Geek in Toque
Once again, this is not a listing of places where I quaffed magic mushrooms in a field (that’s a totally different blog). Instead, this is my weekly round-up of the best of the interwebz, painstakingly curated by spending probably too much time online. In my defense, we were pummeled/blessed with about 5 feet of glittery white snow this week here in our mountain hideaway, so I had a lot of time to ponder the awesomeness that came through the channels. In no particular order:

1. Blogchat A rolling stone or Twitter chat gathers no moss, but it certainly gathers smart participants and endless pearls of bloggy wisdom every Sunday evening at 8 pm Central. Hosted by the inimitable Mack Collier and featuring a changing roster of learned pros, Blogchat moves faster than a speeding torrent and is a source of great connections and tips for making the most of your online presence. You can participate through a Twitter client like Tweetdeck or HootSuite by creating a search column for the term ‘#blogchat’. New tweets with the #blogchat hashtag show up in your column. Or if you want to follow #blogchat on another site, you can try TweetChat or WTHashtag – Learn more here.

2. 20ThingsILearned.com – is lovely new HTML5 e-book from the developers of Chrome. It’s a stocking stuffer for the geek in your life. An anonymous tip for your clueless boss. Every “thing” is shareable. Delicious illustrations from Christoph Niemann add to the playful vibe. Love this.

3. Meet Up – Having relied on MeetUp to connect with like-minded peeps and discover helpful IRL events, this week I started a group. Hiding away in a mountain town is a spectacular experience, but I do miss the opportunities to network that living in a tech hub like Toronto afforded me. I’m very keen to connect with other Geeks in Toques, and love the usability, choice, and promotion tools that MeetUp offers. Support is amazing and I loved having to promise to take it offline – because most of us have the online network of our choice all sewn up and we do need to reach out and touch each other (with permission, of course) every once in a while.

4. When Bad Websites Happen to Good People We’ve all seen it. That company with a remarkable product and remarkable people with the GeoCities 1995 web presence. The site you want to use, but can’t, because it’s as prickly as a porcupine’s hiney. That opening autoloading video that makes your teeth gnash every time you drop by. “Nascent blobs of regurgitated brochures” (Tip 2). Involved in a site refresh or critical overview? You should read these 10 little nuggets of plain-spoken sense, and share them, and comment on them, and add to them, and tattoo them on your forehead.

5. My lady friends? You need to read this blog. Often.

Have a week to end all weeks. Be awesome to each other.

The full report is ready for download. So are other local government action resources.