Leah Reich wrote a beautiful, gut-wrenching essay on grief, and how to deal with it online. It expands on ideas I touched on in And then there were four, about what type of information is appropriate to share online. But Leah’s Disconnect goes much deeper on the topic, and it is so well-written:

But sometimes, even now, I think about public mourning rituals. I think about how the Victorians treated grief, how publicly they wore it, how they wore rings made from the hair of their beloved deceased. I recall telling myself I could say something, I could document my grief. It was okay to make it public, even if it felt like a very wrong, obnoxious, and strange thing to do. I remember thinking I needed someone to do something, but I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t know how to ask.

That’s the rub, isn’t it? Under even the most ordinary circumstances, how difficult it is to tell people we feel awful, to ask for a little extra patience, to ask for comfort. So to reach through the emotional distance when the stakes are so much higher, when the cost of rejection is risking further isolation at a time when you are already floating on what seems like the last splinter of wood from the great wreck of your life — well, you know, maybe throwing a thing or two at the internet and seeing what sticks doesn’t seem so crazy.

Read Disconnect by Leah Reich.

Last night Cennydd Bowles tweeted something that really resonated with me:

Never ascribe to stupidity that which is adequately explained by complexity.

— Cennydd Bowles (@Cennydd) December 3, 2012

It reminded me of Erin Kissane’s contribution to the A List Apart article What I Learned About the Web in 2011:

If a single idea has followed me around this year, from politics to art and work to friendships, it’s been this one: “it’s more complicated than that.”

It’s centrally important to seek simplicity, and especially to avoid making things hard to use or understand. But if we want to make things that are usefully simple without being truncated or simplistic, we have to recognize and respect complexity—both in the design problems we address, and in the way we do our work.

I don’t know the flow of events that led Cennydd and Erin to their respective statements, but I know why it struck a chord with me. It feels like the number of tweets and blog posts that are written to ridicule and obliterate new products/apps/redesigns are on the rise. It’s like people don’t like anything any more — unless their friends made it. I think we can do better.

It’s easy to write a few paragraphs about how much something sucks. You know what’s difficult? Recognizing and respecting complexity. Giving people the benefit of the doubt and trying to understand why they made the decisions they made — whether it’s related to business, design, development, or anything else.

What’s really difficult is starting your argument from an assumption that other people are deliberate and thoughtful, and then working through each of your criticisms methodically. You’ll either realize that they made the right decisions, or arrive at the conclusion that they made some mistakes. Even if they did make mistakes — and we all have — by starting from a different baseline you’ll end up with a solid (and respectful) critique that the person can use to do things better.

For a creative person, the difference between reading “You suck!” and reading “Here’s where I think you made some wrong decisions” is the difference between being shamed into crawling under the covers and never putting their work out there ever again, and being encouraged to make their product better. We should always, always aim to do the latter.

I’m slowly making my way through Issue #3 of The Manual. If you haven’t read these books, I highly recommend it — they’re wonderful essay collections. This morning I read Practicing Passion by Tiffani Jones Brown, in which she dissects the whole idea of following your passion and doing what you love. She starts with this observation:

Sure, I’d been excited to start my own business. And sure, I’d loved the idea of writing for a living. Yet banal and frustrating tasks — the kind you approach with a groan, not a fist-pump — make up much of my job. So do I feel over-the-moon about my work? I truly like it. I feel good when I get better at it. Passion overstates the point.

She then goes on to recommend a more tempered approach to the passion thing:

Instead of asking “what will make me feel passion?” we should ask, “how can I make passion happen?” The answer is to cultivate a way of living and working that makes passion more likely. Passion takes practice.

But the point that really resonated with me is the part where she talks about flow:

You can get into flow doing almost any activity, no matter how good you are at it, no matter how mundane the task. Only two things are required: the activity has to have a clear goal and a challenge. You need to be really plugged in and focused; what you’re doing must stretch your body or mind. You won’t achieve flow while multitasking or surfing the internet but you might, odd as it seems, while doing a content audit or cleaning up comps.

Those are good words to remember. Sometimes we do what we want to do. The rest of the time we do what we need to do to get the job done and get better at what we do. Anyway, I guess the point is, buy The Manual. It’s such a treat.

I’ve really been enjoying Tim Kreider’s columns for the New York Times. His essay called The ‘Busy’ Trap got a lot of attention, and for good reason. His latest is called The Quiet Ones:

We’re a tribe, we quiet ones, we readers and thinkers and letter writers, we daydreamers and gazers out of windows. We are a civil people, courteous to excess, who disdain displays of anger as childish and embarrassing. But the Quiet Car is our territory, the last reservation to which we’ve been driven. And we can be pushed too far.

I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll just link there quietly.

I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with the reverse-chronological order on this site (and most blogs, for that matter). For me, the problem is that the latest few posts on the home page aren’t necessarily the most important posts I’d like readers to see. In addition to that, if a new reader visits an article through a link from elsewhere, and then checks out the home page, they won’t immediately get an idea of what the site is about.

That’s why I’m so excited about Ben Brown’s concept of Reader Aware Design. He begins with a question:

Presenting everything as a reverse chronological stream of posts made sense when we knew our readers were sitting at a desk, hitting reload on 30 tabs all day long at work. Does it still make sense when content arrives on an e-paper watch, an Xbox or a tiny slip of paper?

Ben says no, and he provides some recommendations as well as a proof-of-concept they’ve been working on. Read his post for the detail. Exciting stuff!

Scott Simpson tells us something I think we all desperately need to hear in his article in Issue 4 of The Magazine:

You are boring. So, so boring.

