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Alex Brown’s love of horses started long before he launched the blog, Alex Brown Racing, but it was Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro that pushed the blog into prominence — and eventually established it as a site dedicated to the welfare of horses. Along the way, Brown learned many things about creating and nurturing an online community using tools, including Wikis, Facebook and Twitter, and following certain principles, such as: Be authentic, be transparent, be consistent and build trust. Brown, one of whose goals is to rescue horses destined for the slaughter house, talked with Knowledge@Wharton about his strategies for bringing attention — and money — to the cause. Transcript can be found at: knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

If you really want to get down to business and get things done, you need to create an environment conducive to productivity. I do it by eliminating everything that might distract me from accomplishing what I want.

The goal of creating a minimalist desktop is to eliminate the distractions and focus on just the tools that you need to actually get things done. Today we’ll take a look at how you can set up your PC to focus on the tools that get things done.

Clear Off Your Desktop

The first thing you need to do is get rid of all that clutter on your desktop. The easiest way to do so is by simply right-clicking on the desktop and un-checking Show Desktop Icons.

Looking at a nice clean desktop is great, but you’ll still see all the files in open and save dialogs, or while you’re browsing around your computer. You should make a point of cleaning up your system of all the junk files you don’t need; if you aren’t sure, you can always put them into a single archive folder elsewhere on your PC. We like using tools like our own Belvedere to automate your PC maintenance and keep your system clean.

One additional trick I like to do is hide any files or folders that I don’t ever need to use, which is especially helpful in modern versions of Windows that won’t let you delete many of the folders in your Users folder—instead you can simply hide them via the Properties dialog.

Auto-Hide Your Taskbar or Dock

Now that your desktop is nice and clean, the biggest distraction is staring you right in the face: the taskbar or dock with all your open apps. If you find yourself switching to your email inbox dozens of times while you are supposed to be working on something else because you can’t resist clicking on your email’s taskbar item, it’s probably time to hide your taskbar. In Windows, it’s easy to do from the Taskbar properties screen (right-click taskbar -> Properties), and on your Mac you can set your Dock to Hide in the preferences. If you’re using a third-party dock, the setting is probably in the options panel somewhere.

If you’re rocking multiple monitors, an additional trick that I use is setting your primary screen as the “Extended” one in the display setup, which puts the taskbar on a different window so you won’t accidentally trigger it, and it takes more effort to check it. This even helps if you don’t auto-hide the taskbar, just to get the taskbar out of your immediate field of vision.

Get Rid of Unnecessary Notifications

Hiding the taskbar doesn’t help enough if all of your applications are popping up all the time trying to get your attention. Windows 7 has a new Action Center that lets you fine-tune the notifications, including allowing tray icons or popup notifications on a per-application basis, but for XP or Vista you can always take the route of disabling all notification balloons entirely.

Of course, not all applications use the native Windows notifications, but they usually allow you to tweak the notification levels in their preferences. One of the biggest offenders for wasting your time are the desktop email notifications for Microsoft Outlook, but those can be easily disabled or tweaked.

Use the Keyboard to Launch Applications and Automate Tasks

Rather than using gaudy application-launching docks that overload your system with icon clutter, it’s much simpler to use the keyboard to launch applications with a few keystrokes. There’s loads of great application launchers to choose from, like Launchy for Windows, Quicksilver for Macs, or Gnome-Do for Linux, but if you’re using Windows 7 you may need to go no further than the built-in Start menu search engine.

You can take it a step further by using AutoHotkey to turn any action into a keyboard shortcut, like launching your email client, opening your home page, or sending keystrokes to an application. Text-replacement applications like Texter save you time by automating tasks like inserting your signature or formatting a URL, and once you get used to using them, you will be sold on the benefits.

Switch Contexts by Killing Tasks Quickly

If you really need to get something done, it’s usually a good idea to close down your web browsers, instant messaging client, Twitter distractions, or even your email application. Rather than manually closing them all down, it’s much easier to create an AutoHotkey script or a batch file to kill them all at once.

You can use the taskkill utility to instantly close down an application, even from an AutoHotkey script. Just create a new script similar to the following, which will instantly close Chrome, TweetDeck, and Internet Explorer when you press the Win+F12 shortcut key. Savvy AHK users will note that you can also use the WinKill function instead, or if you don’t want to kill the applications and would rather simulate clicking the close button, you can use the WinClose function.

#F12:: {
 Run, taskkill /f /im chrome.exe
 Run, taskkill /f /im tweetdeck.exe
 Run, taskkill /f /im iexplore.exe
 Return
}

You probably won’t want to kill an application that doesn’t automatically save your files, but all modern browsers have session saving and crash recovery features, so even if you kill the browser, all your tabs should show up the next time you open it.

