When it comes to face-to-face business meetings, the rituals are clear. You shake hands, exchange cards, get down to detail. People have been doing it for years. Facebook though is relatively new and its use as a business tool even newer. So what’s the correct way to use Facebook professionally, maintain your audience and keep your market feeling friendly?

1. Split the Personal from the Professional

Before Facebook launched its “pages” Facebook users were forced to combine their personal accounts with the business profiles. It was a mess. Not only were accounts capped at 5,000 “friends” but there was no easy way to separate personal details from professional information.

Today, that’s no longer the case. It is possible to maintain two completely separate identities on Facebook. Friends and family no longer need to be bored by your product announcements and potential buyers don’t have to shift uncomfortably in front of their screens when you mention something cute your child just said.

That allows you to keep your professional page professional. You’ll be able to talk about your business, show pictures that only relate to the work that you’ve done and discuss industry news. You can still be friendly — small talk has its place in business too — but the main focus of the page will be professional.

2. Don’t Skip the Middleman

Keeping your professional page professional is fairly straightforward. Using your contacts is a little tougher. There’s nothing wrong with looking through the friends and contacts of your contacts — that information is public — but there is something wrong with approaching a complete stranger in the hope of developing a business relationship. You don’t know each other so the only reason you’d want to know that person is that you want something from him. That’s not how relationships begin.

You do have something in common though: the person you both know. So ask for an introduction. When you’ve got a friend to bring you together, the join is lubricated and both of you want to make your contact happy by making it work. It’s not just polite, it’s also more effective.

3. Keep Your Content Relevant

Part of maintaining a professional presence on Facebook is avoiding the temptation to not just post personal information but to share irrelevant information. When you’re chatting with your friends, it’s fine to offer links to content that made you smile and videos that you found shocking. It’s a social time so you can fill it any way you want. When people visit your professional page, it’s on their business time and that means you don’t get to waste it.  They can find fun content everywhere else on the Web.

You will need to post interesting content if you’re going to keep your audience engaged but that content has to be related to the subject of your business. That’s why people are following you.

And of course, you don’t get to spam either. Facebook is not the place to send a stack of unsolicited marketing emails to everyone who follows you. Even those who have “liked” your business page will still regard the Facebook mailbox as a personal space. They won’t want to see business messages in it. Assume that your Facebook friends are also your newsletter subscribers (and encourage those who aren’t to sign up) and send your marketing emails to their inboxes.

4. Look at Their Eyes When You Speak

In a face-to-face meeting, you’ll expect the person you’re speaking to look at your eyes. You can’t do that when you’re chatting on Facebook but what you can do is understand who you’re addressing.

A general status update posted on your professional Facebook page is addressed to everyone. You can use plural verbs, talk to an audience, refer to “you guys” or thank “everyone.” Readers know they’re looking at a public space so while people always like to feel that they’re being addressed personally, asking if “anyone is interested” or how “you’re all getting on” with your product update is fine.

When the replies come in though, respond to those comments personally. Ideally, you’ll want to do it right away so that your response sits under their message. Miss a few though and you’ll need to indicate who you’re replying to by mentioning them by name. It’s an approach that keeps a conversation personal even though it’s public and lets you “look” at the person you’re having a conversation with.

5. Be Polite, Not Clever

Real conversations are lubricated not just by small talk but with small jokes as well. They’re helpful at breaking the ice, creating shared experiences and bringing people together. But jokes are dangerous. It’s embarrassing when they fail and it’s even worse when the jokes themselves are offensive, rude or inappropriate. In a real social context, it’s possible to clean up quickly by moving the conversation on.  Online though, your misjudgment is likely to hang around where everyone can see it. Instead of being forgotten, it can be seen by everyone who stops by your Facebook page where it continues to do damage.

When the cost of being funny and failing are so much higher, you have to be much more certain that the risk is worth taking. In general, you’ll want to be at least as polite on Facebook as you are in real life, more optimistic about the future and more positive generally.

The goal of any professional Facebook account is to create relationships with people who like you. When they like you, they’ll do business with you. Smiling a lot makes people like you. Inappropriate comments though will quickly turn that like into a strong dislike.

Facebook’s business pages are both a new and a unique social environment. It’s a place that’s proven to be effective at turning leads into customers but it’s also one in which brands have made enough mistakes that have harmed their earning potential. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to get the usage right. Keep things polite and professional, understand who you’re talking to and work relationships rather than leapfrogging them and you should find that your leads keep liking you and buying from you.

Image: docpop

Twitter’s trending topics were meant to be its jewel in the crown, a way for anyone to see a snapshot of the zeitgeist, to understand which are the most important issues of the day, and to see breaking news topics as soon as they happen. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Unless Justin Bieber is the most important thing happening in the world right now and the three words to say after sex are what’s really on everyone’s tongue at the moment, then Twitter’s list of trending topics — highlighted on its website — have been a mighty fail. But even if trivia remains top of the trending topics, marketers can still pull some value out of the list — provided they know how to analyze the information they’re gathering and what to do with it once they get it.

Twitter at least appears to have recognized the failure of trending topics to produce usable information. Recently the site changed its trending algorithm to focus on “emerging trends” rather than the most popular subjects over a period of time. So far, the change has made little difference. Instead of Nick Jonas winning a spot in the trending topics list, “Jick Nonas” has made the popularity charts as fans look for ways around what they believe to be Twitter’s keyword blocking software. And hashtags like “#thatswhyyoursingle” are still dominating the list.

Listen to Real Conversations

The reason for the consistent failure is trending topics’ strength. Search sites have always marketed trending topics as an opportunity for marketers to overhear real conversations and understand the subjects that are actually moving people. These are topics that people want to discuss, not the subjects that media editors and producers think that people should discuss. But what people generally want to talk about on the Web are generally the same kind of subjects they talk about in college canteens, school playgrounds and around the watercooler: sex, sports, and rock and roll. That changes a little when a major news event, such as a natural disaster or an election, happens but the list soon reverts back to the usual combination of pop stars and cheesy phrases.

It’s tempting to believe that the failure is Twitter’s, that the site no longer has the kind of sophisticated audience that its initial 30-something, educated, slightly geeky demographics suggested. But trending topics aren’t limited to Twitter, and other sites are suffering from a similar failure to provide information that’s obviously useful to marketers. Google’s Trends should also be providing similarly useful data but like Twitter, its top lists are filled with searches for sports matches, television programs and celebrities.

One option for marketers and businesses then may be to ignore what’s on the list and simply aim to break into it. That’s always been part of the strategy of Twitter’s hashtag giveaways in which companies hand out a freebie at random to someone who wrote a tweet containing a particular hashtag. Twitter however was quick to spot this attempt at trend manipulation and appears to block hashtag giveaways from making the trending topic list. Giveaways have also become so common now that it’s harder than ever for a company to gain the kind of traction that would even qualify it for a trending topic. And there’s some evidence that the exposure generated by an appearance on a trending topic list doesn’t always translate into extra business.

A better option then may be to look beyond the top trending topics — which are likely to remain trivial and entertaining — and use the information to compare different businesses in the same field.

Google Compares Trends

Google differs from Twitter is in its ability to allow marketers to compare searches for their products to those of their competitors. A comparison of Blogger.com, WordPress.com and WordPress.org, for example, shows that the free WordPress blogs are more popular than the Google’s own offering. That might be interesting for bloggers wondering which software is more popular with other users, but it’s also an important piece of information for developers thinking about where to target their plugins. (A search by keyword, rather than by website, shows that interest in WordPress outgrew interest in Blogger back in late 2006 and has continued to outpace it ever since.)

Neither of those companies though are trending topics. Facebook’s privacy issues might push it onto the list briefly but in general, they aren’t likely to trend. One way then of using trending topics is to focus not on the most popular items that succeed in bubbling through the trivia but to mine search information, look deeper and make comparisons.

But perhaps the most important value of trending data doesn’t lie in an analysis of the information itself but rather in an understanding of what it reveals. The criticism of trending data isn’t an attack on the sites that produce it. It’s an expression of disappointment in the subjects that people find interesting enough to share in large numbers on social media sites and search engines. Companies might be disappointed to find that they’re not the main talking points among the general public, but they should hardly be surprised.

And yet, many of the items on the trending topics list are products. Justin Bieber is no less a product of the entertainment industry than Windows is a product of Microsoft. His record company have made him into a trending topic by making him trendy enough to build the kind of deep loyalty that other marketers can only envy — and which is just about unique to the music industry and its teenage fans. If trending topics reveal anything is that it’s not easy to create products that have mass popularity, and no list is going to provide a shortcut to instant success.

But the most important lesson is that a marketer’s goal shouldn’t be to join the conversation by attaching a product to a popular topic. It’s to be entertaining enough to change the conversation. When your competitors are sex and rock and roll, that’s not going to be easy either.

Photography: nedrichards

The name of the end product might be decided by ad men, focus groups and marketing people who think tags are for displaying brand names, but while a project is in development, it’s the programmers who get to come up with the working titles. It sounds creative and fun, an opportunity for geeks to undo their ponytails, let their hair down and come up with something cool and funky.

Often they do, especially when the developers are working for free on open source projects. Ubuntu’s creators, for example, tend to opt for two alliterative words, the second of which is an animal. Choices have included “Gutsy Gibbon” (Ubuntu 7.10), “Hardy Heron” (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS), “Dapper Drake” (Ubuntu 6.06 LTS) and “Hoary Hedgehog” (Ubuntu 5.04). Ubuntu 4.10 was probably happy to have been upgraded to a number after being called “Warty Warthog” during development.
Linux’s developers are no less imaginative. While Ubuntu called 7.04 “Feisty Fawn,” Linux used “Feisty Dunnart” to denote Linux Kernel 2.6.2. Other names have included “Colgate” for Red Hat Linux 4.0, “Darth Vader” for College Linux 2.3 and “Puberty”  for WOWLinux 6.2.

