I’m thrilled that today marked the publication of my first blog post for Oprah.com, Spice Up Your Dates with Technology. As a contributor to this site, I’ll show how you can use technology to “live your best life”, in Oprah’s words. Keep an eye out for upcoming stories on my profile page, which will highlight different ways to make meaningful use of technology in your life and relationships.

My first post shares six ideas for how technology can make for better dates. One of the tips I share is to create a date night dashboard. Here’s a peek at what mine looks like:

I hope you’ll check out the story on Oprah.com, and share your own ideas for making love with technology.

If you want to sharpen or deepen your use of social media, try going to art school.

That’s the big takeaway from my first months here at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. I can’t say I’m “going to” art school — my role heading up the new Social + Interactive Media Centre has so far kept me out of the classroom, though I’m dying to audit everything from the course on art since 1945 to the Continuing Studies class in Arduino.

But I’m nonetheless enjoying an eye-opening immersion in the work and world of the practicing artists who make up Emily Carr’s faculty and student body. Through their exhibits, presentations and conversations I’m discovering a new way of thinking about my own creative expression through social media.

Of course, it feels presumptuous to even draw the analogy. But in many ways the experience of an individual participant in a social media site is analogous to the role of an artist, particularly if your definition of art isn’t contingent on its aesthetic value or tangible social impact. Blogging is much like memoir or criticism; photo sharing online is not unlike exhibiting in a real-world gallery; YouTube contributors are amateur (or not-so-amateur) filmmakers, and podcasts are often more like spoken word performance than like journalism.

It is journalists, however, to whom social media creators are most frequently compared. “Citizen journalism” is a very real and powerful phenomenon, and has shifted some of the power to narrate our contemporary experience out of the hands of established institutions and into the hands of individuals and small groups. But to hold social media creators to the paradigm of conventional journalism is to obscure much the impact of their creation, which is significant not just in how it speaks to the world but in how it transforms the creator herself.

The transformative power of social media is better understood by looking at creators not as journalists, but as artists. And it’s not such a tremendous leap to do so. After all, much of contemporary art transcends the traditional idea of art as painting or sculpture: conceptual art and installation art are now included in the exhibits of museums all over the world. There’s also a long and strong tradition of art that comments on political or social issues, so the content of social media should be no obstacle to considering it as a form of art. Finally, we should look at social media in the context of the thriving digital art movement, in which everything from video games to virtual sit-ins has been presented in exhibition. By all of these standards, the contributions of social media participants look a lot like art.

Artists	Social media creatives
Express themselves in text, performance, photos or film	Express themselves in blogs, photo sharing and video sharing
Collaborate on ambitious projects and performance pieces	Coordinate online by combining related works
Engage with political and social issues through their art works and activism	Undertake online activism through creative expression in blogs, photos and video
Embrace new technologies to create new forms of art	Create and use technologies as a form of creative expression
Incorporate traditional crafts into works of art	Foster and market crafts online

You don’t have to identify as an artist to use social media to explore and celebrate your creativity, and turn that creativity into an engine for personal growth. In fact, getting away from the artist label – from what we think about as Art – can help make creative expression less daunting, more approachable, and more rewarding. What matters is to find the path, platform and tools that will help you connect creativity to the world and to yourself.

For the first time in a year, I’ve lost myself in a book. It’s Barbara Kingsolver’s latest, The Lacuna– a marvellous historical novel that centers on a Mexican-American who becomes cook and secretary to Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky. I’ve disappeared into the world of mid-century revolutionaries and artists, surfacing into my own life with that lingering distraction that comes from having half of my head, and even more of my heart, ensnared in a fictional world.

And yet I never feel more myself, more in balance, and just plain happier than when I’m reading a novel. That’s why I was so distressed by the recent realization that it had been months since I lost myself in a book. How many months? I wondered aloud, during a conversation with a dear friend. I counted backwards to….the arrival of my Kindle last May.

“I guess I haven’t been reading since I got my Kindle,” I heard myself say. “I guess that at the end of the work day, it just feels like one more damn screen.”

“That’s because it is one more damn screen,” she pointed out.

At the time of our conversation I was mid-way through A Short History of Women. It was the third novel in a row that I had expected to love, but as I paged through my Kindle, found just OK. That very day, I headed to a real bookstore — you know, the tree-killing kind — and bought the very same novel in hardback. It had taken me weeks to plow through the first few pages, but once I switched to paper I was pulled right in.

My next experiment ran in the opposite direction: at an airport bookstore, I picked up a copy of Anathem, which was loaded on my Kindle but still unread. After a couple of days of reading, I was halfway through the paperback, so I switched over to the Kindle. My reading ground to a halt. I picked up the paperback again, and forced myself to try switching back to the Kindle a few more times….but no luck. The sad truth was that despite being a major gadget freak, the Kindle just didn’t work for me.

