Tonight my daughter, a.k.a. Little Sweetie, requested a bedtime story that was “more educational”. (Apparently she didn’t like my version of the Three Little Pigs, in which the Big Bad Wolf helps the pigs with their unwanted facial hair.) After trying her on the tragedy of the commons — my version stressed the importance of taking care of common assets, rather than the virtue of enclosures — I landed on the story of DeCSS.

DeCSS was one of the most colourful stories that made it into my doctoral research. The version that I included in my dissertation didn’t seem quite right for a six-year-old, so I came up with a slightly revised edition that took some small significant liberties with the facts. Here it is:

Once upon an eon* there was a little boy who wanted to watch Star Wars on DVD. But he didn’t have a TV, and he couldn’t watch Star Wars on his computer because his computer didn’t know how to play a DVD. But he was a clever boy, and so he decided to write his own computer program — a program that would let him watch his DVD.

As soon as he got his program working he sat down to watch Star Wars. It was great! In fact it was so great that it made him feel sorry for all the other kids with computers like his — computers that couldn’t play DVDs. So he shared his computer program with other kids by putting it on the Internet, where other people could find the program if they needed it.

A few weeks later, there was a knock on the door. BAM! BAM!

“Who’s there?” the little boy asked.

“The police! We want to look at your computer. We think you are the boy who put the DVD-watching program on the Internet.”

“Come back with a warrant!” the little boy said. **

“Humpf!” said the police officer, and she went away.

The next day, there was another knock at the door. BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! This time, there were two police officers.

“Do you have a warrant?” the little boy asked.

“Yes!” the police officers shouted.

The little boy opened the door. “Why do you want to look at my computer?” he asked.

“The people who make movies don’t want you to watch DVDs on your computer,” the police officer explained. “You aren’t allowed to share your DVD-watching program anymore.”

But the police forgot one thing: the little boy wasn’t alone. When the little boy shared his computer program on the Internet, he made thousands of friends all over the world — friends who appreciated how nice he was to share his computer program.

And one of those friends had a great idea. If the police wouldn’t let them share their computer programs, they’d share something else — something the police weren’t allowed to keep them from sharing. Like art, or music, or poetry: the law says that people have to be allowed to make and share whatever art they want.

So the little boy’s friends took his computer program and hid it in pictures. They hid it in songs. They even hid it inside a movie.

The police were mad. The people who made the DVDs were mad. But they all knew that they couldn’t keep the little boy and his friends from sharing their art work…and from sharing a computer program that helped a lot of people all over the world.

* Little Peanut was very insistent that all of tonight’s stories began, “once upon an eon” instead of “once upon a time”.

** Little Sweetie and I spent some time earlier this evening role-playing the proper response to law enforcement authorities who want to sweep the house for media downloads and unlicensed Disney merchandise.

A few weeks ago Rob and I went out for dinner at r.tl, which must have the best URL of any restaurant in the world. A waitress brought us our menus, and asked if we’d eaten there before.

“We were here for Valentine’s Day,” I said. “Actually, I think you were our server.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember,” she apologized. “It was a busy night.”

She handed us our menus, and as she turned to leave us, we pulled out our iPhones. Suddenly she pivoted back.

“I do remember you! You were the couple who spent your entire Valentine’s dinner online!”

Guilty as charged. I’d love to claim special circumstances — we did relaunch the Social Signal website last February 14 — but the truth is that an awful lot of our couple time involves the gentle tap, tap, tap of fingers on touchscreens and keyboards. As the parents of young kids, “us” time happens after the kids go to bed, when we break out the laptops and visit with our friends on Twitter. Our most frequent date-night hangout is the restaurant that knows to seat us by the power outlets. And when we do go out without our Macbooks, you can count on the frequent appearance of our iPhones to snap a surreptitious picture of the menu’s typos, or to tweet a thought or question that we want to share with our pals.

Technology has always been a big part of our relationship, but there’s no question that Twitter has taken both our techno-fetishism and our relationship to new heights. I think of us a married couple, as co-parents, as business partners, as creative collaborators and as friends.

And increasingly, I also think of us as a Twitter couple.  Nothing delights me more than seeing a tweet from a total stranger like “It’s hard to think of a cuter Twitter couple that @awsamuel and @robcottingham.” (Who was that tweet from? I can’t remember — nor can any of the Twitter search tools turn it up. But that’s a dilemma for another post.)

So while I normally sit out the promotional frenzy of online awards, I now have my heart set on winning the #bestcouple write-in category in this year’s Shorty Awards. The Shorty Awards honor “the best producers of short real-time content” on Twitter, and in our case, a lot of that content is an extension of our relationship as a couple.

Here are the Twitter practices that I hope deserve that title — and which could support your relationship, too:

You can see these conversations for yourself at WeTweet.ca, a site I created to present the case for nominating Rob and me as the best couple on Twitter.  Yes, I care about winning #bestcouple so much that I have spent the past week mastering the intricacies of historical Twitter search, Excel-to-CSV conversion, and CSV-to-Wordpress upload. (A subsequent post will cover the tech side of this project.)