A Phoenix, a Firebird and The Considerable Duck

Not all open source names have been successful though. Firefox had to go through several name changes after running intro trademark issues. Phoenix Technologies objected to the project’s original title which might not have been too surprising. It was called “Phoenix.” But cold water was thrown over the second choice “Firebird” by the fellow open-sourcers of the Firebird free database software project. The Mozilla Foundation suggested “Mozilla Firebird” but Firebird’s developers weren’t happy until Mozilla opted for “Firefox” instead. Perhaps the browser-makers should have been more concerned about being mistaken for a defunct muscle car.

It’s GNOME though, a free Unix desktop, that wins the prize for best open source code name with “The Considerable Duck,” the moniker it used for the slightly less catchy GNOME 2.0.2 Desktop RC1.

Step into the corporate world and the code names start to get a little more dull. There’s a good reason for that. Code names have uses beyond letting developers smile at in-jokes. Because they’re supposed to keep the nature of a project secret, a code name that’s too linked to the project’s goals might reveal the company’s direction to competitors. They allow sub-projects to be broken off and given a new identity – one not linked to the failure of the main project. They prevent the public from confusing a bug-ridden pre-release from a fully-functional final version. And they can be leaked to the press to help create a media buzz during the development phase so they have to sound sensible.

It’s no surprise then that while computer clusters in corporations might be named after Twin Peaks characters or Japanese movie monsters, the names given to the products themselves tend to be a little less creative.

Intel, for example, tends to go for place names. Its development code names include “Brookdale” (Intel 845 series chipsets), which probably refers to a town in California, “Bulverde” (the PXA27x family of Xscale processors) and “Camino” (Intel 820 chipsets.) Things started to get a little more interesting when the company allowed developers to use place names in Israel and India, where it also has development centers. “Dothan,” the name of an ancient town in Israel, was used to refer to a version of the Pentium M which succeeded “Banias,” the name of an archaeological site on the Golan Heights.

Occasionally, Intel has also approved of names that are not geographical. “Kikayon,” the name of a plant mentioned in the Book of Jonah, was used to denote a version of the Intel Core processor, and “Boazman,” which referred to a gigabit Ethernet controller, is a Hebrew phrase that can mean “the time has come.” Intel might have regretted giving its developers so much freedom though when they called a 32 nm processor microarchitecture “Gesher.” Although that’s the unassuming Hebrew word for “bridge,” it was also the name of an Israeli political party. Intel later changed the code name to “Sandy Bridge.” Considering the speed with which Israeli political parties rise and fall though, Intel might need to produce alternative code names for all its development products.

Rivals AMD are equally systematic. The company’s K8 CPUs take their code names from cities around the world. The Phenom brand uses names of stars and its mobile platforms the names of birds. The developers of Opteron server CPUs and platforms are clearly a more exciting bunch though; they use cities linked to Ferrari.

Apple’s Big Cat Code Names

In general though, it seems that the cooler and more creative the company, the better the code names. Apple now tends to use the names of big, scary cats to denote its operating systems but the company hasn’t always been so aggressive. The Apple //c+ was oddly named “Adam Ant” after the 80s pop singer, and the Apple Power Macintosh 6100/60 was called “Piltdown Man” after a Paleolithic forgery consisting of a modern human skull and an orangutan’s jawbone. The name “Macintosh” itself derived from “McIntosh” just one code name in a series of types of apple that included “Cortland” (Apple llgs) and “Pippin” (Apple //c).

Nintendo also used some exciting names for its consoles during development. The GameCube used to be called “Dolphin,” the Game Boy Advance was known as “Atlantis” and the Nintendo 64 was named “Project Reality.” The Wii was called “Revolution” for more than a year before the marketing people decided a word normally associated with toilets would help it sell better.

But maybe it was a smart move. “Revolution” alerted the gaming world that something big was coming while “Wii” indicated that what came out was something that long-term players needed and found immensely satisfying.

So code names may be fun but they’re not always trivial. During the Second World War the Germans named a new radar system “Wotan” after a one-eyed god. R.V. Jones, a scientist at the British Air Ministry concluded that the name meant that system used a single beam, and was able to develop an effective countermeasure. May the creativity continue.

Photography: Sacca

Meet a geek with a good idea, and you can almost see the swimming pool, palm trees and pina coladas in his eyes. But talk to him and you’ll often find that plans for living the high life are only a few months deep. Once the long hours have been recovered and the mansion bought, most tech-type entrepreneurs want to be known for more than their invention and certainly more than the deepness of their tan. They often want to use their money to change the world too.

That’s not new, of course. Those with more money than they can spend have long been inclined to give it away, often in return for seeing their name on the hospital wall. In Slate 60’s list of the top philanthropic donors of 2008, only Michael Bloomberg at number nine (with a $235 million donation) made money with technology, and you have to drop another two places before you reach Richard Weiland, one of the founders of Microsoft. He donated just over $174 million in 2008. The bulk of the money on Slate’s donor list though came from finance, real estate, investments and other traditional industries and a full eight of last year’s top eleven private donations though came in the form of bequests.

Bill Gates is Alive and Giving

Bill Gates at least had the generosity to give away most of his fortune while he’s still alive. Helped by Warren Buffett’s contribution, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gets to manage an endowment of $35 billion, sharing the loot between global health initiatives, global development programs and the United States, particularly in the area of education.

Gates has practically been around long enough to be considered “old money” — in tech terms at least. Slightly newer and no less generous is Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. Listed as the 156th richest person in the world, Omidyar owns over $2.6 billion worth of eBay shares. His Omidyar Network has already committed some $270 million to a range of philanthropic causes.

Clearly though, it’s easy to dig deep once you’ve already cashed in. So what’s happening with those on the way up? How generous are the newer entrants to the tech world to those in need of more than a lava lamp.

Google’s slogan doesn’t promise much. “Do no evil” might sound like an upgraded version of the Hippocratic oath but it doesn’t say that the search giant is planning to do any good either. In fact, the company, as well as its founders, have been quietly busy handing out cash to good causes. Google.org, Google’s charitable side, has already committed over $100 million in grants and investments, much of it to develop clean energy, improve global health and enhance information access. Makani Power, for example, received a $15 million investment to support research on high-altitude wind energy. Aptera Motors and ActaCell netted $2.75 million to help develop technologies to be used in plug-in electric vehicles. And the Seva Foundation received $2 million to support programs to prevent blindness and restore eyesight in India, Nepal, Tibet, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Egypt, Tanzania and Guatemala.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s two founders who are each estimated to be worth about $18.5 billion, are themselves no slouches when it comes to philanthropy. Brin’s family foundation runs assets of $103.5 million and he himself donated $106 million between 2002 and 2006. Page handed out $135 million in that period, and his family foundation handles $134.4 million.

Facebook for Good

It’s when you move on to the newest forms of Web 2.0 that the hands stop reaching the bottom of the pockets. That’s perhaps not too surprising. Social media and the collaborative Internet are new enough for the money to be still under construction rather than piling up in bank accounts waiting for someone to figure out what to do with it all. And often, it’s not being made at all.

Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable donations, for example, aren’t being reported but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s made some. We can understand though if he hasn’t. This year, Zuckerberg’s fortune was said to have dropped below $1 billion so he’s probably been busy watching the pennies.

His website though has been making efforts to give back. Facebook for Good is a page dedicated to helping Facebook fans “[s]hare your stories about how Facebook has helped you give back to your communities, effect change or connect with a distant relative.” Stories contributed include the moving tale of a lost cat which was reunited with its owner after two years thanks to social networking, a post about Facebook acting as matchmaker to a couple that had met in summer camp as teenagers then got back together after finding each other online, and a description of how cops can use the site to catch criminals. More effectively, Facebook has also made a number of virtual gifts available for members to buy each other. Between 90-95 percent of the fee will benefit sixteen charity/advocacy groups. The remainder will be spent on administration rather than on enhancing Facebook’s profits. Or creating some.

Creating ways for members to give to charity though is not the same as giving to charity yourself. But it is popular and for Web 2.0 companies with lots of spirit and little spare cash, it’s a pretty good option. Tech blog Mashable is currently hosting the Summer of Social Good, using the power of social media to raise money for a bunch of good causes, including The Humane Society, Oxfam, WWF and the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Again, they’re not dipping into their funds themselves but they are donating time and effort, and that’s a kind of money too.

And what about the newest boys on the Web 2.0 block? There’s no sign that Twitter has donated anything yet, but there’s no sign that it’s made anything either. (A few “sponsored definitions” will only go so far.) But for a service that’s only been around for two years, it’s already spawned Twestival, which raised enough money for 55 water projects in Ethiopia, Uganda and India, and almost brought down a despotic regime in the Middle East.

Now that’s changing the world.

Photography: CarbonNYC

Identity theft marks its 453rd anniversary this summer. In 1556, a man named Arnaud du Tilh arrived in the French village of Artigat claiming to be Martin Guerre, a peasant who had left his wife and child eight years earlier. The man fitted Martin Guerre’s profile. He looked like Martin Guerre. He repeated a number of facts about Martin Guerre. And he was accepted as Martin Guerre by Martin Guerre’s wife with whom he went on to have two children. It wasn’t until the real Martin Guerre turned up in 1560 – minus a leg – that du Tilh confessed. He was hanged in front of Guerre’s house.

Today’s identity thieves have less to fear. They also have much more opportunity and they’re becoming increasingly sophisticated too. They no longer need to rely on an uncanny resemblance to a missing husband to win themselves an easy life, and they don’t even have to rummage around in suburban garbage cans for old bank letters to pick up useful information.

The rise of social networking means that anyone can now gather all sorts of valuable data about almost anyone else and create fake profiles that steal trust and win confidence. Email phishers, garbage scourers and credit card copiers might have followed du Tilh with their version of Identity Theft 1.0 but the new upgraded version is a lot smarter, a lot less reliant on the greed of phishing victims and the carelessness of bank customers… and a lot more pernicious.

