TweetMemeFace+: Create Story Arcs in Your Content

Theater isn't funny without narrative. Neither are your tweets. Image courtesy of Flickr user Cormerhouse Manchester. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND.Need a laptop? We've teamed up with Intel to bring you the HackCollege Laptop Chooser. If you share the Laptop Chooser, you'll be entered to win a Samsung Series 9 Notebook!

Part of the beauty of social media is that it is freeform. You can post a tweet about cute cats one day, and follow it up with some serious 140-character commentary about the Iraq war the next.

However, if you're intending to use your social media accounts in a way that makes you look like an appealing hire post-graduation, you may want to avoid this option. An account that exposes all possible facets of your personality is only going to be of interest to people who know you personally--if that's your kettle of fish, rock on, but this is for people who want to appear more knowledgeable than their industry competition. This is about creating a social media narrative.

I've gone into this to some extent in my columns on context-specific posts and unified profile pictures, but today we're looking specifically at how to craft your content into something approaching a narrative about who you, in your social media form, are. It sounds difficult, but with a little bit of monthly planning it really doesn't have to be.

Decide what you're talking about: If you're trying to get a job by using social media, this will most likely just be whatever industry you're looking in to. Decide the general subject area, and--if necessary--decide what makes your take on it unique. If you're an anthropology major, maybe focus your tweets on one specific subset of anthropology, like digital studies or youth. If you blog about gaming, become an expert on a specific platform. Merlin Mann has a great quote (paraphrased) about this as an approach: don't blog about Star Wars, blog about wookies. Even better, blog about one specific wookie. Become the internet expert on that wookie.

Decide who you're talking to: Are you looking to network with your peers to build up a community of friends in your industry, or are you trying to communicate with more established members of your field? The tone and subject of your social media should change appropriately. For example, on the @HackCollege account, we're talking to our readers--as a result, there's a lot of references to beer. This is not true of the individual accounts of most of the contributors, who are trying to network as writers.

Map it out: This is the main part of how you're going to craft a narrative, once you know who you're talking about and what about. Think of a theme for your week/month (for Twitter and other shortforms, you're going to be looking at the week, and for blogs you're going to be operating on a two week cycle). Think of the big thing you're going to comment on or be showing off--your paper that you're presenting, or a major news story, or some industry event--and put it on a calendar. That will be your major post. As a lead up to it, pull in related content, like another researcher's look at the same material, or a personal anecdote about why that issue is important to you. Plan that post/tweet/GPost before the major one. If you're in a short form medium, you'll be peppering before and after with related links to other peoples' work, and if you're in a long form medium you'll probably be doing a once-a-week roundup post.

Schedule: The lead-up/analysis post structure I just described gives you a way to do either a week's worth of posts on a two-post-a-week blog, or a half-week's worth of tweets. You should be cycling through that structure each week or so, so that most of your recent content relates to the arc. All of the content, no matter what story arc it appears in, should relate to your theme from step one--as a result, you'll essentially be producing chapters or sections of content in a unified body of work. The key to this making sense is to space everything in a reasonable order and time frame--the smaller blocks of content unite the larger work.

Do you have another social media tip? Share it in the comments!

Schooltraq Organizes Your Entire Academic Calendar

Schooltraq is an awesome new way to keep traq (ohsoclever) of all of your assignments.I have featured my way of keeping up with my school assignments on HackCollege before. It involves being incredibly diligent, organized, consistent, and OCD. I happen to be all of those things. However, I would never expect any huge amount of college students to follow my example because of the craziness that it takes to organize a schedule the way I do. Thankfully, there's Schooltraq, which probably understands students' needs because it was actually created by students.

Schooltraq is a new online way to organize your school assignments in a way that is simplistic and doesn't make you want to pull out your hair every time you schedule something in. Essentially, you enter your classes for the semester and color code them (music to my ears). Then, every so often (I would recommend at least every week, but it's probably more effective to do it every month or even to go by the semester), you type in your homework assignments. This is usually when online to do lists and the way I organize my calendar gets extremely tedious. I mean, who wants to type in every freaking assignment you have to do this semester?

One of the really neat features that Schooltraq offers is that you can type in assignments with what the call "Reflex." Instead of typing in an assignment name in one box, the specific class in another, and the due date in another box, you can simply type in "Read Chapter Nine Biology next thursday." Schooltraq uses Reflex as a natural language parser to understand that the assignment is to read chapter nine for biology, and it's due next Thursday. All you have to do is press enter, and bam, it's on your academic calendar. This makes entering homework assignments a lot easier, and the natural language parser works pretty darn well.

You can also check assignments off after you've done them (as you can see above). The website keeps your assignments in order of their due date so you can see which assignment you need to do next. Although that is really important, I still strongly, strongly recommend mapping out really important assignments on a traditional calendar so you can plan out your time to work on major projects and be in the situation where you have two days to write a 20 page research paper.

