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....

Using Twitter to create social media content that boosts SEO

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,...

Need a woman for your all-male SXSW panel?

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...

5 ways social media can help you learn to say no (for HBR)

Subject: Join our new working group? Subject: Time to meet for coffee? Subject: Beta invitation for new web app Subject: Sign up for 2010 lecture series? If your January inbox looks like mine, it’s full of requests and invitations. The problem with the New...

How great editing motivates great user-generated content

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...

The meaning of friendship, on- and offline

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...