Facebook Has 243 Brad Pitts

The two places most at risk are Facebook and Twitter, neither of which can verify the owners of accounts at the time they’re created. For the most part, the motives behind those profiles are more likely to be playful than deliberately malicious. Everyone dreams of being a Hollywood superstar but there are currently 243 people on Facebook pretending to be Brad Pitt. This guy though isn’t convincing anyone and it’s unlikely that any user is going to be taken in by the other 242 Mr. Jolies. In fact, skepticism about the true identity of celebrities on social media sites is so widespread that even Jonah Lehrer, an author and editor for Wired, has been asked whether his Twitter profile is real – as if someone would fake a geeky intellectual.

That means that it’s actually the un-famous that have most to fear from Facebook fraudsters. Because fewer people are likely to suspect a rat, it’s much easier for an evil-minded prankster to damage an average Joe’s reputation with a fake profile. That’s turned Facebook into a site not just for people to make friends and renew old acquaintances but  a potential crime scene where anyone can slaughter a name.

Fortunately, it’s also now legally protected space. In a landmark case in July 2008, the High Court in London ordered Grant Raphael to pay former schoolfriend and business colleague, Mathew Firsht £22,000 (around $36,000) for breach of privacy and libel. Raphael had created a fake Facebook page in Firsht’s name, claiming that he was homosexual and untrustworthy.

Facebook though has the advantage – in security terms, at least – of being at least a little closed. Members are able to restrict their personal information to people they approve, making it slightly harder for identity thieves to copy entirely another person’s life. Most members make use of that barrier on Facebook. Relatively few do on Twitter even though the option is available, allowing anyone to read the details of their personal lives.

Are Porn Bots Picture Thieves?

In practice, that openness might not in itself be a problem. Scammers want to know your bank account details, not what you had for lunch. The real identity threat on Twitter comes from two directions.

The first – and one that’s becoming a growing nuisance on the microblogging site – is from porn twitterers. “Latonya Ditecco,” “luvLorelei395” and “Hubert937” are just three timelines with remarkably similar tweets. At first glance, those tweets appear to be almost natural. Posts like “what are y’all gonna do 4 FathersDay 2morrow…need ideas” don’t stand out as being particularly strange until you realize that exactly the same tweet appears across multiple timelines, and the retweets and rehashed quotes are as meaningless as many that you can find across the site. It’s when they start talking about sex that you know the picture on the profile isn’t of the person typing the messages. More worryingly, while some of those pictures look like they were bought from a kind stock agency for porn sites, others (such as this one) look more like they were lifted from a photo-sharing site. That’s worrying for the people in the pictures who now look like Twitter porn stars.

The other threat though is much simpler and it comes from people impersonating others to benefit from their name brand. That’s not new to Twitter and can sometimes be harmless. Forbes editor Dan Lyons created a Fake Steve Jobs blog to satirize the Apple founder, and Twitter is filled with timelines created in the name of Buffy Summers and other fictional heroes. It’s when those fake timelines pretend to be real and written by other people that the deception is more serious. Even the mainstream media was taken in when someone started tweeting in the name of the Dalai Lama, and news outlets had to issue a stream of corrections when it became clear the timeline was fake.

Again, those aren’t intended to be harmful, even if the effect could be to damage the real person’s brand and credibility. More worryingly though, many of the timelines reported to Twitter’s @spam complain timeline have actually been created by marketers who use the name of well-known Internet sellers to promote their own products. When buyers find that those items are sub-standard, they’ll be complaining to and about the wrong person.

Fortunately, Twitter has been pretty good at responding to identity theft. Its terms make clear that it doesn’t allow name squatting and complaints quickly result in closed timelines. The site’s new Verified Accounts have even made it easy for celebrities to prove that they really are who they say they are, although looking for links to the timeline on the celebrity’s official website can be pretty effective too.

Identity Theft 2.0 then is more complex than the old version. It requires scammers to create entire personalities rather than memorize credit card and social security numbers. And it’s not entirely clear what they can get out of it – other than annoying the person who’s identity they’ve stolen. Pretend to be Zig Ziglar and try to sell your information products on Twitter or Facebook and it won’t take too long before you’re shut down. You won’t have got to swipe someone else’s wife but at least you won’t have been hanged.

Twitter, as you probably already know has taken the Internet in a frenzied storm. Everywhere you look, bloggers advocate Twitter and how cool this micro blogging tool really is.

I must confess that they are all right. But if you are anything like me, you probably get addicted to the Tweets and therefore never get anything else done.

But what type of tweets do people send each other anyway?

In short, those can be anything you like. The idea behind Twitter is to find out what you are doing right now and publish that to the world. While we don’t really want to know your most intimate information, many Twitter users use this medium to lighten up their day and stay in touch with their online friends, family and business partners.

For the best tweets ever, check out the following list:

1. Will You Marry Me

A Marriage Proposal In True Twitter Style.

Thinking of proposing through Twitter for the world to see? Why not. Do as Sean Bonner did and have the world celebrate with you. Of  course she will have to say YES first.

2. The Power of Twitter

See The Power Of The Twitter Community In True Style.

Amazing how one distress call can help you out of a tight spot so fast with the help of the Twitter community. See how one guy was able to solve his urgent problem within the hour! Now THAT is called immediate solution provision with a little help from your online friends.

3. Arrested Development

No, It’s NOT What You Think!

Imagine being stuck in a foreign country jail with only a computer at hand. Here is an idea for you if that should ever eventuate.

4. Pay Per Tweet

Haha.

This is one of the occasions when Problogger Darren Rowse played a joke on the whole Twitter community. It happened – you guessed right – on April Fools Day.

5. Don’t Tweet When You Are Drunk

Celebrity Shamble

Imagine you are in the spotlight of the Internet and thousands of people worldwide know who you are. Now take this one step further and get horribly drunk, then go and tweet to the world how to ban this one guy you can’t stand or are jealous off. All I can say is oops!

6. Bitch Slapping

Be Warned!

Calling people names when the world is watching is perhaps not such a smart idea. Especially if your name is Evan Williams and you are the founder of Twitter!

7. Lights Off!

Fancy Controlling Your Home Lights With Twitter.

Smart people are inventive and Twitter user Justin Wickett has taken invention to a new level by allowing Twitter to switch on or off his lights at home. See how it is done…

8. Tweets in eBook Form

What A Cool Idea.

Now here is a way to take your past tweets to a new dimension – by creating a long lasting and a good looking comic eBook like the one featured here.

9. You’re Fired!

Or Are You?

Reading this tweet makes you wonder why people have to do their fighting in the public eye. Just remember, don’t sack your staff through Twitter, it might have complications.

10. Be Aware Of Your Date!

First Date Madness.

Imagine you go on your first ever date and then get asked to do a threesome with the guys wife?! Eek, whatever next. On the “badfirstdate” tweets you see the unbelievable come true.

As you can see, all these tweets amuse, shock, or anger us in some ways or another. It is interesting to see that Twitter followers throw all caution into the wind when they present themselves to the world and act like they were on Big Brother. Perhaps Twitter is a reality show of its own anyway.

What do you think? Do you tweet?

—ed. note:  Make sure you follow us on twitter and read our free twitter ebook. You might also want to look at our post on the Best Spam Messages Ever.

Photography: W.Sharp

They thought they were so clever. And they were right. But clever people tend to attract attention and sometimes lawsuits too. Sometimes that’s just because they’ve made a lot of money and someone else wanted a slice. Occasionally, it’s because they got curious and stepped on someone’s toes. But it might also be because they’ve been naughty and need to go to prison.

Here are five of the ugliest court cases to hit geeks of different types.

Gary McKinnon – Alien Hacker

One case currently underway involves British systems administrator Gary McKinnon. Keen to find evidence of UFOs, antigravity technology and free energy, McKinnon made his way into 97 computers used by the US Air Force, Army, Navy, NASA, Pentagon and Department of Defense in 2001-2002. He also left a message promising continued high-level disruption and signed himself “SOLO.”

The Americans weren’t very sympathetic. They called his actions “the biggest military computer hack of all time” and estimated the costs of his actions at $700,000. In July of this year, UK Law Lords agreed that McKinnon could be extradited to face trial in the United States where he may receive up to 70 years in prison. His lawyers have lodged an appeal based on his Asperger’s Syndrome.

McKinnon claims that he found evidence that proves the existence of everything he was looking for. Describing himself as a “bumbling computer nerd” he also told the BBC that he accessed the computers using a Perl script that searched for blank passwords and that he usually hacked while under the influence of beer and cannabis.

Vladimir Levin –  Master Criminal

Another hacker who faced extradition to the United States was Russian Vladimir Levin. In 1994, Levin succeeded in gaining access to accounts held at Citibank from which he transferred $10.7 million. Three of his accomplices were arrested trying to withdraw the funds from accounts in the US, Israel and Europe. Levin himself was arrested in 1995 during a layover at London’s Stansted airport and extradited to America where he received a three-year sentence. He was also ordered to pay Citibank $240,015 in restitutions. The bank says that it recovered all but $400,000 of the stolen money.

It was ten years though before it was revealed how Levin managed to penetrate Citibank. A member of a group of hackers sold the systems analyst the access information for $100.

Mark Zuckerberg — Facebook Hero… or Geek Thief?

It could have happened to anyone. While studying at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg was hired by classmates, Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss to write code for their networking site ConnectU.

A short while later, Zuckerberg launched an oddly similar service called Facebook from his dorm room. The site took off, signing up more than two-thirds of Harvard’s students within just two weeks. Zuckerberg’s former bosses then sued him, claiming that he had stolen their idea, design, business plan, and source code.

The suit was dismissed without prejudice in 2007 and refiled shortly afterwards. In June 2008, Facebook settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. The New York Times has also reported that emails prove Zuckerberg took ideas from Aaron J. Greenspan’s houseSYSTEM website.

