It has gotten to the point that you just aren’t keeping up with the times if you don’t have a Facebook account, a LinkedIn profile, a Twitter feed and a presence on a dozen other websites. It can be crazy trying to keep up with all of it — and there are new social networking

The first reaction many people have to Twitter is befuddlement. Why would they want to read short messages about what someone ate for breakfast?

It’s a reasonable question. Twitter unleashes the diarist in its 14 million users, who visited its site 99 million times last month to read posts tapped out with cellphones and computers.

Individually, many of those 140-character “tweets” seem inane.

But taken collectively, the stream of messages can turn Twitter into a surprisingly useful tool for solving problems and providing insights into the digital mood. By tapping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through the mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment —and even help them shape it.

Myths about how to best do email abound. Some are explicitly stated and drummed into your head, and some are the unspoken expectations of the modern corporate world. To succeed at tackling the big email time sink and making email woes a thing of your past, you need to acknowledge these myths for what they are, and implement a system that works.

So you've heard the term "blog" and you want to know what blogs are all about. Well, you've come to the right place.

In this series of four articles we will take you from asking what a blog is to having all the knowledge you need to start a blog of your own so you can share your thoughts with hundreds or even thousands of readers.

Are you using social networks to build your reputation online? Whether you already are or you are just getting started with sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Ning, building your online reputation is your biggest responsibility.

Here are five ways to make sure you do it right.

Short writing still needs to be good writing. Here are some tips for writing on Twitter.

Learn about social media tools and the essentials of social media.

This 45-slide, generously illustrated presentation covers all of the major aspects of Twitters and explain why it matters to an expanding number of people throughout the world.

Social media has intrigued and even inspired companies to engage in the communities where their brands and products, as well as those of competitors, are actively discussed by the very people they want to reach.

This nicely illustrated, 56-slide presentation discusses Twitter, the problems it can solve, the solutions it can offer, and the network it can build.