How to think like a social media artist

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...

A novel approach to life online

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...

How Social Media Is Changing Olympic Coverage

Plenty of locals in Vancouver are stymied in their efforts to decipher just what the protesters want; or more precisely, what it would take to satisfy them.
—Jonathon Narvey

Game play can help grow a community, offer positive mentorship,…

The message of usability

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...

The beauty of baffling

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...

An open source bedtime story

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...

We tweet: 6 ways Twitter can strengthen your love

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....