You’ve Been Robbed by the Geek Squad!

It’s not just teenage game junkies who use pirated software. A 2006 lawsuit filed by Texan software company Winternals accused Best Buy’s Geek Squad of using its programs without a license. The two companies had been in negotiations to use Winternal’s systems recovery and data protection software and Winternal had supplied sample licenses for the duration of the talks. When the discussions broke down, Best Buy neglected to tell its Geek Squad agents to stop using the $1,200 software.

A judge granted a restraining order, demanded that use of all unlicensed software be stopped, and forced Best Buy to turn over all copies of Winternal’s programs within 20 days. Eventually, the case was settled and Winternals, then owned by Microsoft, released a licensed version of its program to the Geek Squad.

Bratz: The Lawsuit

Photography: callme_crochet

Not all geeks are computer nerds though. In a case that should have scared the bejesus out of creative types everywhere, in 2005, Barbie-makers Mattel sued Bratz manufacturers MGA Entertainment and designer Carter Bryant for $500 million.

Bryant, the company argued, had produced the sketches for the best-selling Bratz dolls while employed by Mattel, and sold the ideas to MGA. That breached an agreement that Bryant had signed granting Mattel the rights to anything he designed during his time as an employee.

Bryant and MGA argued that the designer had produced the sketches between April 1998 and January 1999, when he was not working for Mattel.

In July 2008, a federal jury found that Bryant had created the Bratz line while was working for Mattel. Mattel was ordered to pay $100 million in damages. Bryant settled out of court.

It’s an old ad world wheeze. If you want to target a market, first you identify it, then you characterize it, then you give it a catchy acronym – ideally one that’s easy to remember and, more importantly, is cool enough to make its members proud to own and keen to live up to.

“Yuppie” was probably the most effective. First termed in the 1980s to describe young, upwardly mobile professionals, it’s hung around ever since, even if it has lost the slicked-back hair and the Gordon Gecko greed-fest.

Now there’s a new term, and this time, they’re talking about us.

“Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There,” a book by David Brooks, formerly of The Wall Street Journal and now an editor at Newsweek and The Weekly Standard, sets out a case for what he calls “Bobos,” the bohemian bourgeoisie who combine the high income of successful capitalists with a sixties counterculture of non-conformism.

Creative Capitalism
These are people, he says, who eschew vulgar consumption in favor of social causes. They drive hybrids, not SUVs. They avoid big-ticket goods but will spend several hundred dollars on a kitchen knife. They seek authenticity and pay unreal prices for the organic, free-range products that deliver it.

And they consider themselves creators who do business rather than businesspeople whose goal is to make lots of money – even though they do and enjoy what it brings.

If that sounds familiar, there’s probably a good reason. Bobos are also the sort of well-lettered elite who have discovered the social value of education and specialization – and their financial values too. They’re Bill Gates not Donald Trump, Oliver Stone not Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bernard-Henri Levy not Christoper Hitchens (and certainly not his brother).

In short, they’re geeks — specialists in fields from software engineering to interior design and from anthropology to art dealing. They – or, more precisely, we – have picked up plenty of knowledge, want to see (and ideally, help create) a better world, but we aren’t ashamed to make a sack of money while we do it.

We geeks, Bobos – whatever – want to have our wholewheat, free-range, organic cake, eat it and share it with developing countries too.

That the baby-boomers the book describes aren’t like our parents isn’t new, of course. The chauvinist, chain-smoking, sharp-suited office workers of “Mad Men” might be unrecognizable now but they were only a generation away. As Bobos though, we’re more like those crusty old folk than we like to admit. We might buy fairtrade, wear 100 percent cotton, donate to Obama and have women bosses – heck, we might even be women – but we’re still addicted to our iPhones, our expensive rainforest treks in Guatamala and our sustainably-sourced pinewood coffee tables. It’s all still luxury and middle-class contentment. One-downmanship might feel better than one-upmanship but it’s still a version of beat-the-Joneses.

Being pigeon-holed isn’t pleasant but we have to admit, the hole fits.

Learning from Bobo
So as David Brooks holds a mirror up to us what can – or should – we do about what we see?

If we’re smart – and we Bobos like to think we’re certainly that – we take pride in the caring, communal outlook we carried over from the sixties. And then we look for ways to cash in.

That’s not too hard because as we’ve seen, we Bobos are careful shoppers. We buy professional-grade goods, even if we never use them to do more than chop a tomato or fill a corner of the garage. We’re willing to spend money, especially when we feel we’re getting quality in return.

That means branding is going to be more important than ever. The actual quality difference between a top-of-the-range hiking boot, for example, and a bog standard sports shoe is likely to be pretty small (they’re both, after all, made in the same Guangdong workshop by the same rural migrant). It’s the image of expertise that counts – reflected in part by the swollen price tag.

So that’s double good news. It means that even in today’s tough times, it’s still possible for geeks to charge large sums for our specialized services; and it means too that we don’t have to look further than ourselves and our own spending habits to see where and for what we can make those demands. Unlike the bra-burning revolutionaries we left behind, we’re bourgeois enough not to feel guilty about it.

There is a piece of bad news though, even if it’s not mentioned in David Brooks’ analysis. Social acronyms have a habit of coming and going. Bobos are yesterday’s hippies, after all, and soon we’ll be tomorrow’s pensioners. Generation X is already giving way to Generation Y – and they won’t even pay for their music. Time to put our expertise into a book then, hit the lecture circuit and enjoy paradise while it lasts.

Photography: Dale Gillard

After reading an article on Film UI Bloopers I really wondered what goes through the minds of a movie screen maker when they design their computer interfaces for movies? I wanted to go behind the scenes to find out what makes these software genies tick and why computers for movies are often designed with unrealistic user interfaces (UI’s), opposed to the real thing.

A typical example is Jack Bauer’s PDA from the popular series 24. Magically, he is always able to download anything directly to his PDA without having to use complicated conversion software or tools. In real life, applications aren’t always as straight forward than in the movies. Especially between the various operating systems on the market today. Movies often use unrealistic tools which we of the normal kind would love to own but probably never see launched in our lifetime.

To find out I went undercover and to see what I found, please read on.

Interview with two industry experts

I wanted to find out why we keep seeing fancy gadgets (think Bond 007) and not the stuff people use every day. I was lucky enough to be granted permission from two highly qualified industry specialists who were kind enough to answer my questions.

Rory Hinds, Director of Mine Films in London, UK and Canada.

1.) What is the primary reason to design movie computer screen UI’s that seem easy to use on screen, even though the actor in the movie is a total computer novice?

Computer screens for films need to be help the story progress and inform the viewer of what is going on. The design is slick and futuristic, yet simplistic enough for the viewer at home to follow what is going on.

2.) Is it important to stay true to reality in movie computer screen design? If yes, how come time travelers can seemingly morph into current technologies without the need to brush up on their skills?

Films need to be believable yet explore the imagination. Most people know how computers function so if the computer screen design is too out there it becomes unbelievable and you loose the audience. It wouldn’t make much of a film if the hero had computer problems as basic as not knowing how to use the mouse, it would maybe make a great comedy.

3.) Many movies feature extensive 3D data visualizations but they never make it to conventional computer designs. Why?

With films you get to wow the audience and be very creative. 3D animation is a big part of films these days and its a lot easier to design an animation for a film, than to develop a piece of software to be used as a everyday tool. With film-making you have no limitations of the working world, as long as it looks good and helps the story, you can get away with pretty much anything.

To design and develop a real world interface is very costly and it has to be cost effective to sell to a mass audience. The mouse must be the cheapest computer interface device which is on every computer in the world.

4.) Please explain (in your eyes) the need to display the message “access granted” in movie scenes from the perspective of movie computer screen designers instead of moving smoothly to the next step in the process.

Access Granted or Access Denied tells the audience that the hero has encountered a problem they need to solve, showing their skill when they do solve it and gain access. This onscreen message creates tension and the viewer can follow what the hero is doing.

5.) Could you please finish this sentence for me: the driving force behind a movie computer screen design is…?

The driving force behind a movie computer screen design is storytelling and eye candy.

Derek Frederickson, Multimedia Designer, Art Director of Twisted Media, Chicago, U.S.A.

1.) What are the reasons for enlarging text on movie computer UI’s?

Readability; rarely is the computer screen full frame so you have to draw the viewer’s eye in immediately regardless of whether or not this would happen in real life. It’s the movies after all…

2.) How hard is it really to produce voice operated computers for mass consumption?

It’s not! I wish my iPhone had voice recognition like my old (and much hated) Windows Mobile-based smart phone. I miss being able to say, “Dial Spielberg”. Kidding. But certain things are nice to have as voice-operated functions…especially when piloting a star ship or driving a car.

3.) We were all extremely jealous when we saw 007 use his Ericsson mobile phone in the movie Tomorrow Never Dies to drive his BMW. What is your take in the reality of such a tool and its user friendliness in real life?

My iPhone now controls iTunes on my computer. The capability is already here…

4.) Do movie computer screen designers purposely feed us unrealistic information by having 12 year old kids dismantle a Unix system like in the movie Jurassic Park movie?

Of course! The main problem is that there isn’t screen time to show the kid figuring out how to use the GUI…or hacking in (not that this is particularly realistic with the security employed these days) so you just have to make the ‘suspension of disbelief’ as minimal as possible, while still keeping the story moving.

5.) Could you please finish this sentence for me: the driving force behind a movie computer screen design is…?

Make it cool. Make it something you’ll see Apple come out with in 10 years.

In closing

Now that we have the insiders take on what is going on in movie screen design and why, we will hopefully understand the reasons a little bit better. Once again, thank you to Derek and Rory for being so generous to take some time and answer my questions. I think both of you have gone the extra mile and really help us understand the working process a lot better. Next time I’m going to the movies I’ll look at computers from a different point of view.

