The Cosmopolitan Blog

Something new has come to the White House: responsible parenting. I love the fact that, as the leader of his country, Obama sees it as part of his responsibilities to show America how he raises his daughters, and to show examples of successful parenting.

The first time he impressed me was when he refused to let them participate in interviews during the campaign and when he made it a point to tell people that the kids were not left at home with a babysitter every night, but that their grandmother was the one taking care of them.

A few days before he was sworn in, he wrote his daughters a letter. It was moving, beautiful and loving. But more than that, it was showing what place a father can have in his daughter’s life, how he positions himself as the guardian of her future.

He shows that communication is important, and that while it is not expected that every father write their daughter a letter, you can imagine how this would transcribe, in a normal family setting, to regular conversations between a father and a daughter, him sitting on the side of the bed, saying goodnight to her every evening, giving her the kind of comforting advice she will remember for the rest of her life.

A few days ago, we found out that Barack Obama was a night owl and liked working late. Yet he took the time to have dinner with his family before returning to work. Around the same time, Michelle told the press that her agenda, for the first month, was exclusively to take care of ensuring the transition to Washington was a smooth one for her daughters, and that everything else could wait.

As someone who, I believe, had one of the best fathers a daughter can ask for, i can tell you this. Obama offers something to his daughters that is priceless: security and consistency.

For a child, hearing his parents regularly tell him how much he means to them (the importance of the expressed feeling) and then seeing that message reinforced by seeing his parents come home every night, spend quality time, either at the dinner table or in the living room (the importance of actions)… There is nothing more constructive to shape a child’s future character.

I am Canadian, so whatever policies Obama sets probably won’t affect me directly. But watching Barack and Michelle parent, now that’s something that transcends borders and is truly and concretly inspiring.

Being a good parent is not brain surgery. But it requires love, time and dedication. And for all those fathers that think they are relagated to a secondary role behind the “primary” mother, think again. Watch Barack Obama, he’ll lead a whole new generation of good fathers.

How many of you are old enough to remember when handwritten letters were the main written communication tool?From letters, we went to faxes, then to email, then to Instant Messaging, then to text messaging, and finally to things that are so fast, like Twitter.  And in theory, all great advances in technology. Right?

Right. I mean, c’mon, this is so much better than having my mom call me every day saying “did you get my letter? what’s wrong with your postal system?”

So email came along and changed everything. Suddenly, delivery was instant. But we could still claim that we hadn’t “checked our email”, this would buy us response time (a day maximum).

But now we have twitter and text messages, and things are getting even faster.

Here’s my question. Is it because the delivery method is getting faster, that we have to respond right away? And if we respond right away, aren’t we just saying to the sender that we’re available, 24/7? Is that healthy?

Even the busiest gurus agree that we should slow it down, see Chris Brogan’s post “Be Realistic About Time“. Manage people’s expectations. Don’t answer right away.

Try it out. I’m sure you have 1-2 people who email you constantly. Even if you read their email, leave it in your inbox. Wait an entire day (i’m serious) and respond to them the next morning. If they text message you to ask you if you received the email (yeah, cuz that makes sense!), don’t answer. It might take a few times, but they’ll get the message.

Do you agree? Is this a good tactic? Are you someone that is overloaded and wants to slow it down? Or do you thrive on the amount of communication you receive?

I’ve read a lot of articles recently about the best way to use twitter. But i always find them biased, one way or another. Some teach you how to promote yourself, others tell you not to. some tell you that you should make it personal about what you are doing, others tell you we don’t care whether you’re eating a chicken sandwich.

But this article was refreshing: “7 Ways to be Worth Following on Twitter“. It balanced, in fact, the whole message of the article is that you should be balanced in your tweeting.

It’s like the unwritten code of ethics for Twitter. I like.

I like Google, because they don’t seem very egocentric. Let me explain. They often do things without screaming it to the world, they’ve launched beta programs like Google Transit other things without making a big splash.

But sometimes they make corporate changes and i wish they would explain them. The latest is the change in browser favicons. A favicon is a little icon that appears at the top of your browser (near where you type the web URL address) and is associated with a particular website or webpage. Go to http://www.google.com and see for yourself, see the little icon at the top?

Until 2008, Google’s favicon was the first one below. Then they changed it to the middle one below, and now, on January 9, 2009, they changed it again, to the last one below. A few blogs had picked up on it back in 2008, I’ve seen nothing for this latest change though.

While i loved the first one, i was always confused by the second one, it never seemed to gel with Google’s identity. Now this new one is interesting, it’s more artsy… I like. But how long will it stay? Do they have a site that discusses this? What are your thoughts? Does the favicon of a company have an effect on you?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about blog strategy, so here it is. I just found this amazing site: http://www.howtomakemyblog.com/, it has countless blog posts about ways to improve the success of your blog. But instead of being generalities and theory like most other expert blogs, these are a series of concise blog posts about specifics: how to increase comment traffic, useful plugins to increase traffic, best way to use StumbleUpon…

The only catch is that the focus is on Wordpress blogs, since it discusses plugins available for it. But at the same time, ask anyone, i think that Wordpress is fast becoming the only sensible blogging software, whether it’s externally-hosted wordpress.com or your own wordpress.org.

There’s something for everyone. The one tip i found the most useful and went ahead and implemented right away was the no6 on his “10 ways to increase the number of blog comments“:

Does it say “No Comments” underneath your blog article? Does that sound inviting to your ears? It certainly does not, even though it is the text on the standard WordPress installation and most probably on your blog as well. Open your comments.php and edit the “No Comments” to something more inviting and encouraging like “No comments yet, but your thoughts are welcomed”.

Go check the site out. And come back and tell me which you thought was the most useful post, or come and share with us here some useful tip for strategy.