Whether or not Schooltraq will catch on as a leading way to organize students' lives I think depends on the availablity of it on smartphones. A lot of students use Google Calendar to organize their lives, and so in order to become competitive enough to get a lot of notice depends on its accessability. I'm hopeful and I think that as the site develops, it will be a great tool for students.

If you'd like to check out Schooltraq, head over to their website. Schooltraq is currently in beta mode and invitation only, but Lifehacker offered an invitational code "golifehacker" for you to try it out right now.

What do you think of Schooltraq? What will it take for you to switch to it rather than use your current method of keeping track of your assignments?

[via Lifehacker]

Our Top Posts From August

This guy knew what was important to pack. Photo by Flickr user mdowns and licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0Wow, what a busy month. When we weren't giving away iPads and $100 bills, we were churning out massive amounts of back to school content and dorm hacks to put you a step ahead of your classmates. Here were some of our most popular posts from the month that was.

• Double Your Text Skimming Speed with Three Simple Techniques
• Things Your New Apartment Needs That Your Probably Forgot
• How To Start Your First Week Off Right
• Use a Beer Can to Boost Your WiFi Signal Strength
• Replace Your Alarm Clock With These Apps
• College 101: Textbooks
• Get Your Papers Proofread for Free on Kibin
• Build the Ultimate Beer Pong Table: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Use Spaces on Your Mac to Manage Productivity and Social Spheres

My Spaces in action. Photo courtesy of author's screenshot.When Mac OS X introduced Spaces with Leopard, it institutionalized the concept of multiple desktops to Mac users, something most Linux users and some Windows users had been using for years. The productivity line on multiple desktops is still blurry - some belive that one single desktop is more beneficial for work, while others like to divvy up their life into different departments.

I used to be a multiple desktop devotee, but in recent years, had slipped out of the habits. In Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, full-screen apps were introduced as separate multiple desktops, and it was time for me to attempt another experiment. This time, I was serious.

I always broke down my 4 Spaces (no more) like this: Web, Social, Productivity, and Fun. Descriptions after the jump!

Click to read more ...

How to make extra cash without taking on a part-time job

Extra Cash - Everyone's looking for it! Photo by magnetbox and licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Need a laptop? We've teamed up with Intel to bring you the HackCollege Laptop Chooser. If you share the Laptop Chooser, you'll be entered to win a Samsung Series 9 Notebook!

With the cost of tuition skyrocketing at all schools, more than ever, students need to get their hands on as much money as possible. Unfortunately, not all of us have the time (isn’t being a student enough of a full time job?) to pickup a part-time or work-study job that can take 15-20 hours out of your week. If that’s the case (or even if you do have a job already and want more ideas to make cash), you’ve got a boatload of options to make some pocket money on the side. Also, remember that you can use a lot of these side projects to gain experience you can put on your resume.

Psychology/Social Science Experiments: If your campus is like mine, I’m sure there are tons of researchers who want human guinea pigs! In exchange for your time and cooperation, they’ll usually pay you about $10-20/hour. I love doing these because they’re usually scheduled when I have open blocks in my schedule, so I’ll do an experiment for an hour and make $15 instead of surfing Facebook. Most experiments take no more than an hour, and new experiments are posted all the time. And don’t worry – you’ll be completely safe and you can always stop the experiment if you feel uncomfortable. If you’re interested, be on the lookout for fliers advertising for students to come participate in these experiments. If you don’t see any, try emailing or asking your psychology or economics departments if any researchers need students.

Freelance Gigs: Craigslist gigs can be a great resource to make some extra dough. Whenever you have a spare moment, check your city’s gigs page. You can find it by appending “/ggg” without the quotes to the URL for your city’s craigslist page. There will be a big mess of stuff, most of which won’t apply to students, but you can often find things like babysitting or data entry that you can easily do in your spare time. Your mileage may vary, but expect an hourly wage a few bucks more than minimum wage.

Focus Groups and Surveys: Check out the surveys forum on Slickdeals. Slickdeals is a great deals forum that features a community of bargain hunters on the lookout for great deals on basically anything, from TV's to baby food. In one subsection of the forums, slickdealers post links to survey sites they’ve found. The marketers running these sites want your feedback and opinions in exchange for money! Surveys vary in length and payment amount, but I’ve found sites where you can get paid $50 in as little as 30 minutes (MindSwarms.com). Meanwhile, focus groups are in-person interviews that usually take much longer, often 2-3 hours. However, you can expect to be paid a lot more for these, sometimes even $200 for just 2 hours. Regardless of the method, the important thing to remember is that these marketers are almost always screening for certain types of people – so you will probably be denied more than once. But don’t be discouraged! Explore the forums, find survey sites you like, and get started making extra money!