Photography: orphanjones

In the financial year of 2006-7, Japan broke a record. Around 355 workers fell ill from overwork. Of those, 147 died, usually of heart attacks or strokes. It was Japan’s highest figure ever and an increase of 7.6 percent from the previous year, despite a government campaign to cut work hours.

It’s such a Japanese phenomenon that they’ve even termed a word for it: “karoshi,” which means “death from overwork.” The term dates from the 1980s when the economy was bubbling and several –  apparently healthy — top executives suddenly keeled over.

The cause is Japan’s painfully long work hours. Officially, Japanese employees put in an average of 1,780 hours a year, just 20 hours less than Americans (although 340 hours more than Germans). But those figures don’t include unpaid overtime, which Japanese companies take for granted. According to a report in The Economist, a third of Japanese men in their thirties work more than 60 hours a week, but half receive no overtime pay at all. Shortly before he died, Kenichi Uchino, a 30-year old Toyota employee who collapsed at work at 4am after racking up more than 80 hours of overtime a month for six months, told his wife that he was happiest when asleep.

Clearly, that’s no way to go through life and the country is trying to change things. Courts have increasingly placed responsibility for workplace deaths at the feet of employers so that now almost half of claims are declared karoshi. The ruling grants the surviving family government compensation of around $20,000 a year and up to $1m in damages from the company.

Californian Karoshi

It all sounds as Japanese as porno comics, thigh-length school socks and Hello Kitty  but for anyone who worked through the dotcom boom, karoshi does strike a sickening note of familiarity. When Silicon Valley was stuffed with new Web start-ups, high-tech employees too were expected to work all hours, often by the midnight glow of a lava lamp. But even in the early years, no one believed they would be doing it forever. With a pocketful of stock options, the dream was to work yourself into the ground for a couple of years, then go public, cash in and spend the rest of your life gloriously doing nothing.

Of course, many of those who didn’t reach that finish line found that the end of the road came to them. The bubble popped and they got a P45 with more free time than they wanted.

For employees then, even in the hi-tech sector, the threat of self-sacrifice is less that it might be lethal than that it will be pointless. Even then though, as soon as it becomes clear that the company they’re working for isn’t going to make them rich enough to retire before they’re 40, non-Japanese employees are free to move on. They can either start their sprint again at a different company or take the benefits now in the form of a regular 9-5 at a different firm.

How to Work Harder and Be Happier

That’s harder to do for the self employed. Even if they’re not at risk of collapsing at their desks, studies have found that entrepreneurs consistently work longer hours than employees, partly to offset the greater risk of running their own business but also because they can set their own schedules. It’s that freedom – and presumably, the knowledge that they get all the benefits of the longer hours – that makes the difference. The same surveys that find the self-employed work more than staff also find that they’re generally happier.

But there are ways for anyone to reduce their work hours and lower the risk of death by keyboard. Japan is opting for a combination of hi-tech and rest. Workers are being encouraged to telecommute (which might suggest they’ll be dying at home instead of clogging up offices) and to take breaks when they start a family or to look after aging parents.

Against that pressure though is the perhaps stronger threat that downsizing their jobs will reduce them to temporary positions – a growing trend in Japan — removing the automatic promotion prospects and enviable retirement packages that are the closest thing to rewards for the unpaid overtime.

Outside Japan, the same risk can be seen in lower average pay for women as mothers take time out to raise small children.

Perhaps the best approach though is to look at what the French do. Despite their comparatively short workweek, French employees consistently top productivity surveys. They might spend less time at the office than Americans and Japanese do but they use their time there much more efficiently. Old-time Web workers who look back fondly on company Yoga sessions and daytime dodgeball might wonder if they wouldn’t have been happier giving the games a miss, knocking off at six, and spending more time with the family.

Part of actually doing that comes down to careful time-keeping. If work expands to fill the time available, cutting the number of hours you give yourself to complete tasks should help you to get them done faster — and home earlier.

Unfortunately, as unions claim, this might be what lies at the bottom of another trend: the rising rates of workplace suicides in France. However you do it, it seems, hard work will get you in the end.

It used to be the case that parents would dream of their children heading off to medical school or burying themselves under a pile of law books. Today, proud moms who can boast of “my son the doctor” are quickly trumped by even prouder mothers who can say “my son the software engineer.” The pay is often higher, the future brighter and the beepers less likely to go off during Thanksgiving dinner.

But the road to respectable geekdom can be bumpier — and a great deal riskier — than the path to a medical residency or a call to the bar. Teenagers with an interest in curing the sick are unlikely to practice surgery in their spare time, while budding legal minds tend to join debating teams rather than dish out dodgy legal advice during a spare weekend.

Young geeks however, could well find themselves wasting hours on online games or worse, hanging out in the darker corners of the Internet, tweaking viruses, creating PC zombies, breaking into the Pentagon and starting international nuclear wars.

That last one might only be the dream of Hollywood scriptwriters but the combination of a little computer knowledge, a curious mind and always-on Internet access means that tech-savvy teenagers can get up to all sorts of dangerous — and illegal — mischief without ever having to leave their bedrooms. For parents, it’s a worry and for the kids themselves, it’s a wasted opportunity.

I’ve Got a Black Belt in Linux
One service that tries to channel that energy into positive results is Hackerteen, a Brazil-based course that offers young people classes in ethical hacking. The sessions, most of which can be taken long-distance, are divided into colored “belts” to make them as impressive to peers as martial arts feats, and are taught collaboratively. A team of six students, for example, may be set a task to recover data stolen from a company and stored on a server somewhere. The class could take the form of a role-playing game and use video, sound and even comics to drive the story and deliver challenges. Unlike other online courses which requires students to enter a password to begin, for example, Hackerteen students have to discover theirs.

At the moment classes are only available in Portuguese, although they are being translated into English and Spanish. And they’re long. Each of the six levels lasts four months and the whole course takes two years to complete. In the process, it covers entrepreneurship and hacker ethics as well as technical skills. A psychological exam at the green belt level helps Hackerteen gain a better understanding of the student but isn’t intended to test whether he’ll be using his new skills to break into company systems. Students with bad intentions, the company says, fail the ethics and security courses long before they reach this stage.

Interestingly, the entire course is taught on Linux rather than Windows. In part, that’s because Linux is the hacker’s favorite environment but it’s also because Hackerteen wants to put the focus on servers where the higher-paying jobs are.

That might be perfectly sensible. Hackerteen is run by 4Linux, a company that teaches open source software programming, specializes in computer security and has trained the digital crime units of a number of Brazilian police forces. It’s a practical company used to dealing with the business environment.

The Business of Hacking
But it does mean that Hackerteen is an odd mixture of different approaches. The Manga-style graphics and comic book stories make code-cracking seem entertaining and exciting. The challenges are always important and the learning structured so that one skill leads to another and solutions are always there waiting to be discovered.

Real life, of course, isn’t quite like that.

Professional network security staff are more likely to work in cubicles than their bedrooms. More of their job will be spent reminding employees to change their passwords and not to open strange attachments than tracking down stolen databases. And deadlines tend to be set by ambitious CTOs rather than the clocks on ticking bombs stashed in data centers.

On its website, Hackerteen reports that Pekka Himanen, a Harvard-based researcher of hacker communities, notes that for a hacker “controlled leisure and routine is as boring as forced labor. Hackers love to discover and overcome big challenges where they can freely use their intelligence.” That might be true and it’s something that Hackerteen avoids. Workplaces, on the other hand, tend to have lots of routine, plenty of forced labor and no leisure at all.

But if the company’s testimonials are anything to go by, Hackerteen works. Plenty of graduates seem to be taking the course and winning jobs at hi-tech companies.
As for the parents, who have to stump up fees of between $200 and $390 a month depending on the course level, at least they’ll have something to be proud of.

Photography: Dayna Bateman

Working in cafes might be as trendy as typing on a Macbook Air but it does come with one distinct disadvantage. You can’t do it for long. As we described in our rules for café-working, more than two hours on single brew makes you look cheap while pouring down latte after latte to keep your seat warm won’t just be pricy, it will also mean frequent toilet trips while your laptop sits on the table making eyes at strangers.

In reality, the new working nomads tend to spend most of their time not in Starbucks or any other local bean bar, but at home. To someone who has to sit in traffic for a couple of hours a day, who has to share an office with a guy who eats the world’s whiffiest cheese sandwiches and who has a spare room with a view over the bay, that sounds like a dream come true.

And for the most part, they’d be right.

The Joys of Working from Home
Working from home does cut out the commute, which means you can sleep longer in the morning, save on gas bills and avoid the brain seizures that result from reading the stickers on a hybrid car’s rear fender for an hour.

It does mean being able to take long lunch breaks without anyone knowing, and it also means not having to see the boss… ever!

Best of all though, it creates a new way of dealing with the work/life balance, that old dilemma of dividing up time between a competitive career and the family life that makes it all worthwhile.

But it brings some other interesting advantages too.

Alexis Martin Neely, for example, is a lawyer and author of Wear Clean Underwear!, a legal guide for parents, who did the daily drive to her office for three years before starting to swap the watercooler for the kitchen kettle. Today, she only goes into the office, where she still keeps a team, to meet clients and even then on no more than two days a week.

The biggest benefit of her new work mode, she says, is being connected to her children, even when at work, but she also enjoys the free scheduling that comes from not being confined to an office.

“I don’t have to be anywhere at any certain time and I love that,” she says.

The tax benefits help too. Designating part of your home as a workspace means that some of the usual household expenses — such as cleaning materials, Internet connection, phone bills and even some food and drink — can all be tax deductible. Being able to write off part of her housing payments, says Alexis, means that she’s able to “afford more house” than she would otherwise.

For most people that’s because working from home means a home that feels a little smaller. Set up your desk in the living room and suddenly half your salon has become an office. Convert a spare bedroom into a workspace — the usual way of doing things — and you’re now a bedroom down.