Since abandoning my Kindle I’ve read a couple of other books, but nothing that has really won my heart. Finally, with The Lacuna, I’ve rediscovered myself as a reader: the kind of reader who lets dishes and e-mails pile up while I read just a few more pages. And yet a reader geeky enough that the most resonant analogy for my readerly state comes from a Star Trek episode: the episode in which Captain Picard gets zapped by some kind of alien satellite, and lives an entire parallel lifetime over the course of an hour-long brain-probe. That’s what a good book is like: a chance to live a complete parallel life, unconstrained by the place or moment in which your physical self happens to reside.

And that’s what a fulfilling online life can be, too: the chance to live a life and a half, to squish a second parallel existence into the seams of our day-to-day physical lives, projecting another version of yourself into a world that you experience only through the force of your imagination. Like the world you slip into through a novel, that virtual life can feel emotionally real and intellectually compelling; you can feel invested in its characters and relationships, and find it painful to tear away.

That’s online life at its best. But too often it feels novel-like only in the difficulty of separation: like a good book, I can’t put my computer down. Unlike a good book, however, I don’t necessarily feel quenched by checking in on Facebook, or Twitter, or foursquare, or whatever happens to be my compulsion of the week. It’s only as fulfilling as a beach read: diverting without being nourishing, eventful without being insightful.

As I try to tune into the quality of my online interactions, and to differentiate between those that are replenishing versus those that are merely amusing (or far worse, compulsive) the standard of a good novel is a helpful gut check. Novels have been my soul food since I was eight years old, so the feeling I get from a good read is as familiar and certain as a pang of hunger or the adrenalin rush from a run.

My best online experiences have that same soulful quality: the sense that the parallel world I’ve entered through an online exchange has somehow enlarged the space of my life, or the recognition that something I’ve read or seen online has changed how I look at the world, perhaps narrowly, but permanently. Recognizing that online content and online interactions can be as profound as a novel is what keeps me coming back; remembering that a novel remains my single best emotional yardstick for life online is what reminds me that sometimes, I just need to unplug.

1. Try to fix the aspect ratio on the TV screen so the people don’t look double-wide
2. Re-route the ethernet cable on the desk so that it reaches the bed
3. Marvel at the prices of the TV system’s content-on-demand
4. Post mini-reviews of the complimentary toiletries to Twitter
5. Iron your underwear
6. Copy edit the room service menu
7. You know….
8. Rate your hotel on TripAdvisor
9. Use Zap2It to look up the TV listings for the town you’re in and try to figure out which cable system corresponds to the channel lineup in your hotel (answer: none)
10. Eat the plain M&Ms

Rob and I have been together for 12 years this month, but I still remember what it’s like to get over a previous love. Back in the day when there was a little more turnover in my love life, I found that moving on to a new relationship wasn’t enough to cure the heartache of a breakup. It wasn’t until I was two breakups removed that I’d really get over a previous love and stop thinking about him altogether.

I’m wondering if the same might be true of social web sites. I’ve loved delicious, the social bookmarking site, for almost five years now. It was the first social web site to win my heart: my first bookmarks are as old as my first blog posts. We’ve been together since “social media” was “web 2.0″; since the days when Yahoo’s delicious was simply Josh Schacter’s del.icio.us. Delicious has seen me through hacktivism and e-democracy, basecamp and yoga, CarShopping and decorating.

But a recent comment on my year-old blog post about delicious-twitter integration made me realize how we’ve grown apart. Twitter is my new boyfriend: the one I hang out with all the time. When I find a web site or blog post I want to preserve for future reference, I usually Twitter it — knowing that the tweecious extension will cross-post any URL I tweet to my delicious collection.

Delicious is now the old boyfriend: the one I rarely see but can’t get out of my heart. While I documented several options for integrating Twitter and delicious, I never use delicious to cross-post to Twitter via Twitterfeed, and since a rarely use Firefox I’ve stopped using FireStatus to post simultaneously to Twitter and delicious. My delicious bookmarks are there for me (like the boyfriend you know will always take you back if you call) but my primary URL-capture relationship is with Twitter.

Yet I can’t extricate delicious from my emotional attachment to the social web, largely because my exploration of delicious helped form my perspective and understanding of social media. The 2005 article I wrote for the Toronto Star focused on delicious as a window on the then-new phenomenon of tagging, explaining that “it offers users a great amount of additional value in return for only a little bit of extra work.” What interested me was the social impact of delicious-ing: that the selfish act of storing a bookmark would elide into the socially constructive act of sharing that bookmark with others. And the social experience of sharing (easily, effortlessly) on delicious would build the sharing muscles that turn me into a good social media contributor.

If that argument was correct, then Twitter’s success proves that delicious did indeed school us in the joys of sharing. We stored our bookmarks, discovered the value of making them social…and then found that the sharing was worth more than the storage. Twitter focuses on the sharing, not the organizing and retrieval — and now, it’s where we put our attention and find our links.

Or maybe delicious and I had it wrong from the beginning. Maybe sharing isn’t that big an ask: maybe people are wiling to share, waiting only for the opportunity. Maybe we’re naturally generous, or predisposed to vie for the attention we get by sharing what we know. Using tags to organize a record of what we’ve shared — as delicious does so well for bookmarks, and Twitter does less well via hashtags, largely due to that 140-character limit — is a nice bonus, but hardly the main point.