The result is a site that captures virtually every tweet between us for the past year. If that sounds like a crazy amount of effort to put into campaigning for a purely notional award, it’s craziness that’s inspired by sanity: sanity of a totally unexpected kind.

Most of my life looks not unlike what I imagined for myself growing up: Career. Kids. Friends. A home of my own.

The part I never imagined is my life is Rob. Sure, I thought I might get married, but I never had particularly high expectations for what that marriage might be like. My parents divorced when I was a baby, and from what I saw of their subsequent relationships and those of their friends, I thought of marriage as an institution in which conflict, infidelity and heartbreak were the norm.

But here I am in a marriage that is not only a joyful part of my life, but the joy that the rest of my life is built upon. And while I have a superstitious unease about sharing that joy — what if talking about it makes it evaporate? — I also remember, too well, what it’s like to doubt whether real love and commitment is even possible. Putting our real-life love on Twitter, in all its magnificent beauty and horrifying minutia, is one way to let other people see that yes, you can have what you fear you can’t have.

Winning the #bestcouple title won’t make our marriage stronger or our fights less difficult, or even make it onto the invitations for our 10th wedding anniversary celebration next summer. (Probably.) What it will do is remind me that the thing I want most painfully, desperately and improbably is possible…and possible not in spite of my geekiness, but partly because of it.

While you’re nominating us for #bestcouple on Twitter, I hope you’ll stop to think about whatever you secretly and at times hopelessly long to achieve. Your heart’s desire may not be reducible to a Shorty category or Twitter hashtag, but believe me when I tell you that no matter how impossible it seems, you can have it.

You can nominate us for the #bestcouple Shorty by clicking here. Nominations close on Friday, January 29, so please vote today!

With so many businesses looking to tap the power of social media — and so many experts interested in selling to them — it’s no wonder that headlines like this one flourish across the web. Promise people bottom-line maximizing, brand-leveraging, social-media-packed goodness, and they will tweet and retweet like little demons. Best of all, they won’t even peek inside: they’ll set up keyword  searches that automatically grab and tweet any sexy-sounding headline (like this one) using an automatic RSS-to-Twitter service.

But does automatic tweeting add value, or does it devalue Twitter by delivering automated content instead of personally curated links? I’m of two minds. You could say it’s a victimless crime: auto-tweeting actually helps the SEO of the originating post. But I tend to think it breaks an implicit promise, that I’m tweeting stuff because I found it useful or at least intriguing.

If you’re reading this post, I’m betting it’s because my sexy title has gotten automatically sucked up and tweeted by someone you are currently following. (One clue: the tweet you read was posted via twitterfeed or another RSS-to-Twitter service.) So please tell me what you think:

Do you feel scammed if you were led here by an automatic (twitterfeed) tweet, rather than an actual human recommendation? Or are you still delighted to have found this interesting and provocative post? Please let me know in comments below — you’re helping to make up my mind.

I’m looking forward to this year’s SXSW (including lots of panels featuring great women), but I’ve noticed that the all-male panel is alive and well. I’d like to offer up my XX chromosomes (among other qualities) to round out one of the already-scheduled panels…and I’d love to hear from other women who, like me, are available to XX up an all-male panel. (If you want to know why I care, read one of these great blog posts by  Allyson Kapin or Mary Hodder.)

So if you’re a female speaker available to join an SXSW panel, leave your quick summary bio and contact info in a comment below (see my example) or on the SXSW page on the Speaker’s Wiki . I’ll try and get the URL out and around.

And if you’re a panel convenor with an all-male panel, I hope you’ll use this to mix it up a bit. I’d love to see a SXSW where all-male panels are all done.

When a business or organization takes on its first social media project, the communications team typically worries about how to handle a deluge of negative comments or inappropriate content. Rob and I always tell people that what they should worry about is the exact opposite: namely, getting no participation at all.

If you are running a project that relies on user-generated content, you have already discovered how hard it is to get people to contribute that content. Whether you’re asking people for blog posts, videos or even photos (the easiest contribution to make, typically) you’re asking them to go to some significant effort in order to add their distinctiveness to your own. So most online community projects, particularly in their early days, rely on some combination of incentives to get fingers on keyboards, cameras into hands, and content onto the site.

When we do an engagement and promotions plan for a new social media project, we spend a lot of time thinking about different kinds of incentives — contests, recognition, events — as well as other hooks for encouraging contribution. But there is nothing like switching roles to make you see a challenge in a new way. Through experience as a contributor to someone else’s site — the Harvard Business Review — I’ve discovered a whole new way to create value for your contributors: editing.

We typically think of editing as a service to the readers of a site, by making content as readable (or watchable) as possible. But quality editing is a tremendous service to contributors, too. Particularly in the fast-turnaround world of blogging, which requires people to write frequently and quickly, an editor can help turn the daunting prospect of writing a good, widely-read blog post into an achievable goal.

Why is quality editing such a compelling incentive for contributors? Let me use my own experience as an example. When I started blogging for HBR, it was purely for the exposure. But the editorial guidance I got from my editor, Scott Berinato, quickly became an even greater source of value.