Monetize Your Social Media: Whatever your interests may be, have you ever thought about communicating and sharing your expertise with others on the Internet? If not, you should. You can reap so many benefits from starting a YouTube channel, Tumblr, or blog, some of which include: 1) connecting with others who share your interest, 2) getting great experience writing and managing a website, and 3) making money! Once you have enough content and get enough traffic coming to your site, you can put up ads from a wide variety of ad networks. Here are just a few: Google AdSense, Adbrite, and Amazon.

Outside of all the tips I mentioned, there are a ton of blog posts out there with all sorts of ways to make extra cash without taking on a job. Check out 102 Ways To Generate Extra Cash, More Money: 5 Ways to Earn Extra Cash in Your Spare Time, and 10 New Ways to Make Money Online, just to name a few. There are literally hundreds more if you do a simple Google search. I hope these ideas have inspired you to get out, do something, and start recouping all that money you spend on Starbucks!

What are your favorite ways to make extra money on the side? Let us know in the comments!

Beer: The Multipurpose Alcoholic Beverage

Beer. Good for more than just drinking. (Wait, what?) Photo courtesy of k.ivoutin. Licensed under CC BY-2.0.So beer is basically pretty awesome. It is typically the drink of choice of college students. But everyone loves beer. Hell, my ancestors were named after beer. And because it is so awesome, beer has actually been put to other uses other than drinking. So read on to discover some new ways you can put your beer to work in your life.

Pest Trap

Just like humans, little pests like slugs, fruit flies, and cockroaches also love beer. For this reason, you can use it to attrack them into a trap to get rid of them around your dorm or apartment. For slugs, place a small saucer or jar of beer ourside where you usually find them. They'll be drawn to it and will have gotten stuck. Do the same thing for fruit flies, but cover the top of the jar with plastic wrap, poking a small hole for the flies to get into. Apparently they won't be able to get out once they get in.

Roaches are nasty, so I was relieved to hear about this tip. If you have a roach problem, put a piece of beer soaked bread in a jar and cover the rim with vaseline. Cockroaches get in, but can't get out because of the vaseline. 

Fertilize Plants

I have a little indoor plant to spruce up my apartment, and using a bit of beer can actually help fertilize it and keep it growing strong. Use a small amount of a flat beer just at the base of the plant. If you have a house with some roommates, and your yard is prone to ugly brown patches, you can pour flat beer on that too. The acids in beer kill off fungi and pests, and the fermented sugars feed the grass.

Stain Removal

If you've just spilt a little bit of coffee on the rug, instead of using chemical cleaners, try a spot of beer first. Let beer sit on the stain for a few minutes, and then dab it up with a cloth. Wash out the spot again with soap and water, and the magicness of beer should have removed the coffee stain.

Have you ever used beer for any of these household jobs? Let us know in the comments!

[via Networx]

Twitter Timeline Sync with Tweet Marker

Tweetbot version 1.6 now supports timeline syncing with Tweet Marker.

Need a laptop? We've teamed up with Intel to bring you the HackCollege Laptop Chooser. If you share the Laptop Chooser, you'll be entered to win a Samsung Series 9 Notebook!

Many Twitter users check their timeline in more than one client. You may use a Twitter iOS or Android app for reading on the go and then check a desktop Twitter client on your laptop. But when you switch between clients, you lose your previous reading position, which can be a major annoyance and make for a less pleasant Twitter experience. For example, the official Twitter apps (Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android, etc.) will remember where you were in the timeline, but only within each individual app-- you can't make Twitter for Mac start where you left off on Twitter for iPhone. 

If you follow a lot of active Twitters, your timeline is probably constantly flowing with updates. With this setup, an important announcement could easily get buried in this stream. 

Manton Reece's Tweet Marker is a tool for Twitter application developers that aims to solve this problem by setting and getting the "last read" tweet for a given Twitter user. So far, Twitterific for the Mac, iPhone and iPad, Tweetbot 1.6 for the iPhone, and Tweetings for Mac, iPhone, and iPad are the only clients that have integrated Tweet Marker into their clients. Tweet Marker works across multiple platforms and clients. You could sync your timeline between Tweetbot and Twitterific (on any device), and vice versa. 

Tweet Marker is an excellent service that adds great value to clients that support it. Let's hope more Twitter developers will catch on and start taking advantage of Tweet Marker!

[via Macstories]

Mac App MailTab Brings GMail to Your Desktop

MailTab - saving you one browser tab at a time. Photo used courtesy of fair use.MailTab, a new application on the Mac App Store, allows Mac users to have push notifications for their GMail on their desktop. MailTab provides audio and visual notifications when users have new mail, in addition to allowing users to send mail from their desktop without ever opening the browesr.

MailTab emulates an iPhone-like interface and allows users nearly all the functions of mobile GMail from their desktop, providing a simplistic way to always be in the know with your mail.

MailTab is free, but also has a $1.99 pro version.

[TUAW]