That’s where Facebook’s Lists become very helpful. If you group similar people together in a list, you can easily view news from only those sources, providing better context, more quickly, with more of the posts you actually want to see.

First, let’s create a list. Click “Friends” from the left column on the page. Then, near the top right corner of the main column you’ll see the button “Create A List.”

The first step is to give your list a name.

Next, pick the people you want to include in this list. For my “Cincy Network” group, I’m picking all the local people I’ve met at networking events. But you can also pick relevant pages, so in this case, I’m checking a few feeds that will keep me up to date on what’s happening in town.

Now when you want to check your feed for only that group, just click the “Friends” link in the left column, and the name of the group just below it. You’ll see a news feed you can quickly scan, knowing the context for everyone who appears on it.

Creating Friend Lists has another benefit as well. Say your friends from high school aren’t interested in industry-related links you’ll post for everybody else, or maybe you’d like to share some personal pictures with only your family and closest friends.

As you’re filling in a post on your wall, click the privacy pulldown menu (the padlock) and select “Custom.”

The next menu asks who should see the post. Select “Specific People.”

Start typing the name of your group, and a selectable group name should appear below the box. Save this setting, and your post will only go to members of your Friend List.

Like many things in Facebook, using Friend Lists can be a little cumbersome. It would be nice if it were easier to use. For example, the names of your Lists could show up in the privacy pulldown menu to save two steps. But once you get used to it, you can get more out of your Facebook experience by categorizing your connections.

Did you know it’s easy to remove these updates from your timeline, without disconnecting from your friends? Just find one of these posts and click the “Hide” link that appears on the right when you mouse over it.

Facebook will then ask you if you want to hide the person or the application. Click the name of the game.

Success! You’ll now no longer see updates on the games your friends are playing on Facebook, and you’ll see more links, photos and status updates instead.

Update: It gets even better. (Thanks to techpp.com) Not only can you keep games and other apps out of your Live Feed, you can also exclude them from your Notifications. When a notification appears in the lower right of your screen, mouse over the upper right corner of the item to see the “X” appear. Click that, and you’ll be invited to hide all notifications from that application.

That brought back fond memories from bygone days. I could almost smell the D-76 soaking Tri-X in a mysterious bath, while I enjoyed the darkness and the isolation, giving birth to my creative vision.

The truth is, I never had much interest in photography before college. My dad was a professional photographer, but it wasn’t until I saw the job posting for the Publicity Office at Adrian College that I ever asked him to show me how it was done.

We went through two rolls, from shooting to processing to printing in his basement darkroom. I sent in a few prints and got the job. So I headed off to freshman year armed with minimal experience and my dad’s aging Mamiya.

Soon I graduated from PR’s tiny closet in the history building to the full size darkroom of the college newspaper, where I’d push 400 speed film to 1600, bringing out that week’s basketball games and swim meets in glorious grainy detail. The halftone machine was probably bigger than my dorm room, with a loud vacuum pump to hold the wax-resist paper where my shots would be reproduced in thousands of tiny dots.

Several years later, I aim a point and shoot camera at my kids without a thought about aperture or shutter speed. Not only is there no film to process, but my pictures automatically appear on my hard drive through the magic of an Eye-Fi card. It’s a very different world.

This nostalgic reverie actually has a point to it.

That was the beginning for me of some guiding principles I’ve carried with me through my whole career. Something like this:

1. Identify opportunities where not a lot of people have the requisite skill.
2. Learn new skills quickly, and don’t worry about perfecting them before you get started.
3. Keep moving forward, learn from your failures but don’t be afraid of them.
4. When better methods and techniques come along, don’t cling to your old skill set just because you put time into developing it. Embrace the new.

When desktop publishing replaced light tables and X-Acto kinves, I was ready to go along for the ride. When the web started gaining popularity in 1995, I got a Macintosh Performa and a “Teach Yourself HTML in a Week” book.

It took me until Dreamweaver 3.0 to make the leap into WYSIWYG editors, but then i didn’t look back and jumped with both feet into Flash development.

Now, I’ll still hand-code some html once in a while. I’ll put together a swf when it’s the best way to accomplish something. But I’m not married to those techniques. If there’s a faster, easier way to do something, I’m ready to learn.

This is why I feel at home in internet marketing, online development, and social media. The landscape is always shifting. This is an industry that rewards flexibility, adaptability, and a passion for learning. The most successful people in this sphere are those who move quickly, learn quickly, and waste no tears on the skills and techniques they leave behind.

If you ever use flowcharts, org charts, wireframes, or similar diagrams to communicate your ideas, LovelyCharts makes it much less tedious to put those documents together. If, like me, you’ve ever used Illustrator, Fireworks, or (God help me) Quark to draw a diagram or flowchart, this is for you.

Of course there are powerful and perhaps even more flexible charting applications out there. But if you don’t use them often enough to justify their cost or learning curve, then this web-based tool is the answer.

A free account should do almost everything you need to create an occasional flowchart or diagram. You can save the result as an image file to use however you like. Premium accounts add extra features like version history and collaborative tools.