Scott is an extremely experienced editor and writer who takes my decent posts and makes them much, much better: compare my first draft of a post about iPhones and impatience with the final version on HBR as edited by Scott. Some of the lines that got specifically tweeted — like Patience is a virtue. There’s not an app for that. — were Scott’s, not mine.  And while Scott often makes significant changes to my work, his edits consistently capture what I think of as my voice and message. In fact, when my husband read the iPhone piece, the line he specifically complimented me on — the “what, you don’t?” — was, once again, Scott’s.

Scott’s skilled editing motivates me to contribute by providing benefits like:

• Efficiency: I can write my blog posts more quickly because I don’t have to obsess over every turn of phrase or feel like I’ve completely nailed the post. Even if I feel like it’s only about 80% of the way there, I ship my post off to Scott because I know he’ll be able to fix what I couldn’t.
• Reputation: My audience and impact has grown because my posts for Harvard are much stronger.
• Trust: Because I trust Scott’s work I don’t need to get into a long back-and-forth over every edit; and when I make changes to his changes, he usually accepts them.
• Learning: Getting Scott’s feedback on my pieces for HBR has improved my writing across the board, since I now hold the rest of my blogging to a higher standard.
• Inspiration: Scott has suggested post topics and occasionally asked me to cover emerging stories, which encourages me to tackle new areas I wouldn’t have considered.

Editors like Scott can help you elicit exactly the kind of content you want: high-quality content from thoughtful, informed contributors. Contributors who care about the quality of their posts, videos and photos will deeply appreciate your help in getting from good to great.  For editing to be a real incentive for contributors, it has to be:

• Accurate: Your contributors need to know that you’ll correct any spelling or grammatical errors or flag any issues that need fact-checking. They know that you’re protecting their reputation by keeping them from looking silly.
• Deep: You have to offer more than copy editing. Your editors have to immerse themselves in the text or video that’s been contributed, and think about how to get the message across in the most engaging and effective way. That may involve some rewriting, recutting or requests for additional/different content.
• Skilled: Your editing has to make the content better. Sounds simple, but I can’t tell you how often I have worked with editors or collaborators who make my work worse.
• Timely: The faster you can get contributions posted online, the better. If it takes you more than a week to get material posted — and that’s with solid editorial attention, not a quick scan and approval — then you’re going to lose contributors.
• Tailored: A good editor connects with the voice of the content creator, and revises the content in a way that’s consistent with that voice. But not every editor connects with every writer or videographer, so you are more likely to make a great editorial connection with your contributors if you can do a bit of matchmaking or experimentation to ensure a good fit.
• Sensitive: Your editors’ work is to support and strengthen your contributors’ work, not redo it. Your editors need to be tactful and constructive in the way they provide feedback, and contributors have to feel like they have the final word over their content (or at least the option to pull it if it no longer meets their own standards).

If this sounds like a major investment of time, money or effort on your part, you’re right. But content contributors are a lot like customers: it’s easier to keep the contributors you have than it is to recruit one. And when you offer great editing, you build your best contributors’ commitment, loyalty and output.

This weekend was the first time I found myself on the receiving end of Facebook’s new and  more nuanced privacy settings. An old friend popped up in the Facebook sidebar, which rotates an assortment of different people in your friend list. On a whim, I clicked her picture, so I could catch up on her latest news.

Instead I found myself staring at a virtually blank screen showing only her minimal info: clearly, she’d put me on a list of friends who would only have access to her limited profile. I’d been demoted from friend to “friend”™.

This reminded me of an assignment I’d received in my ninth-grade Latin class, when I had to translate the following story:

A son brags to his father about all the friends he has, only to meet with skepticism. “You call these people are your friends,” the father says. “Let’s see if you’re right. Slaughter a goat, and put it in a sack. Then go to the house of one of your friends. Tell him you have killed a man, and you need his help disposing of the body.”

The son does as his father says, and arrives at the house of his first friend. He presents his bloody sack, and asks his friend to help him dispose of the (supposedly human) remains. The friend is horrified and sends him away.

The son repeats the scene at the home of his next friend, who also refuses to help. The son visits friend after friend, but none are willing to help him conceal his crime.

Finally he returns to his father, defeated, and explains that all of his friends have turned him away.

“I have only one friend,” the father says. “Go to his house, and explain that you are my son. Show him the sack, and ask if he will help you.”

Once again, the son does as his father says. This time, the father’s friend – a true friend – immediately offers his assistance in burying the evidence of the son’s supposed crime.

I can’t remember the Latin translation, but the lesson stuck with me: there’s a big difference between “friends” and friends.

You can take a few lessons from this story yourself: the futility of making your kids take Latin. The importance of actually looking inside any blood-covered sack before disposing of it.  The opportunity for a hit Facebook application called “Goat Bag”.

I won’t define friendship as the willingness to conspire in covering up a homicide, but there is undoubtedly a difference between friendship as it was classically understood and the click-here-to-accept notion of friendship that has become commonplace online.

