I can imagine how readers might take this to be sarcastic, or at least very tongue-in-cheek. But I think it’s a valid theory, and here’s why.

The word “branding” has several definitions. In my theory, I was referring to these two definitions:

1. Branding as a means to an end. For a typical company, this includes the company name, logo, colors, fonts, writing style, package designs, and website look and feel. This was what the first “branding” meant. For the rest of this entry, I’ll be referring to this definition as branding.
2. Branding as the actual end. For a typical company, this includes the company’s personality, the impression it leaves on people, customer perception, what it’s known for, who the target audience is, and what differentiates it from the competition. This was what the second “branding” meant. For the rest of this entry, I’ll be referring to this definition as brand.

(Okay, I may have cheated by using a polysemous word with both meanings in the same sentence. But it made the statement sound witty, right?)

Essentially, a company does branding (designs logos, chooses colors, writes catchphrases, advertises) with the objective of building a brand (the impression they or their products or services leave).

This article points out the benefits of a strong brand:

A good brand achieves the following objectives:

• Delivers the message clearly
• Confirms your credibility
• Connects your target prospects emotionally
• Motivates the buyer
• Concretes user loyalty

A strong brand is invaluable as the battle for customers intensifies day by day. It’s important to spend time investing in researching, defining, and building your brand. After all, your brand is the source of a promise to your consumer. It’s a foundational piece in your marketing communication and one you do not want to be without.

So, what exactly did I mean when I said that having no branding is their branding?

Can you think of any world-famous company that doesn’t have a logo these days? That’s right—there aren’t many, if any at all. Can you think of any world-famous company that doesn’t use the same fonts, company colors, and writing style in their advertisements? It’s rare, and when it happens, it’s usually considered a mistake.

Here’s the thing: Branding is something a company does so that people don’t confuse it with 1) another company, or 2) the individuals who work for it. Branding strategy and identity design result in consistency in how the company looks, feels, seems, communicates, advertises, and markets. And the problem with consistency is that it is decidedly machine-like.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.—Oscar Wilde

Consistency helps large organizations keep track of how they’re supposed to come off. But sometimes—for small companies, specifically—it just doesn’t work.

Let’s say you’re hungry one afternoon, and you walk down the street to buy crunchy corn kernels. You pass by the laundrywoman. She’s carrying a pile of garment bags, each marked with her laundrywoman silhouette logo and the words Aling Martha Laundry Services. You give her a smile and go on your way. Before long, you reach your sari-sari store, which greets you with a large sign: Jhonel’s Store in Gotham Black. All of the store’s posters—advertising foot-long hotdogs, cell phone credits, and tube ice—are in Pantone 032. You pay for your corn kernels as well as a bottle of Pepsi. You notice the bottle’s label and think, They’ve rebranded again? Then you roll your eyes and take a sip. At least it still tastes the same.

Now wake up from your dream.

Branding is great for companies who want everything they do to work like an Edgar Allan Poe short story—to leave a single impression. But, like an Edgar Allan Poe short story, professional branding is also very contrived. Consistency and contrivance together help make a brand successful—most of the time. But sometimes, it makes the brand seem like just another manufactured product, and the company like a machine. And other times, it’s simply out of place.

I don’t know about you, but I think there’s something endearing about a logo so ugly you know the Xerox shop owner asked his 10-year-old daughter to make it. There’s something oddly fascinating about a car repair shop named Carbucks whose sign is rendered in the Starbucks logo font. There’s a quiet dignity in every nameless, sign-less, around-the-corner isaw stall where the old lady handing out barbecued innards smiles warmly at each customer who comes to order. Sometimes having no branding strategy makes your brand what it is—approachable, friendly, and somehow more human than companies who spend tons of time and money on their branding.

So in the end, despite my love for good branding, I realize that not every design needs to be perfect. Not every document needs to be in the same font. Not every advertisement needs to sound like it was written by the same person. And somehow this makes me feel a little better about logo design in my country—and the horrible logos I see every day that, for some unknown reason, make me smile.

• Manual search on Google Reader. Whenever I wrote a comment to which I expected a response, I subscribed to the post’s comment feed on Google Reader. All comment feeds went into one folder. Every once in a while, I searched the folder for my name, and thus saw all the comments directed to me. Why it didn’t work: It was tedious to subscribe to post comment feeds and to do manual searches.