Keep Everything Online in Dropbox

Not only is Dropbox an excellent way to backup your files, sync them across multiple PCs, or access them from anywhere—it’s also a good way to force yourself to keep everything important in one place, making the PC you are sitting at a less important component to your ability to actually get things done.

You can take it a step further and install portable versions of your applications into your Dropbox folder. This way you can access the same utilities from every PC you’re on, keeping everything nice and organized and in a single place.

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So what about you? What tools and techniques do you use to minimize desktop distraction and actually get things done? Let’s hear it in the comments.

The How-To Geek focuses on using his PC to actually get things done. His geeky posts can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, Productive Geek, and Twitter.

The Smarter Cities series is supported by IBM. Read more about building a smarter planet on the IBM A Smarter Planet Blog.

Social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even email, instant messaging, and SMS have become the defacto way we communicate with each other. Because of the mainstream embrace of social media, we now live in a world where information is shared at lightning speeds and as a result, we’re actually finding ways to use that free flow of data and information to make the world a safer place to live.

From tracking trends in crime to finding the safest bike routes around a city, from getting emergency alerts during a disaster to understanding the spread of dangerous illnesses, social media is being used by both public officials and private citizens to make our cities safer. This post outlines just a few of the ways that social media tools are now being employed to keep the public safe and informed.

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Find a Safe Place to Live

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Before you even move to a new city, social media and mashups can help you to identify the safest places to live. Apartment data tracking web sites Zilpy and Apartment Ratings can both provide neighborhood crime statistics for those searching for a new place to live, for example. Another helpful tool is CrimeReports, which shows data on crimes committed in the vicinity of any street address in the United States; and families with children may want to use Vision 20/20’s Sex Offender Locator to identify the neighborhoods where accused sex offenders are residing.

Using tools like these you can find the safest places to hunt for a new home or keep on top of crime in your neighborhood and recognize trends. Is crime on the rise? If so, then perhaps it is time to start thinking about moving to a new place, or maybe people in your area need to organize around making the neighborhood safer. Other sites, like Crime Mapping, which puts public crime data on interactive maps, and the aforementioned CrimeReports, are actually being used by police to identify local crime trends.

Elk River, Minnesota Police Chief Jeff Beahen told USA Today that online crime maps recently helped the department nab criminals after a series of burglaries. The department used a crime map to more accurately predict which area the burglars were planning to hit next and deploy officers more efficiently. “We caught them in the act,” Beahen told the paper.

Local news site Everyblock also taps into public records to create mashups that can help keep people safe. In addition to plotting and tracking local crime, on many of the site’s metro pages users can also get information about recent restaurant inspections, helping them to find a safe place to eat.

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Getting Around Safely

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Getting around a city safely can in many cases mean advance planning. Sites like Google Transit, HopStop.com, and PublicRoutes can help you navigate public transit systems more safely, while mass transportation-focused blogs like Inside Transit and Seattle Transit Blog keep people informed about the system and give them a place to sound off.

Social media is especially useful for those who get around on two wheels. In New York City, for example, NYC Bike Maps offers interactive views of the city’s bike paths, lanes, and greenways, while Crashstat maps data about bike and pedestrian injuries and fatalities in the city. Both tools can be used to identify the most and least safe areas of the city to use a bicycle. And blogs, such as Bike Blog NYC, or Bike Portland in Portland, Oregon, and Bike Providence in Providence, Rhode Island, give bikers a way to come together, form a community, and stay informed about issues that affect bicycle safety in their city.

Many other cities (such as Philadelphia and Baltimore) have similar, user created resources.

For those more interested in walking, maps mashups and social media sites can also be helpful in keeping you safe. The Stumble Safely site, for example, is a mashup that combines a crime map of Washington, DC, with a map of local bars, clubs, and eateries, helping you find the best places for safe nightlife.

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Tracking Illness

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Another way social media is helping to keep us more safe, is by keeping us more healthy. Social networks have allowed information to spread in new and unprecedented ways, but illness still spreads by human-to-human contact in the same way it always has. Social media is now allowing us to more easily track the spread of illnesses, however, and be more prepared to fight them. Both Healthmap and Who is Sick? track outbreaks of illness on a map (the former using public data from governmental sources, the latter using user generated reports).

This type of data can be helpful in keeping the public informed about potential outbreaks, helping us prepare better ways to stay healthy, and it can help researchers learn about how diseases spread. Researchers have actually used similar sites in the past to learn how sickness spreads around a population and can use that data to better predict the spread of infectious diseases.

Maps and social media mashups are also being used to keep the public up-to-date on the latest potential pandemic illnesses, as well. For example, the Swine Flu Tracking Map can be used by concerned citizens to keep on top of the latest outbreaks of the particularly worrisome H1N1 flu strain.