Simply using the word “friend” to describe a network-to-network connection effectively cheapens the notion of friendship. And if you’ve heard those implicit air quotes in the way people sometimes use the word friend to describe a social network connection, you know how quickly the currency of friendship is getting devalued.

There’s a simple solution — one you see on a variety of networks. Instead of using the term friend — a term that should have real meaning and value — networks can use words like buddy, connection, or contact.

Meanwhile, it’s up to us users to remember what real friendship involves: Genuine conversation (not mutual monitoring of status updates). Trust (not just putting someone on a “trusted contacts” list). Providing support (and not just of the tech variety).

We all know what the word friend can mean — and what it means to have real friends in our lives. Let’s not get confused by the online appropriation of the word “friend” to describe whoever happens to be at the other end of a T1 line.

Some new mothers worry about when they’ll get to sleep through the night; I worried about when I’d get to write a novel. I’d always figured that I’d write a book some day, but now that I had a kid, would some day ever come?

For me, the answer lay online. Not in an online writing group: I felt far too protective of my writing to consider sharing it with people I’d never met. But I was brave enough to reach out to other local writers by using the web to connect.  I found a couple of other writer friends who liked the idea of starting a creative writing group for people like us: people who earned a living as professional writers or communicators, but wanted an outlet for personal writing. I created a simple web site that explained the purpose of the group, with an application form for would-be members. Once we had found our fellow writers, we used a Yahoo Group to run an e-mail list that let us schedule meetings, circulate drafts and store files.

Whether your creativity takes the form of a solitary activity like writing or painting, or is intrinsically collaborative (like theater or filmmaking) the web can help you connect to the people, resources and ideas that foster your creativity. Creativity often demands social connection: for peer support, for feedback, for knowledge, for collaborators.

The social web offers a lot of ways to capture, hone and feed your creativity:

1. Find your medium. YouTube not withstanding, the web is still a text dominant medium. Blogging makes it easy for writers to find a creative outlet online; photographers have Flickr, and filmmakers have YouTube. But there are lots of creative projects that don’t fit inside these boxes, so you’ll need to get even more creative in finding your online voice. Take pictures of your canvases; shoot a video of someone interacting with your installation piece; film your play, tape your song, make your own music video.
2. Engage another hemisphere. I rely on my netbook for writing – but I rely on my iPhone to spark my creativity. Not by serving up poetry or inspirational stories: by turning off the very parts of my brain that are key to my writing. When I hit a wall, I pull out my iPhone and plug into a game of Flight Control: an utterly uncreative, dangerously addictive game that involves landing planes on a tiny landing strip. A few minutes of Flight Control is so absolutely absorbing that it lets my creative neurons recharge until they’re ready to fire up again.
3. Collaborate. My first adult forays into fiction writing happened spontaneously online. An online chat with a pal turned into an extended riff on a “what if” scenario, and within an hour we’d written our way into a story. Over the following weeks it grew into a manuscript, albeit one that we never published or even edited. But even in raw form, that collaborative writing process reconnected me with my writer self. I was far braver as part of a team than I was able to be solo; by collaborating online, I rediscovered the joy of writing and recommitted to writing on my own.
4. Keep an inspiration file.“Things that aren’t even cats”. It’s a line from a Malcolm In the Middle episode that has become our internal label for “none of the above”. I’m not sure why we find it so compelling, but somewhere in that phrase lies the kernel of a story about organizing ideas online. And when the inspiration for that story hits, I’ll be ready, because I am religious about maintaining a list of story ideas in Evernote, an application that keeps my notes synced between my mac, my netbook and my iphone. Wherever I am, I’m always ready to jot down an idea or retrieve one.
5. Talk it out. Sometimes the mere act of writing something down strips it of its passion – or feels like too big an obstacle. Text recognition services and software can help you brainstorm out loud, whether by writing full documents by voice, or just using a mobile service like Jott to make calls that will get transcribed and set back to you as notes.
6. Relocate. When I want to do an intensive bit of writing, I have to get out of the house and out of the office. But I don’t need a quiet garret: I do best in a cafe with lots of light, and interesting people who aren’t too creeped out when I stare blankly into the middle distance that they happen to be sitting in. I’ve made it easy to dive into a day of cafe writing by buying a tiny, lightweight computer just for writing days; it’s always packed into a tiny backpack that’s ready to go with the essentials for a day of writing. (The essentials: computer, mouse, headset, advil, hand cream, nicorettes). And I use a couple of programs that ensure my writing machine can access any relevant notes on my primary computer: Evernote, which is my master notebook, and Dropbox, which lets me keep a folder full of files synchronized across computers.
7. Find material. Artists are the world’s most incorrigible thieves. As anyone with a writer friend can tell you, everything is subject to appropriation: that quip you made at a party, the video of your first birthday party, the story of your most painful breakup. The social web liberates you from stealing from your friends’ lives, and opens the door on a world full of images, characters and experiences that are yours to borrow and embroider. Stay within the bounds of intellectual property law (i.e. no stealing someone else’s words, images or stories) and you can find all the real life material you need online.
8. Remove distractions. The same computer I use for my creative projects also contains an endless series of distraction. My hard drive is never more organized than the day before a major writing process: I can procrastinate for hours by consolidating folders, renaming files and optimizing my software setup. To limit my techie procrastinations, I use a separate computer on writing days, and keep it as light as possible: I’ve deliberately minimized the number of software tools installed on my writing machine, and I use a low-powered computer that makes it hard for me to run distracting programs or do much geeking out. I also keep a separate, distraction-free account on my primary computer: if I want to write, I switch to my alternate login, which denies me access to the chat programs, email and files that would pull me out of writing brain and into work or geek brain.
9. Expand your horizons. I’ve always been comfortable with words, and assumed that in some previous life I accepted the deal that my ability to write would come with an inability to draw a straight line with a ruler. My family is full of visual artists, but drawing stick figures appears to be the outside limit of my artistic capacity. Happily, I’ve discovered that online design doesn’t require the kind of eye-hand coordination that has always defied me: I’ve created photo collages, illustrative graphics and entire web page designs, and had a heck of a good time doing it. You may have a preferred medium, but trying out other forms of creative expression online – whether it’s making a movie, recording a song, or writing a poem – can help you discover other kinds of creativity in ways that fuel your primary creative commitments.