Don’t take it too hard. We’re all boring. At best, we’re recovering bores. Each day offers a hundred ways for us to bore the crap out of the folks with whom we live, work, and drink. And on the Internet, you’re able to bore thousands of people at once. […]

The Big Bore lurks inside us all. It’s dying to be set loose to lecture on Quentin Tarantino or what makes good ice cream. Fight it! Fight the urge to speak without listening, to tell a bad story, to stay inside your comfortable nest of back-patting pals. As you move away from boring, you will never be bored.

This relates really well to a recent post by Able Parris called Focus Means Ignoring:

We need to spend less time looking to others for interesting things, and start spending more time doing the things that make us interesting. […]

Similarly, and I am saying this more for myself, it’s easy to give time and attention to the things you enjoy or are easy, but true character comes when you give focus to the things that are difficult but must be done. This means you have to ignore everything else, and know that you will be better because of it.

Just imagine the virtuous cycle this could set off… As people post fewer boring things like Foursquare checkins and retweets of how awesome they are, and we all take the conscious decision to read fewer boring things and instead spend that time listening, learning, and doing new things, we could slowly and collectively pull the current state of the social web out of that cesspool of boringness. Well, that’s a pipe dream, of course. And to be fair — there’s nothing wrong with clicking on a good animated gif every once in a while.

Anyway, back to Scott’s article. One of his recommendations for fighting the descent into becoming boring is what he calls “Expanding your circles”:

When you expand your social and intellectual range, you become more interesting. You’re able to make connections that others don’t see. You’re like a hunter, bringing a fresh supply of ideas and stories back to share with your friends.

This is very much related to Mark Granovetter’s 1973 theory of weak ties1. The theory states that because a person with strong ties in a network more or less knows what the other people in the network know, the effective spread of information relies on the weak ties between people in separate networks.

In other words, to get more interesting information out of Twitter or any other social network, you need to follow people who give you access to additional knowledge clusters. If you see too many tweets about the same thing in your timeline, or if your RSS reader shows 5 consecutive links to the same tech article, you may have too many strong ties.2

Go and and find those weak ties at the edges of your interests, and strengthen them. Otherwise we’ll just continue to talk about the same stuff over and over and over again. And that’s boring.

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1. “The Strength of Weak Ties”, Mark Granovetter, 1973. PDF link. ↩

2. I wrote about this extensively in How to get more out of Twitter. ↩

Stephen Hackett’s Parenting Technology is a haunting piece of writing for The Magazine. I don’t want to give the story away, so I’ll just quote a couple of key paragraphs:

How many little moments have I missed in my kids’ lives by checking Twitter on my iPhone while they play in the yard? How many hours have I spent writing or hacking away on my Web site while I should have been reading books to Josiah?

Technology saved my son’s life, yet has left him with terrible scars. It allows me to work from the hospital on days when I need to, but distracts me from being engaged at home. Technology is wonderful, but terrible, all at once.

How we deal with that balance — with what technology wants — remains one of the biggest struggles of our time.

Back in May I posted my wish list for a mobile WordPress publishing platform. Since then nothing official has come out of Wordpress to help with that list. But I’ve been using Tom Witkin’s Poster app for a while now, and it’s close enough to what I need that it has significantly increased the amount of writing and publishing I do from my iPhone and iPad.

Poster’s interface is clean and focused on what’s most important: writing. It has full support for Markdown and TextExpander touch — including some custom keyboard commands to insert commonly used Markdown attributes:

The built-in preview screen makes it easy to proofread and make sure you didn’t miss anything:

The only thing that is still missing for me is a mobile Safari bookmarklet that lets me send a piece of selected web page text — along with the page title and URL — to Poster as a new post that’s ready for editing. It would also be great to see Poster integration with apps like Instapaper and Reeder.

If you run WordPress and have stayed away from mobile blogging because it seemed like too much of a hassle, give Poster a try.

Links for Poster: Official site | On iTunes

My latest article for Smashing Magazine came out yesterday. The Immersive Web And Design Writing is about the resurgence we’re seeing in longform writing that’s done with much patience and care. I interviewed the publishers of three such examples: Andy McMillan of The Manual, Nick Disabato of Distance, and John Boardley of Codex. After all the editing was done, I came to the following conclusion:

So, maybe what I initially thought was an article about design publications is actually an article about all of us instead. The point is not just that we should have a balanced information diet, but that the real power of that balanced diet lies in the energy it gives us to get started on our own projects. Seek out these nutritious words. You won’t regret it.

I hope you like the article!

I love Craig Mod’s writing, and Paris and the Data Mind is another great piece. It starts off as an article about Fitbit, and more broadly, the Quantified Self (“a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on most aspects of a person’s daily life”). But it quickly expands to an essay about memory in the age of data that never disappears:

I think of our check-ins, our food photos, our tagged friends. I think of our steps, our Fuel Points. I think of the myriad and nearly endless streams of data—data now actively collected but becoming increasingly passive. I think of all this and I can’t help but see a hologram projected somewhere off in the distance. A reconstitution of something, someone, miles away, years out. […]

How specific and formful our collections—these collections that constitute our selves—have become. Still not entirely whole, but closer than they’ve ever been. We play them back—literally, scrolling out timelines. A life of thoughts, granular GPS, and time-coded data. Holograms of ourselves, transparent and broken, from another time and place. They skip like a worn record, or a dusty movie reel, with pieces missing here and there. But they are us, however scratchy, and their resolution increases daily.

This theme has come up quite a bit recently — how the Internet prevents memories from fading. Craig ends up challenging the idea that unforgotten memories are necessarily a good thing.