The obvious answer is that different people have different motivations. The genius of delicious was — and is — its dual value as a private organizational tool and as a way of sharing and publishing. Yahoo doesn’t care whether you’re using delicious so you can find your bookmarks across multiple computers, or as a way of establishing yourself as the definitive curator of Ikea hacking resources: they just want you to keep storing those bookmarks.

Twitter, on the other hand, still skews social. It’s great for those who like to chronicle their lives, build their reputations, or connect with friends. It’s at least as useful as a personal information tool — I use it to log hours into my time tracking software, track the latest news headlines, and maintain a private diary of my kids’ cutest remarks — but most people are surprised when I suggest that they might like using Twitter even if they never post a single public tweet.

Appealing to the productivity geeks as well as to the social networkers is a terrific way to build users for a platform. But I’m still happiest to see web applications that drive people in one direction: towards social, and towards sharing. Maybe the next one will be the new boyfriend that helps me finally get over delicious.

Completing an online form that reminds me that when you’re the one GIVING the money out, there’s no pressure to create good user experience.

I celebrated Valentine’s Day the traditional way this year: filling out a really terrible online form for a funding application. Funding organization that received that application this week: if you do the kind of social media monitoring that lets you recognize that I’m talking about you, that is a sign that you have the web skills to do better!

As for the rest of you, I’m sure you don’t need to see the form in question in order to know what I’m talking about. The odds are good that at some point in your life you’ve filled out a form that, in its really terrible user experience, conveys this message: We have something you want (a job, funding, a freebie) so suck it up.

But the truth is that there is no organization that is so wealthy or sought-after that it can afford to convey that “suck it up” message. Good user experience isn’t just an instrumental value: it’s a crucial part of how you are communicating your organization’s values and strengths to the public.

Most web sites are pushed into delivering (or at least thinking about) good user experience because they are trying to get something from users: a contribution, a purchase, an e-mail address. Social web sites in particular have to deliver good user experience in order to elicit the sign-ups, profiles and user-generated content that bring an online community to life.

Anyone who has had to deliver a good user experience can tell you: it’s not easy. I have spent months working on the design and development of social sites, only to have the “d’oh!” moment of realizing we’ve got an upload or sign-up process that is missing a crucial step or explanation. And even knowing how hard it is to get right, I’m regularly amazed at the number of major, well-funded web sites and online communities that have major usability glitches or suffer from an overload of calls to action. (Upload a video! Sign up for our e-mail list! Comment on our blog! Vote in our poll!)

But at least these sites are trying. They are trying to make the contribution process as easy as possible, to provide the explanations that make the process clear, and to speed users on their way to successful participation. That has the instrumental benefit of increasing participation, not the least because it carries the message: your time and experience matters to us. We are trying to make this easy and fun for you.

When you’re the one giving something away, you may think you can opt out of that user experience challenge. It may seem like usability is an unnecessary expense; bad user experience may even seem like an ally, a way of weeding out the people who aren’t motivated enough to stick out the endless pop-up windows and error messages.

But bad user experience isn’t just your users’ problem. It’s your problem, because it’s delivering the single communications message that no organization can afford to deliver: the message that its audience doesn’t matter.

It’s the nature of Twitter that you baffle half the people who follow you & are baffled by half the folks you follow.

I wrote this tonight in response to an old friend who was teasing me about finding half my tweets baffling. It’s a comment I get a lot, often from Facebook friends who are subjected to all the tweets that I cross-post to Facebook. And in most cases, it’s because I’m often tweeting about relatively technical things that don’t make sense to folks who aren’t web developers, or at least, very heavy social media users.

I know how they feel. About half the stuff I read in my Twitter feed baffles me just as much as I (apparently) baffle others. And that’s a good thing.

Here’s why: while it can be uncomfortable to be baffled (an experience that is not entirely unrelated to feeling stupid, as I often do online) it’s a sign that you’re stretching. If you understand 100% of what you read in your Twitter feed, you’re either following the world’s most effective 140-character communicators, or you’re following people who only talk about stuff that is entirely within your comfort zone.

Where’s the fun in that? The whole joy of Twitter (or at least a good chunk of it) is discovering the undiscovered, or (as Donald Rumsfeld put it) the unknown unknowns. Click the cryptic link, read the web page that includes only 7 words you recognize, and next time you come across a post on the subject (whether it’s working with AJAX or resurfacing floors) you’ll recognize 8 words.

And if you’re the baffler rather than the bafflee, that’s also good news. It’s a sign that you’re not just preaching to the choir. You’re still saying the occasional thing that makes sense to people outside your lab, your field, your spiritual community. There’s enough variety in your tweets to both baffle and engage; to interest your fellow specialists while still appealing to your old friends. And hopefully what’s engaging some of your followers is what’s baffling to others, and vice versa: you’re helping all of them stretch their muscles, their knowledge, their ability to decrypt obscure and labored acronyms in a desperate attempt to stay within 140 characters.

Whether you know exactly what I’m talking about here, or you’re still feeling baffled, that’s ok. Either way, I’ll aim to get you next time.

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.