Are you an artist/geek — or a geek/artist? Or maybe even a techno-skeptic who has nonetheless found ways of harnessing technology to your creative self-expression? I’d love to hear about the  practices, tools and work habits that have helped you turn the social web into a tool for supporting your creativity.

At this point I’ve concluded that my best bet is to roll my own Wordpress site using aggregation via FeedWordPress, which I’ve now been devoted to for five years — one of my most enduring tech relationships! Then I will periodically use Wordpress export to export my blog to Wordpress.com, and suck my Wordpress.com site into Blurb for printing. Results to be reported….unless some fabulous developer creates my dream service before then.

I just discovered that my presentation at Oberlin’s 2008 Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship is on YouTube. I talked about how the lessons of building social networks parallel our experience as entrepreneurs.

• Aggregation of photos (offering Flickr and Facebook import at least, and ideally also Picasa, iPhoto upload, and more) and tweets into a single, chronologically ordered collection
• A selection of prefab design templates for online display (as per Tumblr, Wordpress and every other blogging platform) plus the option to create your own or use CSS to style
• A selection of prefab design templates for printing (as per all the book printing services)
• A print layout tool that lets you select which photos, albums or tweets you want to include in a specific print album
• Drag-and-drop rearrangement of photos and tweets so that you can decide which tweets will appear underneath or on the same page as specific photos

Nice-to-have features:

• Outbound Twitter support so that you can tweet the URL of a newly published album
• Facebook connect, with the ability to share albums with specific friends or friend lists
• Aggregation of RSS feeds so that you can add blog posts or headlines to your online or print album
• Aggregation of videos (from YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and elsewhere) to include in the online album
• Ability to organize content thematically (by tag/hashtag or keyword search) as well as chronologically, so that you can create topical albums (e.g. “birthdays”, “company picnic”, “bowling night”)
• Comic-style layouts (like ComicLife) or photo captions (like PhotoCaps)
• On-demand printing of individual photos with the option to select a tweet to print as the caption or speech bubble in a photo
• Outbound RSS for the online version

Premium features:

Of course, I have also been thinking about what would make this service profitable — profitable enough to be worth building. Clearly, you’ve got the print-on-demand market for scrapbooks, which could include not only tweeting mommies like me but the much larger universe of Facebooking mommies (and daddies, and grandparents). But the market for this service goes well beyond the mom and pop crowd. For example, premium services could include:

• e-mail newsletters: select items from your online album to turn into an e-newsletter (some blogging platforms let you do this already); combine this with the kind of list management and delivery service offered by Campaign Monitor or Constant Contact, and you can charge for each e-newsletter that’s sent out
• print newsletters and magazines: select items to turn into a regular print newsletter or magazine, and you’ve suddenly got a supremely easy way for organizations and companies to generate monthly or quarterly newsletters and magazines for members, or for families to generate yearly (please, please not monthly!!) newsletters for friends
• company, organization or school yearbooks: create yearbooks from the real lives of your employees, volunteers or students, as lived online.

I’m hoping that somewhere out there is a coder who can see that what I’m talking to is not very complicated (it isn’t — the APIs are all there) and sees an opportunity to create a new cool app. Or better yet, some startup is reading this and thinking, hey! this is what we’re doing! Either way, I’d love to hear from you.