• Subscribe to Comments. This is a popular WordPress plug-in that allows anyone to subscribe to comments on chosen posts. New comments were sent to my email as they arrived, and I read them when I had time. Why it didn’t work: I still received all the comments on each post—not just replies to my own. This was a big problem for the more popular blogs, and was a bigger waste of time than manual searching. Besides, not all blogs have this plug-in installed.

Then I read about Yahoo! Pipes, and I knew I had found my solution.

Keep track of comment replies with Yahoo! Pipes

Here’s how to be notified of direct replies to your comments using Yahoo! Pipes. All you need is a Yahoo! account and some spare time.

1. Fetch your feeds. Fetch the comment feeds of all the blogs you comment on. It’s likely that you read and like posts from the same blogs. Take the feed of the entire blog, not individual posts, so you don’t have to keep adding new items all the time. (I really should have thought of this before; I could have used it with my Google Reader search solution!) Comment feeds can usually be found in this address format: http://blog.com/comments/feed.
2. Filter your feeds. Permit only feed items that contain your name to come through. Comments that are addressed to you will have your name in the description. If you’d also like to keep track of comments you’ve written, permit items with your name in the title. Remember to include all the names that you comment with and/or that people might use to address you.
3. Run the pipe. Once you run the pipe, Yahoo! Pipes can render the output as an RSS feed. Subscribe to this feed using your favorite feed reader.

Use Yahoo! Pipes to keep track of comment replies

There are limitations, of course. If you have a very common first name, you may receive comments that aren’t addressed to you. Also, for blogs with threaded comments enabled, people may not mention your name when replying to you.

But if you’re willing to navigate through the Pipes and are okay with having to add newly discovered blogs from time to time, it’s a great solution. You have one feed to subscribe to, and there are no searches required. Receiving comment replies is fast and easy.

According to The Productivity Handbook by Donald E. Wetmore, the foundation of our lives consists of seven areas: health, family, financial, intellectual, social, professional, and spiritual. I personally include another area, fun, which I think is very important.

The eight fundamental areas of life

• Health. You have to take time for health and fitness today, or you will have to take time for sickness tomorrow. Wetmore puts it nicely: If time management means anything, it means making choices every day that add a few extra years to your life, giving you more time to manage.
• Family. It’s important to foster communication, and to make sure you don’t lose sight of your loved ones in the humdrum of daily life.
• Financial. Most financially successful people take time away from their expense column and allocate it to their investment column, thus earning more per working hour. Instead of watching TV, they spend their time pursuing further education, sharpening their skills, and doing other activities that afford them more rewards during their lifetime.
• Intellectual. You may be productive now, but you need to invest time in your education to be productive in the long term. Your success five years from now depends on what you’re doing today to improve and polish your skills and talents.
• Social. Having friends has great emotional benefits. Also, the help of other people can save you time—getting you answers, making introductions, or giving advice.
• Professional. Job satisfaction and career ambition are very important in life. Independent of the financial compensation, we all need to feel like our work has made a difference or at least an improvement. There’s no point in being productive in a career you don’t find fulfilling.
• Spiritual. Productivity doesn’t require you to rid your life of problems, but only to handle your problems better. Faith, religion, or simply a positive outlook in life helps you cope with and transcend everyday problems, empowering you to achieve balance and do things better.
• Fun. Sometimes you just need to enjoy life. Hobbies, pastimes, vacations, and other small rewards are there to make you happy, and even if they don’t grow into the long term, the short-term satisfaction provides a bit of balance.

You may not spend the same amount of time every day in each area, but if you do so over the long run, then your foundation will be sound. On the other hand, if these areas are not in balance, no productivity tools or techniques will be effective over the long term.

Causes and effects

Wetmore emphasizes the importance of balance by illustrating what can happen if it’s not present. For example, if you’re not getting enough sleep (health), you have no energy, thus leading you to have trouble thinking (intellectual) and working (professional). You tend to be more impatient with acquaintances (social) and relatives (family). In other words, a deficit in one area can affect every aspect of your life.

But let’s not focus on the negative. The lack in one area can contribute to the lack in others, sure—but don’t forget that success in one area can enhance success in others. For example, if you’ve chosen a job that motivates, energizes, and inspires you, you find that you seem to have more time and energy for exercise, family bonding, and social events. In general, good things lead to more good things.

