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Posts Categorized Writing

Modern Rituals

I don’t have a lot of rituals in my life. I check email every five minutes, but that’s just a part of the job. And I walk the dogs every night, but only because, if I didn’t, they’d piss the carpet. I go to the local cafe, but not every day.
That’s why participating in […]

NaBloPoMo Q&A 8: Never Tell a Story Like It’s Not About You

Louise asked:
I was wondering if you have ever regretted your transparency on the web. Has it worked as a negative or positive influence?
I was 23 years old the first time it happened. It was two hours into 1996. And I was bummed out. So I wrote down how I felt, posted it to my website, […]

If It Bleeds, It Leads

With my month-long experiment in daily posting a week away from its blissful conclusion, I thought I’d check to see what effect, if any, it was having on the site’s traffic. So I checked in with the handy WordPress traffic page. Here’s what I saw, with the addition of the most trafficked posts and the […]

What’s on Your List?

So me and six thousand of my friends are participating in National Blog Posting Month right now, which means we’ve all agreed to post to our blogs every day of November. I don’t know about my fellow NaBloPoMo-ers, but today’s the nineteenth day of this and I’m getting to the bottom of the barrel. So […]

NaBloPoMo Q&A 6: Chopping Blocks

Or: How To Bust Your Creative Block
Megan asked:
Say someone’s in a rut. What advice would you offer for getting out? ie, how do you stay creative and engaged? Who/what keeps you accountable?
And Joey asked:
How do you overcome creative block? What inspires you?
I had an English teacher in high school who said something I still think […]

NaBloPoMo

NaBloPoMo = National Blog Posting Month. And I am member #4928. Which means I’ll be posting here every day for a month. Or at least trying to. Stay tuned.

iPhone The Book

It was my pleasure to donate a few stories and photos to Ethan Bodnar’s printed retrospective of the most anticipated Apple product ever: iPhone: The Book. I got my copy a few days ago and it’s beautiful. It will serve as a fun reminder of the wild ride that was the iPhone launch.

Did Assignment Zero Work?

As powazek.com readers know, I participated in Assignment Zero’s Interview Week over the last few months. Jeff Howe, who coined the word “crowdsourcing,” has a piece in Wired today with the provocative headline: Did Assignment Zero Fail? A Look Back, and Lessons Learned.
It’s a frank assessment with many insights that should be required […]

My Interview in Wired.com

In May I participated in AssignmentZero’s Interview Week. The stories have been making their way online at Wired.com this week, and today mine went up! Check it.
Exploring the Dark Side of Crowdsourcing
As the creator of Subvert and Profit, a site that makes a business out of gaming social media site Digg for paying advertisers, “Ragnar […]

How to Write a Book in Three Easy Steps

My book, Design for Community, has just gone out of print. It lives on as a download, but it’s just not the same. There’s just something special about those dead trees.
After I finished writing the book, back in 2001, I wrote a little story about what it was like. It was published online in a […]