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Keeping the Public Informed

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Because social media channels offer such an amazing way to spread information, it’s natural that many web services exist to keep citizens informed of important issues. CrimeWeb is a free, centralized, web-based clearinghouse for public safety information that is currently being used by many local government organizations across the US. Users can sign up to get alerts about missing children (Amber alerts) and adults, homeland security updates, major crimes and fugitives, as well as local community information. Similarly, crime data mapping web site SpotCrime offers free crime alerts by email, and also sells crime tracking iPhone applications (iTunes links) for New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, and London.

Mainstream social networking tools are also being used to keep the public informed and connected. The Police Department in Dallas, Texas, for example, uses Twitter to put out crime alerts, as do the police in Boston, Massachusetts with the @Boston_Police account. The Police Department in Richmond, Virginia, meanwhile, uses both Facebook and Twitter to connect with the public and answer questions, and in Michigan, the Department of Transportation is using social media tools like Twitter and YouTube to connect with those that use their services and keep people informed of changes and interruptions in the public transit system.

Local neighborhood crime watches are also finding social media tools useful. The Shreiber Crime Watch in Dallas, Texas uses a blog and SMS alerts to keep citizens up-to-date about potential threats, and the Safe Atlanta for Everyone neighborhood watch program in Atlanta, Georgia uses a Twitter account in addition to a blog to stay connected with the public.

In addition to keeping the public informed about matters of public safety, social media services have proven to be invaluable tools for organizing and connecting people and disseminating information during disasters. After the horrific massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007, for example, Facebook became an online gathering place as people began to reconnect with loved ones and work through their grief. And social media has been used each year as a way to track and get information about the seemingly annual wildfires in California (in 2009, 2008, and 2007).

In fact, web-based and social media resources are now among the first places people turn during a disaster. “It’s becoming more organized,” says Leysia Palen, a researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “We see evidence that people are learning that online sources and communication can be very critical. Looking for help, searching lists of the missing, finding emergency housing online. It’s become an important complementary news source and a way to get involved [...] People are increasingly going to online sources — with new ones emerging every day — and learning how to behave online in emergency situations.”

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Catching Criminals

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With more and more public safety departments turning to social media to stay informed, it is becoming more commonplace for social media to be utilized in actual police work as well. In July, for example, the Boston Police used Twitter and Facebook to track down bicycle thieves, while the Los Angeles Police Department utilized YouTube in an effort to locate criminals that broke into actress Lindsay Lohan’s home in August.

And using social media is becoming a common trend in modern police work. From police in New Zealand using Facebook to catch a burglar, to police in Ohio utilizing social networks to circulate pictures of criminals, social media tools are becoming the modern equivalents of the Post Office wanted poster.

Police are also using the things people post on social networks and blogs as a way to track down law breakers. “We are using this (Facebook) as a crime-fighting tool. It’s becoming pretty common,” said Indiana, Pennsylvania Police Chief William Sutton after his department utilized Facebook photos and videos posted on YouTube to identify out-of-hand party-goers at a post-Super Bowl street gathering last February.

While the latter is a case of what happens when criminals incriminate themselves on social networks, it is clear that social media tools are being used in smart ways by police departments and neighborhood watch groups to make our cities safer.

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Smarter Cities series supported by IBM

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The Smarter Cities series is supported by IBM. Read more about building a smarter planet on the IBM A Smarter Planet Blog.

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Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube

Tags: crime, safety, smarter cities

It’s not a clever hack any of us want to have to use, but the Art of Manliness blog has a homebrew fix for the next time your restroom trip ends in disaster.

Photo by powerbooktrance.

When a toilet clogs, the first jobs are stopping water from flowing to prevent an overflow and finding a decent plunger. Then again, if you’re visiting a friend’s place and might feel embarrassed returning from the bathroom with such a request, some hot water from a bathroom sink might do the trick. Need more firepower? Add in dishwasher detergent to put things right:

Add a few cups of hot water to the toilet bowl before you start plunging. After you pour the hot water in, let it sit for a few minutes. To put it mildly, the heat helps break the, um, stuff up. This will make unclogging the toilet with the plunger much, much easier. The heat from the hot water can sometimes break up the clog without plunging, so this could be a good tactic to use if you a clog a toilet at a friends house and you don’t want to face the embarrassment of asking for a plunger.

The blog post, sourced from a Roto-Rooter representative, offers more good-to-know tidbits about properly using a (warmed and un-stiffened) plunger and using tools like an auger for the really bad, um, breakdowns. If you’d care to be so discrete as to share your own toilet emergency fixes, we’ll welcome them in the comments.