Two related subjects I’d like to talk about are productivity at work and work-life balance.

On work and productivity

Lots of people immediately associate productivity with work, the word productive with employees, and productivity tools with the workplace. I think we need to broaden our perspectives a little. We’re not robots. We’re human beings, and we choose to be productive as human beings. We don’t just produce work. We produce ourselves, every single day.

On work-life balance

I’ve always been slightly uncomfortable with the term work-life balance. I do appreciate the idea, but the term itself makes it sound like work and life are at odds with each other. They shouldn’t be. Work is important—not apart from life, but as a part of life… and only one of several. I don’t know how many people consider work as half of their priorities and everything else in life (health, family, fun, etc.) as the other half. Not many, I hope.

The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov

Summary: Smurov, a lovelorn and self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin, commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband—only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife as he searches for proof of his existence among fellow émigrés, who are too distracted to pay him any heed.

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousand mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.

The Eye was an elaborate joke which I caught on very early. I appreciated the prose style, the clarity of description, and the small details that made the story more real. However, I felt the sensation of just rolling along for the ride until the end, without any emotional or intellectual investment. The novel was not as dazzling as Nabokov’s other works, and it really should have been a short story. It did, nevertheless, inspire me to ask myself this question: Are we nothing more than what people perceive us to be?

(I think that we are, indeed, partially defined by how others perceive us—but in the end, how we see ourselves is ultimately truer and more real.)

The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford

Summary: This book attempts to demystify how money works in the world. Why does specialty coffee cost so much? Why is efficiency not necessarily the answer to ensuring a fair society? Through topics ranging from health care to cross-town traffic, the dirty little secrets of money are delightfully revealed here.

The Undercover Economist was generally a light read. The beginning of the book was well-written and fascinating. The middle was rather boring and too technical for my tastes. It got better nearing the end, but the last chapter was a bust.

The book offered some good ideas. The part about auctions was especially interesting. But it wasn’t cohesive enough, and could have been better structured and organized. Also, I was disappointed that it failed to offer any advice on how to apply the introduced principles to daily life.

A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Summary: Dr. Watson, an army surgeon just back from the war, and Sherlock Holmes, an independent consulting detective, meet for the first time and become flat-mates on Baker Street. As Holmes investigates a strange murder, Watson goes along on the adventure, eventually writing up the case and publishing it for the public to enjoy.

A Study in Scarlet was a wonderful story overall. It wouldn’t be helpful to review works that are already well-loved and have proven their worth, so let me focus on two specific points about this book.

First, the first chapter of the second part bored me almost to tears. Long flashbacks are uncharacteristic of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and for good reason. Still, Doyle redeemed himself by making the flashback part more and more compelling, making sympathy toward the characters much more possible. Near the end of the flashback, I found myself really hoping for a good ending for the protagonists—even though, obviously, it was not to be.

Second, one thing I liked about this book (and many Sherlock Holmes stories in general) was that good and evil were not clear cut. In the end, the bad guy turned out to be a good guy seeking revenge, and he didn’t lose the battle altogether.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Summary: This collection includes some of the great detective’s most intriguing cases. The book is composed of twelve short stories—mysteries and adventures involving robberies, disguises, cults, blackmail, and, of course, murder.

“My dear fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”

For detective stories, I usually prefer mysteries to adventures or plain narratives. That being said, my favorite stories in this collection were:

• The Red-Headed League, a wonderful, well-written mystery.
• A Case of Identity, which helped me discover how much more fun mysteries are when you read the story carefully and try to solve the problem yourself.
• The Man with the Twisted Lip. Sometimes it’s too easy to solve the problem several pages before Holmes announces his solution—but if the story written well enough, that’s okay.
• The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, a good story—more of a narrative than a puzzle—that made Holmes endearing in his way.
• The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet, a good mystery.

My least favorite stores were:

• The Five Orange Pips, which didn’t have much of a mystery. (For example, being from the modern world, I knew the meaning of KKK the moment it was mentioned). It had an unsatisfying ending—the client died and the criminals were never found.
• The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb, which was more like a horror adventure story than a mystery. Again, the criminals weren’t caught—but I suppose there must be some balance in the series. After all, Holmes is only human.

What’s it all about?

