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...

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....

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...

12 things you don’t know about Rob Cottingham

In a few hours I’ll be thankful for a plate of turkey, stuffing and gravy. Meanwhile, there’s nothing like jamming chunks of bread into the cavity of a formerly living creature to make you appreciate what really matters in life. As I stood elbow-deep in turkey, I found myself reflecting on the person who is at the heart of most of what I have to be thankful for this year

Vendetta of the week: Twitter ponzi schemes for building followers

Twitter friends and followers are more than statistics. They’re real relationships, real people. When we get so obsessed with the number that we’re willing to entrust the following process to a ponzi scheme, we’ve lost sight of the purpose of this — or any other — social network: to connect us, and to help us communicate.

How the social web can nourish your most personal relationship

The process of strengthening a relationship by working hard together; by facing, nurturing and celebrating your successes and challenges together — that’s an experience that’s open to any couple, or indeed any relationship, that integrates the creative and communicative possibilities of the social web. Here are some of the ways you can use the social web to bring the energy of creative collaboration into your relationship.