights words up with more vivid color.

UI & Sections
First time I saw The Next Web’s new layout I thought “Hey, this is so close to Lifehacker’s…” but there are differences. Same idea in using just one sidebar to show a list of posts, filtered by latest and popular: this way you can prompt users lots of contents in a “condensed” portion of the screen, offering them a more easily way to read other stuff while navigating within the website.
The next Web is based on channels (topics) which you can now navigate and read in a 2-content grid layout. The only difference is shown by the All Channels page which will be focusing on 9 slots, 3 of which on the upper and more important part of the page while others following in a grid-like structure, like others channels do.
I don’t love so much grid-based layout but I can understand that a website that publishes as much content as The Next Web need to find a way to show as much as they can without losing a pleasant look.

Interesting: the upper navigation menu links to The Next Web’s Events section, where you can find upcoming events all around the world, Magazine section, The Next Web monthly magazine for tablets and smartphones, and Labs, The Next Web’s own products ad services.

Single post page
Coherent with the new layout structure, the single post page makes the reading experience pretty easy and enjoyable. Sharing content is (as you can imagine) fast and easy, even though I don’t personally like sharing options to be “enveloped” in a single window that pops up when mouse-overing on the arrow icon.
But it’s just up to me, no big deal.
Comments follows the post content and are based on Disqus.

Interesting: you can navigate to next and previous posts with the arrow keys on your keyboards. I don’t remember any website covering tech news that offers this feature. Useful, right?

Here’s some screenshots:

[print_gllr id=2386]

Sure there’ll be improvements and tweaks based on beta testers, but The Next Web’s Next Website seems pretty cool to me.

What do you think? Do you like the new orange-based layout? What about the new template? Share your opinion in the comments and with me on Twitter (@the_dandy)

Poche ore fa ho ricevuto una email da parte di Twitter che mi ha invitato all’utilizzo della sua nuova e attesissima piattaforma di promozione degli account, nonché dei singoli tweet.
L’invito, anzi l’exclusive invitation come recita l’email in questione, si presenta con la scritta

@the_dandy, you’re invited to advertise on Twitter.
Gain more followers, reach more customers and grow your business.

che punta alla pagina https://ads.twitter.com

Curioso come chiunque riceva un invito personalizzato, ho cliccato per guardare come era “da dentro” il sistema di monetizzazione di Twitter.
Preciso che già prima di entrare, mi ero promesso di non sperimentare nulla e quindi non provare a promuovere tweet, account per vederne il funzionamento. Avrei rimandato il tutto a tempi futuri.
Questa mia scelta si è rivelata, inconsapevolmente, l’unica possibile.

Twitter Inserzioni (o Twitter Ads in inglese) si presenta con una schermata composta dalla barra nera in alto tipica di Twitter e 5 sezioni numerate per la registrazione del tuo profilo Twitter Ads, visibili una volta che ci si è loggati.

Sezione Benvenuto

La prima sezione è quella di presentazione del servizio nella quale si trova il video che vedi qui sotto e i concetti base che stanno dietro alle inserzioni Twitter.

Sezione Località

Inserimento delle località target per l’attività di promozione.

Sezione Account Sponsorizzato

Sezione Tweet Sponsorizzati

Sezione Metodo di Pagamento

E’ in quest’ultima che ho trovato la “sorpresa”: la carta di credito e/o debito deve avere un’indirizzo di fatturazione negli Stati Uniti oppure in Canada.

Questa sera non ho dunque ricevuto un invito esclusivo per provare Twitter Inserzioni, ma soltanto per provare la pagina di login e l’inserimento dei dati.
E io che, nel tempo di caricamento della pagina https://ads.twitter.com, pensavo pensavo già a come tirarmela l’indomani su Twitter proprio promuovendo il post che sarebbe nato dal test di questa piattaforma.

Hai ricevuto anche tu questo tipo di invito? Condividi la tua opinione nei commenti e con me su Twitter (@the_dandy)