Different people find Lifehacker useful in different ways, but it’s the productivity angle I find most worthwhile. It’s all about organization, efficiency, and getting things done. A couple of months ago, they posted Top 10 Productivity Basics Explained. Although I feel that the post doesn’t aptly sum up their GTD philosophy, the following principles partially comprise some of the core habits and techniques they advocate on the blog:

• Doable to-do lists—the simplest method for getting things done.
• Remind your future self—planners and calendars are essential.
• Ubiquitous capture—making sure that ideas and information you come across now will be available to you later on.
• Working in dashes—seeing tasks as small challenges within a larger project.
• Keyboard shortcuts—using the keyboard for more productivity.

In general, it’s best not to take all the posts too seriously. To get the most out of Lifehacker, I usually try out the tips that seem useful, ignore those that don’t apply to me, and keep the rest in mind for a later time. I find that trying out the tips that seem relevant often pays off, even though it does take some work. Installing new applications, fiddling with command lines and menus, and experimenting with new methods take time and effort at the outset, but they can enhance your workflow in the long run.

Lots of good stuff

I often use Lifehacker for discovering software and web applications. In fact, my favorite section on Lifehacker is the Hive Five. Hive Fives come in two parts. In the call for contenders, the editors ask readers to nominate the best tool (usually software) to accomplish a task. In the actual Hive Five post, they report the top five or six nominations and ask readers to vote for the best. Thousands of people vote, so if you’re in the same demographic as the Lifehacker crowd, the top pick will most probably turn out to be the best solution for you. Hive Five is so useful that if I’m looking for recommendations for a specific type of software, I make Lifehacker one of my first destinations. Recent examples of Hive Fives are Best Video Players, Best PDF Readers, and Best Instant Messengers.

My least favorite sections on Lifehacker are Featured Workspace and Featured Desktop. Featured Workspace seems only to be useful once every few years, for workspace renovation inspiration. Featured Desktop isn’t relevant to me, as my desktop consists of a pretty wallpaper and essential files, folders, and shortcuts—and I have no interest in changing this simple setup.

Avoiding information overload

Lifehacker posts new entries around 17 times a day, and you could get overwhelmed if you read the feed daily. Fortunately, Lifehacker has various feeds to help limit what you read.

• Top Stories feed—the best posts of the day as chosen by the editors. 3 to 8 feed items a day.
• Highlights feed—the week’s most popular posts in one feed item a week. I would recommend this feed for most people.
• Feature feed—features are longer-form original articles by Lifehacker editors and guests. This sends out one feed item a day.
• Tag feeds—posts on a specific topic. Every tag at Lifehacker has a feed. Visit their archives page to see all tags. Once you get to a tag page, e.g., http://lifehacker.com/tag/open-source/, add index.xml at the end of the URL to get to the feed.

In general, you can get posts on your preferred topics by combining and excluding categories.

Personally, I subscribe to the complete feed and check it once or twice a month, reading only the subject lines. I read the full post when I find the title interesting.

Selected posts from last week

The following is a sampler of Lifehacker posts, just to give you an idea of what their posts are like. These were my favorites from the week of August 10 to 16, 2009.

• How to Make the Most of Your Naps
• How to Build a Web Site from Scratch with No Experience
• Five Classic Ways to Boost Your Note-Taking
• Apply the W.E.A.L.T.H. Acronym to Make Smart Purchases
• Free Tools to Back Up Your Online Accounts
• Learn the Basics of Regular Expression Searches
• Set Themes, Not Goals, for Better Time Management
• Try Out Google’s New “Caffeine” Search Architecture
• Exercise Won’t Make You Thin, but It Will Make You Healthy
• Five Best Video Players

As you can see, the blog features articles not only on productivity, organization, and technology, but also on health and fitness, learning, and personal finance. Enjoy!

Someday I’d like to be able to work without touching the mouse for long periods of time. I decided to start small. One of my goals in July was to learn keyboard navigation for web browsing in Firefox and for the web applications I frequently use—Gmail and Google Reader. The first order of business was to find a way to click on links without using the mouse. The traditional way of doing this is to use the tab and shift-tab commands. As you can imagine, I hoped to find a better solution—tabbing is simply unfeasible for long pages with hundreds of links.