Working from the Bedroom
Alexis takes a slightly different approach. She makes no separation between her home space and her office space. While she has an area over the garage that she says could be converted into an office, she’s chosen instead to place two desks in her bedroom, which she says is quite large.

“I like being in the center of everything and being able to feel like I am part of my family,” she explained by email from her porch. “Even when I’m working.”

The price for that continual family presence though is never being out of the office. Like many people who work from home, Alexis has to cope with the temptation to answer emails on the weekend or take calls in the evening — time that office workers are usually able to call their own. For Alexis, being truly with the family and away from the attractions of work often means getting away from the house.

That’s something that anyone thinking of setting up a home-based business needs to consider, and they have to decide too whether a house-full of children is likely to make them less productive than an office full of co-workers.

Interestingly, Alexis has found the opposite to be true. Leaving her team to work without her in the office has improved their productivity.

“I quickly found my team was more efficient without me there,” she says. “They got more done without me in their hair and I was a whole lot happier working from home.”

If you don’t want to work from home then, you might try suggesting that your boss stays away.

Listen to the rumors and you might believe that geeks are pale, spotty, have the social skills of Klingons and less chance of finding a mate than a panda bear with an attitude problem. But we all know that’s not true.

In fact, geeks are sexier than Madonna in her prime, more desirable than a Macbook Air, cooler than a polar bear in shades, and know exactly what to do when it comes to partnering up and finding love.

Heck, they invented the Internet — of course, they know how to virtually land a date.

Online dating used to be a little embarrassing. It was the sort of thing you only admitted doing after you’d ‘fessed up to cross-dressing and were caught searching in the darker regions of the Internet. These days though, with millions of people uploading their photos to dating sites and plenty of marriages starting with an email rather than a corny chat-up line, online dating has become as standard a way of finding a partner as asking your best friend if his new squeeze has a sister.

And for geeks, the choices are endless.

I Really, Really Like You…

One of the most interesting is iminlikewithyou.com. The address might be longer than an HBO mini-series but it’s also just as packed with creative little scenes.

Its tag line is “play games. meet people. hang out,” and along with slick animation, the site tries to create platforms on which users can interact. That might be something as simple as pasting comments onto the pictures in the news stories (it’s entertainment news, so you might want to skip that) to playing multiplayer Tetris.

The site does feel a little young but it’s more hi tech than most relationship sites and it should make sparking up a friendship easier than sweating over a first email.

Let’s Not Go Out

Omnidate is a bit like iminlikewithyou but for an older — and perhaps slight more agoraphobic — crowd. A quick glance at the pictures reveals plenty of grey touches and not a few slightly lined faces. It’s aiming at people in their late thirties rather than the twentysomethings who want to leave sarcastic comments on pictures of Lindsay Lohan’s butt.

For people who are serious about not being single, that already makes it attractive but it’s the virtual dating bit that makes Omnidate different… and a lot more geek-friendly. Omnidate lets you place an avatar in an animated virtual environment where you can chat, joke and get to know each other without running the risk of wasting an entire evening with the worst date since… well, your last one.

Actually, it’s a bit like instant messaging but with something more interesting to look at than a line of text. Unfortunately, what you won’t be looking at is an animated version of the real person you’re chatting with. It will be someone they wish they looked like.

But then again, you won’t be sitting on a tropical island or watching the northern lights either.

Get your DNA Tested

Playing games and meeting in a virtual bar might be fun but it doesn’t really tell you whether you and a new friend are compatible for a lifetime of happy ever after.

Apparently, your DNA might be able to do that though.

ScientificMatch.com tries to combine just about every method of matching people known to science. You’ll start with a bit of psychology by prioritizing your values but go on to scrape the inside of your cheek with a cotton swab. ScientificMatch then checks your DNA and matches you, the site says, with someone who’ll find your body odor sexy, give you a more satisfying sex life, is less likely to cheat on you and serve up healthier children.

Whether those things are true is any scientist’s guess (and you have to wonder about lab workers who spent years studying biochemistry only to end up playing with single people’s cheek cells.) What is certain though is that you’ll be matched with someone with money.

ScientificMatch.com charges just under $2,000 for a lifetime membership. The envelope to return the cheek swabs is prepaid though.

Where Have All the Successful Geeks Gone?

But if money is important to you in a mate, then you might try MillionaireMatch.com. Sure, you’d have to skip past the corporate lawyers and all those equity traders are probably too busy now with Monster.com to return your messages, but this should be the place to go to find a geek who has already hit the big time.

After all, you do want to find someone who thinks like you, right?

Photography: 2 Dogs

They’ve been called “new Nomadics,” “new Bedouin,” “mobile merchants,” and for the top earners, “the kinetic elite.” But to waitresses and baristas everywhere they — or we, because yes, at Geekpreneur we’re part of the zeitgeist — are simply customers. And not very good ones at that.

We sit in front of our laptops in cafes, chatting on our cell phones, surfing the Web and doing the sort of work that would once have required a fully equipped office. And we do it all for no more than the price of a cup of coffee every couple of hours.

It’s a whole new way of working and one that’s becoming increasingly popular. According to the London Times, Britain alone now has 2.4 million telecommuters, more than double the 0.9 million people who were working on the hoof in 1997.

The benefits of working in cafes are clear for people who need no more than a laptop and an Internet connection to get a job done: they don’t have to stare at the same four walls at home; they can find some of the sociability that’s lost when they wave goodbye to the watercooler; productivity can rise when they’re surrounded by other people focused on their work. And the coffee’s pretty good too.

But they have to do it right. These are the rules we’ve discovered for getting the most out of café-working.

1. Find the Right Café
Cafes work when they have the right atmosphere, and even though every Starbucks might look the same, each outlet has a unique feel. It’s important to find a branch that matches the style of your work.

There’s a difference, for example, between a café near a college filled with students leafing through books, and a coffee bar in an office building packed with lawyers writing briefs or executives holding informal meetings. The latter always makes your own work feel more serious.

And despite the convenience, Starbucks is best for the times when the Web is a distraction. Unless you can hop onto a neighbor’s line, you’ll have to pay for the connection.

2. No Chatting
One of the benefits of leaving the house to do some work is that you’ll see other regulars and maybe even exchange a few words with them. But one of the first things you discover when you work for yourself is just how much time employees waste when their hours aren’t their own.

That’s a trap that café nomads want to avoid. A nod “good morning” is fine. A quick exchange of pleasantries is polite and interesting. But a long conversation about last night’s telly is employee-talk. When you’re your own boss, it’s a no-no.

3. Keep your Privacy
When you sit in the same place every day, there’s a danger that it can feel like home. It isn’t. Even though peeking at other people’s screens is considered bad form, we all do it. A café then isn’t the place to check your bank account online, log in to Paypal or pull up confidential information. Some work is best done on your sofa.

4. Watch the Bandwidth
For the most part, the sort of Internet connection you can find in a café will let you do anything you want, even while dozens of other people are also checking the Web and downloading emails. But if you’re planning to upload your latest feature film to a video site or swap files that weight more than an elephant with a high body mass index then you might want to wait until you get home — especially if you’re using the connection in the office building next door.

If what you do makes it hard for others to do what they want to do, then that’s something best not done in public.

5. Order Regularly or Head Back to the Road
If modern nomadism has a downside, it’s the price. A daily brew might not be as expensive as office rental but it has to be paid and it has to be ordered regularly. On the whole, a cup every couple of hours is a fair rate, although you might be able to string it out longer if the place is empty and your presence makes the café look more inviting. For really crowded times though, hogging a seat for half a day and leaving a couple of bucks won’t win you friends among the workers. It’s why Starbucks don’t provide free Internet.

But watch the gold outflow (when you’re doing this daily, those coffees add up) and the caffeine intake too. The jitters aren’t great for productivity and leaving your laptop on the table while you run to the bathroom is just bad for your nerves.

6. Tip Well
The best way to be sure of a warm welcome is to tip generously. You want people to be happy to see you. In a café, that means paying them.

A good tip won’t just win you a nice smile though. It also means you won’t be bothered if you stick around just a little longer than a couple of hours. It means no one will mind when you ask them to turn down the music or lower the blinds. And best of all, you’ll always get your coffee exactly the way you want it.

Photography: mzelle biscotte

Monday mornings have never been very popular but ever since the Web took over the world there’s been a new reason to wish for a seven-day weekend. Forty-eight hours away from the office can mean hundreds of emails collecting unanswered in your inbox. Before you can even begin the week’s work, you first have to wade through the jokes, spam and personal messages to find the business emails sent on Friday evening just… and that’s so that you can answer the follow-up emails sent on Saturday morning asking why you haven’t responded.

One solution is to copy Wired correspondent Lawrence Lessig and declare email bankruptcy. He gave up on the idea of answering all his emails, wrote to everyone whose email he hadn’t answered, apologized profusely, suggested that anyone with an urgent request should write to him again and promised special attention to anyone who did.

That’s certainly one way of dealing with email overload and while it’s not as expensive as financial bankruptcy, it is a public declaration of complete disorganization.

There are alternatives. Here are some of them.

Filter your Messages into Folders
It sounds so simple and yet the whole process of setting up filters and making sure they work can be so tedious that they’re often overlooked. That’s a shame because an inbox really should be a temporary place to store messages until they’re acted on rather than a permanent home for overlooked attachments.

One possible solution could be Itzy Sabo’s SpeedFiler, an add-on to Outlook which makes the filing process much simpler.

It won’t actually answer the emails for you, but at least you won’t have to see them when you’re checking your messages.

Filter your Messages Out
It’s a trick that’s been well-used on telephones and strangely ignored by email users. Away messages can be a neat way of screening your emails. Senders receive an automatic reply saying that you’ve received their message but that you won’t be answering it right away.

There’s no expectation, so no nagging follow-up emails — and no surprise when non-urgent messages are ignored. This BBC article also points out that you can use away messages to claim that you’re doing a leadership course or meeting the Dalai Lama for dinner.

