I had the honor of being interviewed by Federico Viticci for one of the premier articles of his major redesign and re-launch of the prestigious Mac Stories website. I just now read through the whole interview for the first time, and it turned out great. It’s a good, long read about all sorts of Mac nerdery.

This article by Marissa Bracke is what inspired Scott’s aforelinked piece. There is some great insight and advice in here:

It took me a while to realize that there’s a big difference between someone who feels busy and someone who has a lot going on in their business. […]

Skeptical? Try this for three days straight: don’t use the word busy. At all.

You want to email this article to everyone in your office who always talks about how busy they are, don’t you? Yeah, me too.

Fantastic essay by Scott Berkun:

People who are always busy are time poor. They have a time shortage. They have time debt. They are either trying to do too much, or they aren’t doing what they’re doing very well. They are failing to either a) be effective with their time b) don’t know what they’re trying to effect, so they scramble away at trying to optimize for  everything, which leads to optimizing nothing.

On the other hand, people who truly have control over time have some in their pocket to give to someone in need. They have a sense of priorities that drives their use of time and can shift away from the specific ordinary work that’s easy to justify, in favor of the more ethereal, deeper things that are harder to justify.

The promo video is very cute. It tells more about what Twitter already is than it does about their website’s new UI.

And speaking of the new UI, the unconventional design of Twitter’s new iPad app now makes a bit more sense. But it looks as if there are two significant advantages Twitter’s website has over their iPad app: (a) selected tweets don’t stay ‘pinned’ in your current timeline view; and (b) side-loaded pages are closable.

How Leo Babauta uses Notational Velocity. A perfect example of how simple software can still be mighty powerful.

Seth Godin on “The massive attention surplus”:

It turns out that the almost infinitely long tail of attention varieties is what will kick open the monetization of online attention. Yes, I will give my attention to an ad, but only if it’s anticipated, personal and relevant. We still give permission to marketers that earn it, but so few marketers do.

This is why elite ad networks like Fusion and the Deck are so wildly successful. They’re serving up relevant, anticipated ads on sites of good report with a trusting readership.

What an incredibly clever alarm/timer/to-do app. It sits in your Menu Bar and you can drag files, emails, URLs and contacts onto it and schedule a concrete time to hash out a to-do item. It syncs with iCal (and therefore, Things). And you can even use it to set a timer.

Alarms was just released as a public Beta, so it is currently free test. (Via Patrick Rhone.)

Google Reader was seeing upwards of 267 percent year-over-year growth in traffic to now a 27 percent year-over-year decline. Perhaps RSS readers are on the decline, but it’s because syndicated content is becoming more popular, and is therefore available through many means beyond just a feed reader. Such as email, Twitter, Facebook, the Tumblr Dashboard, etc.

(Via Khoi.)

Update: Google Says Google Reader Is Doing Just Fine.

Marco Arment, in his interview with Brett Kelly:

The only way to deal with large amounts of email is to devise standards for deciding quickly whether to respond to something. And not whether you think you should respond, but whether you think that you realistically will. You have to be honest with yourself and brutal to the senders who don’t make the cut.

This is how most people work anyway, but they’re in denial about it, so they’ll let their inboxes collect thousands of messages and then “declare bankruptcy” after a while and start the cycle again.

In case you missed it earlier, Brett’s Talking Tools interview with me is here. And there are several others as well.

Match 4 looks like a doozy! Scott Thomas versus Mark Weaver with commentary by John Gruber? Wow. And if, like me, you prefer to wait until the match is over so you can read through each volley at your own pace, you may now begin.

I get a lot of email asking how I do links in my RSS feed and on my website. For the past year I’ve been using this plugin by Jonathan Penn, and it has been the foundation of getting the proper behavior for links in my RSS feed (though I have written a bit of additional code to get better functionality out of it).

This new plugin, written by YJ Soon, seems to add similar custom functionality right out of the box:

(i) the item’s RSS permalink becomes the link destination; (ii) the actual permalink to your post is inserted as a star glyph at the end of your post; and (iii) a star glyph is added in front of your non-linked-list post titles.

Moreover, you can customize much of the behavior as desired.

I have not yet switched to this plugin, but if you post links (or are thinking about posting links) to your WordPress website this plugin looks like the ticket.

And so long as we’re on the subject, clever readers may have already noticed I changed the default behavior for links in the shawnblanc.net RSS feed about a week ago. Formerly the linked-to URL pointed to this site’s permalilnk first, thus causing two taps or clicks before landing on the linked-to URL. Now a link in the RSS feed goes directly to the linked-to URL. This change in RSS behavior has proven to be a fantastic decision, and I highly recommend all link-bloggers do the same. But more on that another day.

A lightweight, easy-to-use utility for keeping getting notifications from your Basecamp projects. If you are in and out of Basecamp all day, BaseApp is a swell utility — it runs in the Menubar and only costs 9 bucks.

Got 60 seconds? Please fill out this quick and fun survey about how you do (or don’t) use Instapaper. It’s for a piece I’m working on.

In light of all the “Worry isn’t Work” and “how to I manage my inbox” talk lately, this essay by Robert Louis Stevenson (written over 100 years ago), mentioned in the aforelinked post, deserves its own link.

Here’s another quotable lines:

He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in return. Either he absents himself entirely from all fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden inkpot; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge some temper before he returns to work.

And with the advent of Twitter, Facebook, and a million other things to distract us, this essay is now more relevant to more people.