This weekend has helped me identify the most likely scenarios for my own demise:

1. Buried under mismatched wineglasses.
2. Suffocated by a dishtowel avalanche.
3. Arm spontaneously separates after 18 continuous hours of drilling ceramic tile.
4. Food poisoning from leftovers stored in plastic food containers that didn’t precisely match the companion lids.
5. Trapped under Ikea display unit after lying down on floor and reaching towards wall to see if any of the out-of-stock kitchen hooks had fallen behind (they had! five packs!)
6. Head explodes from toddler screaming.
7. Blood poisoning from drinking through our lifetime supply of plastic cups.
8. Sliced by sheet-metal cutter I stretched from the Home Depot that had the sheet metal in stock, to the one that would actually cut it.
9. Red blood cells become magnetized from excessive exposure to magnetic spice tins.
10. Starved to death after refrigerator and pantry are blocked by accumulated housewares.

But yes, our kitchen does look lovely.

Our parents and grandparents recorded their memories in baby books, year books, photo albums and Super 8. We have Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and blogs. Our tools have the virtue of immediacy: 140-character updates and cell phone cameras make it quick and easy to add to our collections, and the web enables real-time sharing.

Until Apple releases that much-rumored tablet, however, we can’t curl up with a blog or flip through a Flickr album with the same ease and intimacy you’d experience with a physical book. And our digital memories typically lack the curatorial dimension in which we choose the particular memories to record or images to juxtapose.

As I’ve shifted to recording our family’s memories in digital form, I’ve been frustrated by the lack of tools for presenting and preserving the daily capture of our stories and images. On the one hand, there are dozens, if not hundreds of services for printing photos in physical books. And there are hundreds, if not thousands of tools for aggregating every kind of online media into a single blog or site. But in my search for a service that will aggregate multiple sources of online content, and then prepare it for offline (and ideally also online) publication, I’ve come up empty.

With so many families, groups, and companies capturing and sharing their memories online, surely there is a huge potential market for a service that can convert that collective lifestream into a set of on- and offline photo albums or memory bookss. In our case, I’d just like a tool that would pull our Twitter updates together with our Flickr or iPhoto collections, using datestamps to combine tweets and photos from the same week or month into a nice montage. I haven’t updated my kids’ baby books in years, but I could put together a beautiful album each year based on the comments I’ve captured in Twitter and the photos I’ve snapped with my iPhone and camera.

Essentially, this tool would be a hybrid between a blog that aggregates from multiple web services (like Tumblr), an online photo album service (like that provided by Facebook, Flickr and many others) and a print-on-demand service (like Shutterfly or Lulu).

A service that met my needs would also have a strong potential market for school, community and company yearbooks. Imagine compiling a company yearbook from the tweets and photos of your entire team — a big company could even have separate pages and sections for each department. Nonprofits could use photos and tweets to compile annual reports on their activities. And I hear that the kids now use the Internet to communicate, too: they might have one or two Facebook updates that could help feed a great, relevant yearbook.

In my next few blog posts I’ll present a recommended feature set, a review of related tools and an interim solution.

Two months ago, Rob and I decided to refocus Social Signal on social media capacity building. We recognized that we have the most impact — and the most fun — delivering the workshops, training and content that helps organizations find and realize their social opportunities. And we decided that one way to help build social media capacity was to open source our consulting practice, even though we didn’t know what that would mean for our business.

The day after we made our decision, our colleague Rochelle Grayson told me that Emily Carr University was looking for a researcher to head up their new technology research centre. It was an opportunity I wouldn’t have considered even forty-eight hours before. But when I told the wise and wonderful Morgan Brayton about our decision to restructure Social Signal, she’d given me this piece of advice: Don’t focus on what you think your work should look like — focus on the experience you want to have.

With that principle in mind, I asked Rochelle to introduce me to the Emily Carr team. And what a team! ECUAD President Ron Burnett wowed me with his philosophy of organizational leadership, his discussion of digital media research, and his awesome Mac geekery. VP Rob Inkster inspired me with his approach to building bridges between tech companies and digital creatives. Maria Lantin, the head of Intersections Digital Studio, is a soulful artist who can also code. And Glen Lowry and Jim Budd, who are part of the digital research program, blew my mind with their innovative thinking about e-learning and interaction design.

I’m thrilled and honoured that Ron and his colleagues have invited me to join Emily Carr as the Director of the Centre for Moving Interaction. For the next two years, I’ll work with the students and faculty of Emily Carr to develop research programs that engage BC tech companies in exploring new opportunities for — and applications of — digital creativity. And as part of that work, I’ll do research that digs deeper into the strategic and social implications of social media.

It’s an extraordinary chance to build capacity around social and interactive media — not in the form that I anticipated two months’ ago, but in a way that I hope will advance the work of ECUAD, the opportunities for BC companies, and my own thinking about social media. And because Emily Carr faculty typically maintain an outside practice or studio, I’ll be able to continue my work with Social Signal, too – in particular with Concept Jams, but also as a resource for Rob and our clients in Social Signal’s other work.

And I’m not going anywhere, at least not digitally – you’ll still find me blogging here (as well as at AlexandraSamuel.com and Harvard Business). I’m getting a change in venue, role and title, but in many ways I’ll be doing the same work we’ve done for the last four years through Social Signal: exploring the immense potential that digital media has to transform the way we create, collaborate and communicate, and helping people to find their path to putting these technologies to their most effective and positive use.