Network technicians point out that you can expect to hear from a lot more spammers.

Answer Two-Minute Emails Right Away
David Allen, the creator of the Getting Things Done productivity system, has a solution to email overload. He recommends that any task, including email answering, that can be completed within two minutes should be done immediately.

Most emails though can be answered within two minutes so he’s really saying that you should answer all your emails right away. That would certainly give you a clean inbox… whether you’d get anything else done though is a whole other question.

Answer All your Messages at Once
You might be better off then doing the exact opposite. Programs like GMail’s Notifier let you see when an email arrives and gives a peek of the content. That means you don’t have to check your inbox to see if an urgent message has come in. Anything that isn’t urgent you can just ignore until later.

You could then leave yourself half an hour at the beginning and end of each day to answer anything that needs to be answered. The time limit will keep your answers short and most people can wait a work day to receive a reply.

Start Fewer Email Chains
Look at your inbox and see a long list of flagged messages, and you might think that your problem is that you’re not writing enough emails. That could be true. But it could also be true that you’re writing too many emails. One way to keep your inbox under control is only to use email when absolutely necessary.

If you can get the same information across with an SMS message, a quick IM or even a phone call, then do it. There’ll be nothing to reply to, the conversation won’t last more than a few minutes — and you’ll have one less email chain waiting for a new link.

Get Used to Being Rude
The biggest problem with email is that it feels rude not to answer. That’s true even if all someone has done is send you a link to a news article, a bad joke or a message saying you’ll catch leprosy if you don’t forward it to everyone you’ve ever met. It probably is rude not to answer a message but… well, tough.

When you’re getting hundreds of emails a day, you can’t possibly answer every single one. You didn’t ask for the link, the joke or whatever it is, so if it’s not urgent, sending it to you and expecting a reply is an imposition. People who are as busy as you are will understand. People who email occasionally will have to learn to forgive.

How do you keep up with your email? Don’t email us… use the comment form below.

There’s a problem with owning stylish gadgets… everyone wants one. With Apple selling iPods of every kind by the truckload, that iconic white front and silver back can now be seen everywhere from high school playgrounds to the highlands of Tibet.

Some Apple fans then have taken a brave step. They’ve customized their covers to create a whole new look that makes their music player stand out from the crowd. This is what they’ve done and what others are offering to do for them too.

Xexoo’s Golden iPods

For the music lover who has everything but taste, Xexoo will replace your iPod cover with 18 carat gold and even embed 700 small diamonds into the front. If you’re not into diamonds, you can just go for the gold or ask for a customized version, perhaps with rubies, sapphires and a hint of polonium if you’ve got the contacts.

Oddly, most of the examples show pimped Shuffles. Did they think their customers couldn’t afford the 60GB versions?

Xexoo’s site doesn’t quote the price of their pimping, but if you have to ask….

DIY Goldplating

Of course, if you want to save cash but still look like you have more money than a rap star and slightly less sense, you could just do the pimping yourself.

This iBling was created by Daz and submitted to Pimpyaplayer.com, a tongue-in-cheek site that explains how to destroy Jonathan Ive’s fine work. The picture’s are pitifully small but the text will make you laugh.

Scott Lawrence’s iPod Arcade

Scott Lawrence seems to spend an awful lot of time breaking into all sorts of gadgets to make them do clever things that they were never designed to do. One of those is installing Linux onto his iPod, then running MAME, which emulates arcade games like Pacman.

And just to make the point, he then built a little arcade cabinet to fit it in.

The Bulletproof iPod

After a Japanese iPod owner saw his machine crushed on the Japanese metro, he took precautions with his next model… and armor-plated it. This version weighs in at 446 grams and comes with a 5mm aluminum A5052 shell that could apparently stop a 0.22 bullet.

Useful if people really don’t like the bass leaking from your earphones.

Gelaskins Give Designer Wrapping

Making an armor-plated iPod is hard work. It’s much easier to buy a print from Gelaskins. They offer a wide and very impressive range of vinyl prints designed to stick to your iPod. The prints available range from fifties comic book art to Escher sketches and Impressionist paintings.

They’re all very cool and you can even buy a matching cover for your phone or laptop.

Etch Your Sketch

Gelaskin lets you peel and stick to pimp your iPod. Etchstar takes a more permanent approach. They treat the iPod’s silver back as a palette for their etchings. You can choose from their range of designs or upload your own. (Artists can even contribute their own sketches and get a — pretty mean — 10 percent royalty whenever their designs are chosen).

Not surprisingly, considering the way they’re made, the designs look very tattoo-y, but they can still be a lot of fun and include topics ranging from film and television to colleges and cartoons.

Of course, you could always just buy your iPod from one of Apple’s stores and order an engraved message. Just be sure not to choose any of the messages that Apple doesn’t like…

Whenever anyone becomes a parent, someone at some point will always ask: “So, how does it feel to be a mom/dad?”

The correct answer, of course, is “exhausting” with a large dose of “confusing” thrown in for good measure. It takes time before new parents start to think of themselves as moms and dads — and then the change happens. People who never thought it their business to tell anyone what to do start laying down limits on television-watching, sleep hours and cookie-guzzling. The power they exercise becomes broader not through choice but because of who they are.

And it feels natural. Of course moms and dads punish and reward. That’s what they do. It’s expected. It comes with the job description.

Fitting the Bottle to the Label
Labels may just be sticky things with words on them then but they do have real power. And just as they give “parents” the freedom to control their children without feeling like despots, so positioning yourself in this way can deliver a wider range of possibilities in any walk of life.

Just deciding that you are already what you hope to be in the future can give you the confidence and the freedom to do the job now.

Tell yourself — and others — that you’re a “programmer,” for example, and you’ll feel a need to justify that claim by learning more programming languages, reading the computing press and creating programs.

Call yourself an “entrepreneur” and talking to venture capitalists will no longer feel like chutzpah. It’s what people like you do, and having the confidence to do it will increase the chance that investors will have the confidence to give you the funds you’re looking for.

Describe yourself as a “blogger,” and you will feel the need to write posts every day, understand image licensing and become if not an expert, then at least knowledgeable about traffic generation, blog platforms and online advertising.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that.

Calling yourself a Nobel prize-winning novelist and you won’t get a million dollar check and an invitation to give a speech in Sweden. But it can kick-start a process of learning, delivering the skills you need to justify the position you’ve taken.

Or rather, the positions you’ve taken — and this is where things can start to get complicated.

How to Be in More Than One Place at the Same Time
In practice, no one is ever just one thing and if we were to apply labels to ourselves, we’d probably be covered in sticky paper from head to toe. We are all many things at the same time, some of them apparently contradictory. It is possible to both call yourself someone’s parent, for example, and to be called someone’s child. It’s also possible to be an employee from Monday to Friday, and an entrepreneur when you step into your garage at the weekend.

Fortunately, occupying multiple positions doesn’t seem to create any real problems. Shifting from one position to another happens naturally and smoothly, and without requiring prescriptions for schizophrenia. It just means that you have to put more work into making the most of the potential that life-positioning supplies.

That starts with deciding who you want to be in every walk of life. Making lists always sounds like an ineffective way to organize these sorts of things — they always get lost for one — but you can do this mentally. Divide your life into “professional” and “personal” categories, and tell yourself what labels you’d apply to yourself for each of those categories, and what labels other people would apply to you.

Really throw in every label you can think of, every position your job or status forces you to take. A typical list might include your job title as well as your relationship to other people. It could say “designer” for example, as well as “boss,” “employee,” “assistant” and “student,” and all at the same time.

Similarly, your personal list could include “brother,” “friend,” “colleague” and “neighbor.” Each of those titles brings their own skills and their own codes of behavior and each position always has the potential to be filled in a better way.

Once you’ve understood where you can improve your life now, you can draw up a third list, for “potential.” Here you would include all the positions you’d like to take. Those could include “business owner,” “Webbie award-winner,” “engineer.”

Believe that you already fit those labels and you won’t just be becoming better today, you’ll be becoming better for tomorrow too.

They’re irritating, they’re unavoidable and they’re in your inbox. Last year, spam made up 96 percent of all emails sent. According to The Economist, 70 percent of those messages were for sexual enhancers, 10 percent for counterfeit goods and 6 percent for software.

Most of that gets caught in spam filters and deleted without being read, but just occasionally, spammers produce a message that’s actually worth receiving. We searched around and pulled out these gems of mass marketing.

Classic Lit Spam
With spam filters wise to key terms and able to identify random strings of words, spammers started padding their ads with excerpts from classic — or rather, copyright-expired — literature to beat the algorithms. Books press-ganged into the cause of large organs and over-pumped stocks have included “Robinson Crusoe,” “The Three Musketeers” and “Pride and Prejudice.”

But we like this excerpt best from “The Master Key” by Frank L. Baum, author of “The Wizard of Oz” that we found here.

Your name! he demanded, sharply Robert Billings Joslyn, United States of America! Your business, Monsieur Joslyn! Rob drew the Record from his pocket and placed it upon the tableThis, sir, said he, is an electrical device that records all important events discontinue Orange stad, and then mail stop 1.200 B, followed by A rub a I wish to call your attention to a scene enacted in Paris last evening which may have an effect upon the future history of your country He opened the lid, placed the Record so that the President could see clearly, and then watched the changing expressions upon the great man’s face; first indifference, then interest, the next moment eagerness and amazement MON DIEU! he gasped; the Orleanists! Rob nodded Yes; they’ve worked up a rather pretty plot, haven’t they? The President did not reply

Phishing for Aliens
Not all spam messages are intended to sell, of course. Some hope to part suckers from their cash by offering them the opportunity to take a share of some illicit loot. Most of these “419 Scams” (named after the law in Nigeria, where most of these scams originate) are pretty dull affairs spinning a tale of trapped inheritances and blocked bribes. But this message, found here, is just out of that world altogether.

