2022 in Review: Blogging and a Bit More

2022 was a pretty quiet year in my blogging life until the last few weeks. I lost my writing mojo in 2020 when the world went dark, other than the writing I needed to do for work, and only this fall and winter did I start making an effort to write again. 

We still have a global pandemic and people still die from COVID-19 and its Greek-numbered variants. I've been vaxxed, vaxxed again, boosted, boosted, variant-boosted, and I still mask in crowds, stores, and mass-transit settings. The number of people doing the same has dwindled; sometimes I'm the only person wearing a mask. 

I'm fortunate to have a job that lets me telework 100%. I do travel a bit, eat occasionally in restaurants, shop in stores (masked), and occasionally have a social life with people I know are vaccinated and maintaining precautions. We kept up the grocery online order/pick-up habit because dang, that's lower stress than going into a store full of lots of people coughing, especially this time of year with the "tripledemic" in the news (COVID-19, flu, respiratory syncytial virus, with that last one usually only producing mild cold-like symptoms but breaking out much more seriously this year, especially in children). 

I haven't had COVID-19 yet that I know of. (I do have my suspicions about a few days of feeling under the weather during which I kept testing negative after attending a big conference and receiving a lot of texts and emails from people I'd talked with saying they had tested positive.) Nor have I had the flu, a cold, or any other contagious respiratory illness. Masks are awesome.

You would think that with all this non-social time on my hands I would have done more writing. It's been more like "what do we binge next?" at our house, to be honest, plus a lot of books read. At any rate, here's 2022's short list:

In May I tried to plan ahead for a special round-number birthday celebration: Counting up the Years. This was a lot of fun, coming up with things I could do that don't all cost money; instead they cost the far more rare and precious elements of time and attention. 

As part of my job, I get to coordinate with the office of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee on the proclamation for Bike Month. I wrote Bike Everywhere Month Rolls in May for the WSDOT Blog to share that—especially happy to do that in the year in which the Washington state legislature passed the historic Move Ahead Washington package with record-breaking levels of investment in active transportation and public transportation and dedicated future funding from a new carbon tax. That same package included a directive to WSDOT, where I work, to apply Complete Streets principles on all our projects, which is game-changing in a way that adds to the value of those new investments.

Both my long list of fun ideas and my bike riding took a turn for the worse September 1 when this happened: Broken Wrist, Dang It! No Riding for a While.

Revisiting my bike blog revealed I had a problem numbering in the tens of thousands that required drastic action in subscriber management: So long, spammers (with apologies to real people). [Honestly, this one isn't worth reading; noting it only in the spirit of full disclosure of lessons learned.]

I was delighted to write State Active Transportation Plan receives multiple awards for the WSDOT Blog. The plan my team worked on starting in late 2018 got slowed by the pandemic, and became final toward the end of December 2021. Over the course of 2022 the plan won state, regional, and national awards. And for an extra dose of woohoo, the new Move Ahead Washington transportation investment package wrote the plan into state law as a resource for identifying gaps in walk/bike/roll networks to prioritize for investment.

In November when things got weird with Twitter, its potential demise looming, I grabbed the archive of the many faces of Tiggs in The Kitten Chronicles, Year One, The Kitten Chronicles, Year Two, and The Kitten Chronicles, Year Three. I share a picture or funny story every so often, adding to a thread I started the day we brought him home. He can be a real poophead sometimes—ask me about the holes he's eaten into a lot of good merino wool clothing—but he's also brought joy.

Kitten Chronicles Day 1: Attempts to take pictures are almost all either kitty butt or blurry as he runs around checking out the place. Haven't named him yet; awaiting insights into personality or some cute story we can tell about how he got his name. pic.twitter.com/4qEqCDhLE4

— Barb Chamberlain (@BarbChamberlain) July 14, 2020

Now I was on a roll and Twitter was still there to inspire a bike blog post: What’s in a Name? Acoustic or Analog, Regular or Traditional Bicycle*. (But just in case, I started up a Mastodon account, @BarbChamberlain@toot.community.)

I rolled right into wanting to do something to reflect on the National Day of Mourning (labeled Thanksgiving on the federal holiday calendar) and Native American Heritage Day and compiled a post I've had in the back of my mind for a couple of years now: “We Are Still Here”: Indigenous-focused Bicycle Programs.

I treat that long four-day weekend (since I get those days off) as a chance to do cooking that takes time, although I don't try to get an entire fancy meal on the table in one fell swoop. Thus I dove into Vegan Cranberry Caramelized Red Onion Orange Chutney Recipe Experimentation.