If you’ve had a baby, chances are you’ve given some thought to the question of childproofing. No sooner does the stick turn pink, it seems, then people start telling you about all the things you’ve got to do to ensure that your baby doesn’t hurl itself down the stairs, electrocute itself, or drink poison instead of breast milk.

Keeping your baby alive and uninjured is an important part of parenting. But so is keeping yourself sane and happy. And if you’re a geek, the keys to your happiness may be embedded in the thousands of dollars of technology that you accumulated in your pre-baby years. The technology that is just chock full of delicate wires and flashing buttons that are all-too-vulnerable to tiny, sticky hands.

With the wisdom earned from six years’ of childraising, two destructive children and four or five figures’ worth of maimed technology, I’d like to weigh in on the neglected side of childproofing. Because once you’ve figured out how to keep your baby safe from your stuff, it’s time to figure out how to keep your stuff safe from baby.

Replace your DVD player with a computer: Just before our second baby, aka Lil Pnut, was born, our DVD player died. When Rob suggested we replace it with a Mac Mini, I thought he was crazy: why spend $800 on a computer when we could get a DVD player for $200? Happily, he prevailed, and it turns out to have been our smartest purchase ever: instead of playing a constant game of keep-away so that sticky fingers stay off of DVDs, we download our videos or rip them immediately to our hard drive. Now that we’ve entered the gaming years, the same principle applies: buying DVD-based games is a risky proposition, but buying downloadable games ensures there’s no physical medium to lose or destroy.

iPhone case: You may think you’ll never hand that gorgeous, shiny iPhone to your gooey toddler, but trust me: someday you will be in a lineup, or at restaurant, or at a friend’s house, and become truly desperate for something — anything!! — that will distract your kid for a few precious moments. When that day comes, you don’t want to hand your kid a bare naked iPhone: you want to hand them a phone that is in a sturdy, impact-resistant case, with some kind of protector on the screen, too.

CD/DVD slots: You may not realize it, but your computer’s DVD drive is an awesome receptacle for index cards, paper clips, coins and a wide variety of two-dimensional objects. If you don’t need to access the drive on a regular basis, slap a piece of duct tape on it. I haven’t seen any kind of drive cover that you can install (and lock) but would love to know of one

Speakers: We used to have very nice stereo speakers that Lil Pnut dismembered over a year’s worth of steady working away at the edges, the cover, and finally, the interior. Put your speakers on a high shelf, or put the good speakers away for a few years and get a pair of moderately-priced bookshelf speakers instead.

Kid & sitter account: Once your kid gets old enough to use your computer — you know, at around 8 months — you want to ensure that all that banging away on the keyboard doesn’t nuke something crucial on your drive. Set up a separate user account, with no admin privileges, that you can use when you are sharing the computer with baby; it’s also handy if you’re going to leave your computer for a babysitter to use, too.

Raise your power bars: Even if your computer is out of reach or locked away, a kid will gravitate towards that bright red switch that does that cool flashing on-and-off thing when you flick it. If you want to avoid a sudden (and perhaps fatal) power outage or surge, keep the power bar hidden behind furniture or up out of reach.

Get mag-lock cables: Apple’s mag-lock cable connection is a genius way of ensuring that your kid won’t destroy your laptop cable (or laptop) by tripping or pulling on the cord. If you’re likely to have your baby in the same room as your laptop, a magnetic lock cable is your new best friend.

Give baby your deprecated technology: People who are concerned about keeping baby safe from technology will tell you that you should never let your kid play with something that isn’t designed as a toy. But if you have a tech-loving baby, he or she will be far more interested in actual tech than in play tech. A good compromise is to give baby your cast-off tech toys so that she or he can play with something that looks and beeps like the real thing — just make sure to avoid handing over anything with little pieces that can break off and get swallowed, and keep a careful eye on baby when playing with grownup toys.

Use Google safesearch: You may not object to seeing pornographic images — in fact, that may be one of your favourite uses for the web. But get in the habit of leaving Google’s safesearch on — it’s under “search settings”, and can filter out any explicit images that come up in a search. That way a kid that accidentally punches a few unfortunate letters into the search bar won’t get an explicit and traumatic eyeful.

Password protection: Set up passwords on all your computers and phones — before your kids set them up and lock you out. On different occasions, Lil Pnut has managed to lock us out of both a computer and iPhone, simply by banging away on the keyboard until he somehow triggered the account settings, at which point he apparently entered some random keystrokes that voila! created a new password we couldn’t get around.

Avoid magnetic toys: There are a lot of great kids toys that use magnets either as a way of creating little pictures and paper dolls, or as a construction element. Small, strong magnets are incredibly dangerous to kids if swallowed; but even large, non-swallowable magnets can be bad news if applied to the side of your computer.

Put your phone out of reach: Did you know that randomly hitting the buttons on your phone will trigger a connection to 911? I didn’t — until Lil Pnut got ahold of a phone and, after a few minutes, found himself talking to the 911 operator. Apparently this is a very common problem, so the good people at 911 would appreciate you keeping your phone out of toddler reach so that they can keep the lines free for people with actual emergencies.