From: Frank Young <xxxxx@xxxxxx.com>
To: xxxxx@xxxxxx.com
Subject: Time travelers PLEASE HELP!!!!!!
Date: 10 Jan 2002 20:43:53 +0100

If you are a time traveler or alien disguised as human and or have the technology to travel physically through time I need your help!

My life has been severely tampered with and cursed!!

I have suffered tremendously and am now dying!

I need to be able to:

Travel back in time.

Rewind my life including my age back to 4.

Be able to remember what I know now so that I can prevent my life from being tampered with again after I go back.

I am in very great danger and need this immediately!

I am aware that there are many types of time travel, and that humans do not do well through certain types.

I need as close to temporal reversion as possible, as safely as possible. To be able to rewind the hands of time in such a way that the universe of now will cease to exist.

I know that there are some very powerful people out there with alien or government equipment capable of doing just that.

If you can help me I will pay for your teleport or trip down here, Along with hotel stay, food and all expenses. I will pay top dollar for the equipment. Proof must be provided.

Also if you are one of the very few beings with the ability to edit the universe PLEASE REPLY!!!

Only if you have this technology and can help me please send me a (SEPARATE) email to:

xxxxxx@aol.com

Please do not reply if your an evil alien!

Thanks

Spam Cartoons
One way that spammers try to beat the filters is by embedding their message as an image. The response of email clients was to stop images downloading without the recipient’s authorization. Usually, that’s a good thing, not just because it saves us from that piece of spam but also because it stops the spammers realizing that the address is live and sending us more.

Sometimes though, not downloading the spam picture can deprive of us of a naughty pleasure. This is just one of a series of crude — but funny — spam images found here.

Promises, Promises
Spammers clearly think the rest of us are stupid — or at least stupid enough to believe their promise that a bunch of herbs can turn us into male porn stars. Some promises though are just too good to be believed… like this one:

Looking for something new and innovative??

Visit http://xxxxxx.com enter your details for extensive information (your info is never sold or distributed)

It is possible that there are people dumb enough to believe that their personal details and email address will be stored safely by a spammer… but is that spammer likely to find them at Facebook’s Harvard Business School group where this message was posted?

Unique Comment Spam
It’s not just inboxes and forums that get walloped by spam though. Comments on blogs are also tempting targets for spammers who usually simply insert a link to their site. Sometimes though, the spammer will try to hide the link behind a block of text — and just sometimes, that text is worth reading, like this one, found here:

I am a keen mountain-biker, and was the proud owner of a fairly expensive mountain bike. My bike was fitted with ‘V’ brakes, which are extremely effective, though prone to squealing. My dear brother decided to have a ride on my bike one day, while I was out. He noticed the squealing as he cycled down the hill we live on, towards the invariably busy crossroads at the bottom. Being a helpful sort, he headed back home and proceeded to pour a generous amount of 3-in-1 oil onto the brakes, before once more setting off down the hill. The oil worked! The only reported squealing came from my brother, as he slammed into the side of a moving VW Beetle. To this day he sports an impressive scar running from his eye socket to just past his ear.

Have you found any good spam (and we mean ‘good’ spam)? Share it here.

Photography: eccentric scholar

It’s hard to believe that a couple of thousand years ago, the world would have mostly been a handful of tones. Yellow was reserved for Chinese royals, purple was kept for Imperial togas, reds might have decorated posh Roman villas and black emphasized the eyes of Egyptian Pharoahs, but for everyone else, dyes were limited and expensive. Clothes were mostly available in different shades of natural.

Today of course, we’re surrounded by color, and software such as the ProPhoto RGB color space are capable of recording more tones than the eye can even see.

But just as the number of colors available has expanded so has the use of those colors.

Here are just some of the ways that color can most effectively brighten your life.

The Healing Powers of Color
It might sound very New Age, but using colors to heal the body goes back thousands of years. Ayurvedic medicine was certainly being practiced around 500BC, and holds that each of the seven chakras is associated with a color. Red, for example is the color of life and too much of it can make someone angry and stubborn; indigo helps with perception and, according to some people, can even stop bleeding.

Today’s chromotherapists take that idea even further, arguing that all living things vibrate at a particular frequency and that by shining colored lights on the skin it’s possible to aid the body’s healing processes.

If you’ve got a cold, for example, instead of sucking an orange, you could try soaking up orange.

Can it work? Like sugar pills, probably. But sitting in front of a lava lamp and focusing on the colored bubbles certainly won’t do you any harm.

Technicolor Mood Enhancers
Arguing that colored gels can cure diseases might be a claim too far but one solution offered by chromotherapists might have some substance.

Colors can make SAD people happy.

That’s not just people who happen to fell a little low today, but sufferers from Seasonal Affective Disorder — a fancy term for the winter blues. When daylight hours shrink and the sun drops out halfway up the sky, some people can find themselves feeling constantly depressed and lethargic.

Bathing in the warm glow of colored lights can restore some pep to their batteries, it’s believed.

Of course, you don’t have to be SAD to benefit from the mood-enhancing effects of colors. If red has you feeling energetic while blues and greens give a sense of relaxation, then changing rooms or looking at color charts might be enough to get you out of a rut and put you in the mood to create.

Organizing Color Schemes
The fact that colors look different to each other means, of course, that they’re great for organization. It’s certainly a lot easier to mark list items in different colors — as a way of showing their priority or to indicate how they need to be completed — than to re-create David Allen’s GTD system with its 43 folders and multiple action options.

But you need to be careful here.

Use more than three colors, whether it’s to highlight a book or mark your folders, and you can find that you end up with some nice-looking notes but no memory of what each color is supposed to mean.

That doesn’t mean you can never use more than three colors. But if you need to consult a key to remind yourself what the colors stand for, you’re probably missing the point.

Colors for Design
Yes, of course, color is a vital part of any design process and not just for aesthetics. If yellow alone marks a warning while red indicates danger, what are we to think of McDonalds’ garish color choice but as a way of forcing buyers to eat fast, leave and make room for more customers?

You might not want to make your surroundings look like a fast food bar but you can combine color schemes with organization to create a home or work space that’s both attractive and functional.

Most people, for example, arrange their bookshelves by subject or author. But what would happen if you organized them by color (as members of this Flickr group have done)? The books wouldn’t be any harder to find because you can usually remember what color the cover is supposed to be.

You’d also know exactly where to put them back when you take some volumes down and leave them on the desk.

And perhaps best of all, if you were feeling ill or just a bit low, you could lean back and focus on the shelf that makes you feel better.

You can’t unwrap them, return them or even re-gift them. In fact, beyond a bunch of 0s and 1s on a server somewhere, they don’t exist at all. And yet, virtual gifts are doing a roaring trade online as surfers and social networkers show just what their contacts mean to them by buying them… well, nothing.

Here are some of the coolest virtual gifts that you can buy online.

A Hole in The Ground… in Zimbabwe

Some of the best virtual gifts online are in Second Life. That’s mostly because a lot of them aren’t just virtual.

Great Gifts, for example, lets Second Lifers be extremely generous… with someone else’s gift. They let you present another Second Lifer with a certificate showing that you’ve handed over their present to someone else.

The choices are as broad and charitable as you might imagine and range from a meal for 70 Cambodian children and a llama for a family in Bolivia to… wait for it… a borehole in Sunzukwi, Zimbabwe. That’s £5,761 — around $11,464 — to tell someone who doesn’t exist that you’ve bought them a hole that neither of you will ever see.

Does it get cooler than that?

A Bottle of Booze

It’s not just right-on, save-the-world types who can hand out expensive virtual gifts in cyberspace that can also have a knock-on effect offline though. Starfruit, for example, lets Second Lifers buy chocolate, flowers, wine or jewelry and present them in-world.

The recipient can then enter their real address and swap the digitized stuff for something they can actually eat, smell, drink or wear.

We’ll take the drink.

A Second Life Amazon Gift Certificate

Unless of course, someone is handing out Amazon gift certificates.

Instructables.com has a very simple guide that explains how to buy an Amazon gift certificate and hand it to someone in a virtual world. All you have to do is swipe the image and paste it up online.

So that’s a virtual coupon to a store that doesn’t actually exist given by a virtual person to another virtual person in an unreal environment.

When the order doesn’t actually arrive, don’t be surprised.

Facebook’s Flying Saucer

Okay… you’re right, it’s not that cool. But then what did you expect for a dollar, a Dreamliner? Within the first few months of letting its users send each other virtual gifts at a dollar a time, Facebook racked up an impressive $24 million worth of sales. Considering that the gifts were designed by Susan Kare (who created the original Macintosh icons), that doesn’t sound too surprising… until you see them.

They’re just little graphics that look like they were swiped from a kid’s sticker album.

In fact, some of the best gifts on Facebook are free. Growing Gifts, for example, lets users send each other a virtual pot with a seed which starts sprouting after four days.

Imelda Marcos fans and other fetishists can have fun swapping shoes in the Shoes Galore store

And best of all, Friends For Sale lets you swap your pals for cash — but only virtual cash unfortunately.

Still, judging from the gifts you can buy your pals from the multi-billion dollar networking site’s own gift apps, letting someone else buy your friends might be the best bargain.

A Donna Karan Crystal Dress

We think this is probably cool, but frankly we haven’t a clue. Girls seem to like dressing up their dolls so if you have a 14-year old niece who can’t decide whether she likes playing with Barbie or binary, you can buy her a Stardoll gift certificate that will put her avator in the heights of fashion.

That is Donna Karan, right?

A Pair of Handcuffs

This is exactly the sort of gift you really do want to keep virtual. Utherverse tries to be a competitor to Second Life, but one in which life seems to revolve entirely around sex — complete with Karma Sutra-inspired animations.

Romantic types can load up on virtual champagne, chocolates and roses but if you’re going to hang out in the Internet’s virtual red light district you may as well be generous with the toys.