How to open links using the keyboard

I did some searching and found Hit-a-Hint, which I recommended in my post on Firefox add-ons. After installing Hit-a-Hint, you can open a link using the keyboard by doing the following:

1. Press and hold the space bar. Numbers will appear beside all the links on the page.
2. If you’d like to open the link in a new tab, press and hold the CTRL key.
3. Type the number beside the link you want to open.
4. Let go of the space bar. The link will open.
5. Naturally, let go of the CTRL key if you opened the link in a new tab.

Hit-a-Hint allows you to navigate through form elements as well.

I was running Firefox 3, and I was at first dismayed to see that the add-on was only available up to Firefox 2. Here’s the solution I used to make it work with my version of Firefox (currently 3.0.12 on Windows XP).

1. Download hah_0_9_1.xpi from the add-on’s installation page.
2. Use 7-Zip or some such application to unzip the file as you would a zip file.
3. Open install.rdf with a text editor.
4. On line 8, change em:maxVersion="2.0" to em:maxVersion="3.1".
5. Zip the files into a new hah_0_9_1.zip.
6. Change the .zip extension to .xpi.
7. Open your new hah_0_9_1.xpi in Firefox and install the add-on.

You could also install it using my own file: Hit-a-Hint for Firefox 3. I can’t guarantee that it will work on every machine. I take no responsibility for any undesired or unexpected effects it may cause on your computer.

Firefox, Gmail, and Google Reader keyboard shortcuts

I studied these shortcuts by printing them out and memorizing them. Since I knew many of them already, I highlighted the ones I wasn’t familiar with and focused on those. Here are the shortcut lists:

• Firefox keyboard shortcuts for Windows, Mac, and Linux
• Gmail keyboard shortcuts (must be enabled on Settings page)
• Google Reader keyboard shortcuts

I put my knowledge into practice by setting blocks of time in which I went about my regular browsing habits while attempting to use the keyboard only.  I had to refer to my printed lists quite often, and several times I used the mouse out of habit. I’m still not quite used to keyboard browsing, as accustomed to the mouse as I am—but I’m getting better each day.

General keyboard navigation

I started with web browsing, but I plan to eventually learn general keyboard navigation for various computer tasks. I plan to start with the basics:

• Common keyboard shortcuts for Windows, Mac, KDE, and Gnome
• Keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft products such as Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, and Windows Media Player

Then maybe later I might delve into keyboard navigation of the desktop applications I often use. Here’s to less strain and more productivity.

Browsing the web

• Add to Search Bar allows you to add any website’s search box to the built-in browser search bar.
• Hit-a-Hint enables you to open links by typing the associated number on your keyboard. It’s great for keyboard-only navigation.
• Session Manager saves and restores the state of all windows when you want to, automatically at startup, and/or after crashes.
• Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox’s tab browsing. Features include duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, and more.

Downloading files

• Download Statusbar allows you to view and manage downloads from a tidy status bar. It’s a great replacement for the standard download window.
• Flashgot integrates the browser with Flashget (an external download manager). You may download one link, selected links, or all page links together with a single click. The FlashGot Media command grabs video and audio clips while they’re playing.

Sharing on social media

• AddThis enables instant sharing and bookmarking of web content. There are over 50 supported services, including email, Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Twitter, TypePad, WordPress, and more.

Saving information

• Evernote Web Clipper can add a selection or an entire web page to Evernote (a great note-taking application). If the desktop application is installed, the clips go there; if not, they go to the Evernote web application.
• Xmarks stores your bookmarks online and seamlessly synchronizes them among all the Firefox installations you use. It can also do the same with your passwords if you’d like.

Meddling with the web

• Adblock Plus allows you to block ads. You could manually select ads not to be downloaded, but the best way to use it is to select a filter subscription which automatically blocks most advertisements. Adblock Plus makes the web so much better.
• Greasemonkey allows you to customize web pages using JavaScript. You may download available scripts or write your own. Two examples of useful scripts: Facebook external apps blocker and Amazon Local Currency.
• Stylish allows you to customize web pages using CSS. You may download available styles or write your own.

Designing and developing the web

• ColorZilla gives you a color reading from any point in the browser. You can easily adjust the color and paste it in another program.
• Firebug allows you to edit, debug, and monitor HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on any web page. It’s an invaluable add-on.
• Web Developer provides tons of useful web developer tools. I mean tons. Another invaluable add-on.

And many more

There are lots of great add-ons available for use. Download, install, and enjoy.