Baby-wise purchasing: When we recently looked at LCD TVs, the salesperson was kind enough to point out that one brand of TV (LD) was unique in offering a screen coating that resists the push-and-smudge impact of little fingers. If you’re making new technology purchases, look for the vulnerable points on the product you’re buying, and ask a salesperson to recommend the least-vulnerable option. That goes for household appliances too: look for dishwashers and ovens that don’t just have soft locks (i.e. a locking feature that prevents kids from activating the appliance) but actual physical locks that keep kids from opening the appliance.

Borrow an inquisitive toddler: Once you’ve got the obvious vulnerabilities covered, it’s time to look for the the weaknesses you’ve failed to anticipate. There are inevitably going to be cables and gadgets in your house that you never dreamed of a toddler touching — unless you’ve already got one running around underfoot, by which time it is too late. So while your little angel is still at the blissful, pre-crawling stage, borrow someone else’s toddler: you want the inquisitive, button-pressing kid whose parent is always complaining about the latest household object to be broken or flushed down the toilet. Bring that kid over to your house (after you’ve asked the parent for permission!), give them free rein, and watch them like a hawk as they explore all the nooks, crannies and possessions you have left on view. You’ll quickly find any unanticipated vulnerabilities which you can now patch before your own kid starts moving around.

As you will infer from this post, Lil Pnut is the inquisitive, button-pressing, tech-destroying kid that you need for your own babyproofing audit. We will accept bookings at a rate of $1000/hr for a parent-and-child team; we figure that after a dozen bookings he will have paid off his debt to our household technology. Needless to say, we assume no liability for loss or damage incurred during the auditing process.

I had a great conversation today with Glen Lowry about making: you know, making actual stuff, like objects or art, as opposed to quasi-making (like writing or thinking). I found myself replaying our conversation this evening when my attempt to write a blog post turned into yet another evening of tinkering with my blogging software.

Which one of these activities counts as making: writing the blog post, or playing with the box it came in — that is, the blogging software itself? It strikes me that this is one of those lines that divides technology lovers from technology users.

Except it’s not really a line, it’s a continuum that reflects how people relate to technology, and how technology fits into whatever it is they do or make. For some people, the technology is purely instrumental — a way to make stuff — where for others, the technology is in some way what they make. I’ve come up with some guesstimates of how much time people spend working with technology, versus how much time they spend working on technology, depending on where they sit on this spectrum:

• Passive users: Use the software they find on their computer (as installed by a manufacturer or IT department) according to the instructions or their basic intuition. 99% of their tech use consists of actually using tools to do something else, and maybe 1% goes to troubleshooting.
• Active users: If the installed software tools don’t quite cut it, or they hear about something interesting, or their computer tells them to install it, active users might add a program or two. But they’ll still use their computer, phone etc more or less as intended. 90% of their time goes to using technology to do something else, and 10% goes to trying out new options or learning to make better use of what they have.
• Seekers: Seekers have a sense that their tech could work a little better for them, so they try new things that appear on their radar, and seek out new tools that sound interesting. They hear that Twitter is cool, so they try it; they hear that Twitter is more fun if you have client software, so they try out a couple of options like Tweetdeck and Nambu. But what they find, they use as prescribed. They spend about 80% of their time using technology to do something, and 20% looking for the next super-cool tool that will make everything better.
• Tinkerers: Tinkerers enjoy playing with tech and seeing how they can bend to their will, so they are constantly shifting back and forth between using technology to get stuff done, and working on the technology itself. They are tweaking settings, installing plug-ins, running upgrades, and adding new hardware and software to their toolkit. They spend about 60-70% of their time using technology to do something, and 30-40% of their time making their technology work better.
• Hackers: Hackers find it viscerally annoying to use technology that doesn’t work right — as in, the way they want it to work. So while they may start out using a piece of hardware or software to get something done, they are likely to invest a lot of time in altering or creating a new solution that works the way they think it should. They spend about 30-40% of their time using technology, and 60-70% of their time making and fixing hardware and software so it works right.
• Developers: Developers enjoy making more than using. Sure, they need to send e-mails just like the rest of us, but mostly what they are e-mailing is snippets of code on their latest project. Technology isn’t what they use: it’s what they make. So they spend about 80-90% of their tech time actually making technology, and only 10-20% using someone else’s.

I think something interesting starts to happen at around the “seeker” point in this continuum. As people start to spend more time working on their technology — thinking actively about what tools they want to use, and what will make them most effective — the technology stops being a tool and starts to be in some way a creative product. Even if you never touch a line of code, the simple decision to take charge of your iPhone — to replace that background image with a picture that inspires you, or to add a couple of apps that let you track where you’ve been and what you’ve seen — puts you in the driver’s seat, and makes your phone (or computer, or TV) into an expression of what matters to you.

But is it making? Is tweaking, hacking or even building your own computer the same as imagining an object that never existed and making it from scratch? If I could stop tinkering with my Wordpress plugins I could pick up a paintbrush or chisel and let you know.