My morning routine includes reading poetry. Along the way I've encountered more than one poem that somehow involves bicycles. Hence, “I think/therefore/I ride.” A Bike Rack of Bicycle Poems. Like the Kitten Chronicles, that started as a Twitter thread. I invited suggestions, which yielded some of the poems in my post, and I'm continuing the thread so I expect another post in the future. I started a second thread of transportation poems and that's likely to result in a post as well.

Starting a thread of poems with transportation references. As with my thread of bicycle poems these aren't necessarily "about" transportation; transportation appears.
The bike poem thread: https://t.co/x8x6GXCo6j

— Barb Chamberlain (@BarbChamberlain) October 22, 2022

Watching TV with my sweetie, a reference to the Internet of Things sparked some wordplay. We agreed that An Alphabet of Things seemed possible, and a while later I put it together with some of our thoughts and only one bit of research (to find the X word).

As the year drew to a close, I marked the winter solstice during my morning poetry-reading time, which led to Winter Solstice Readings.

My relationship with resolutions has varied over the years. This year I'm making it both fun and easy by thinking in terms of "joy snacks" in Commitment, Bite-Sized and Tasty. To help people get rolling by bike (or some other climate-friendly mode) whether or not they're "resolution types", I rounded up my blog posts over the years that discuss forming new habits, tracking/not tracking your riding, and the nature of commitment in New Year, New Mode(s).

The last day of the year held so many simple pleasures—joy snacks:

• went for a long walk with my sweetheart on what proved to be a sunny, beautiful day after a week of rain, to downtown Olympia for a coffee date and a stop at Peacock Vintage; 
• rode Zelda the e-bike on my first bike ride since breaking my wrist, woohoo!; 
• baked a delicious vegan dish, a tofu/caramelized onion/mushroom filling in a pie dish lined with thin slices of yam; 
• sewed trim onto the hem of a coat that Tiggs had chewed a hole in, hiding the mended spot and making the coat wearable;
• did yoga, making today one of my "triathlons" (walk 5,000 steps or more, ride my bike, and do yoga all in a day); 
• finished this blog post; and
• enjoyed red wine and delicious chocolate at the end of the day while relaxing on the sofa.

A very satisfying way to close out 2022 indeed.

Digital Housework

"No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again. Sometimes I just want it to stay saved, y'know, for a little bit. I fee like the maid: 'I just cleaned up this mess! Can we keep it clean for ten minutes? Please?' " - Mr. Incredible starting at 0:55 in this clip from The Incredibles

I can't keep entropy at bay. The tendency toward randomness and disorder keeps creeping back in. Today I'm dealing with the equivalent of that mountain of laundry that needs to be done. Or more aptly, the garage you need to clean that holds all the boxes you've moved from place to place without ever opening and sorting them. Today, I'm cleaning up digital files.

In How to Do Nothing Jenny O'Dell wrote about the attention economy's logic "that 'disruption' is more productive than the work of maintenance--of keeping ourselves and others alive and well." She wasn't referring to digital maintenance--if I really do what she calls for I'd have a lot less to maintain--but her point still applies.

It's so much more exciting to start something new than to clean up something old, right? To heck with Marie Kondo; in a consumer economy the thrill of buying a new set of shelves far outweighs the tedium of sorting the things we'll set on them and making a run to donate the items we no longer need or want, let alone dusting those shelves in a couple of weeks after they're no longer new and exciting. In the digital context it's more fun to take today's pictures than to review yesterday's pictures, delete the ones we don't want, and organize them in some useful way.

I appreciate and am inspired by O'Dell's deep thinking about the ways in which we have given away our ability to pay attention, to concentrate, to notice what really matters. We are creating enormous economic value for nothing, doing unpaid digital labor that Facebook or Twitter or Google Ad Services monetizes and sells to shareholders. If we are to extract any true value for ourselves, we're going to have to give some thought to maintenance, not just creation.

I have the digital footprint (and attention span) of an early adopter of some, but not all, of the many shiny-object services of the digital age. I've been on Twitter for over a decade, Facebook about that long. I got interviewed as an early user of LinkedIn in my former hometown because I had so many connections before others were using it regularly. I let a TV station follow me around when I was checking in on Foursquare when that was still a thing. I have an Instagram account I never post to and no doubt dozens of dusty spaces on the web with my name on them created for some forgotten reason. When I changed jobs I had to do at least 59 things to deal with my online presence.

There's no way I can track down and delete all these things I'm not maintaining. I do wonder at times about the amount of server space being held for neglected accounts. How long do you suppose my old "burner" email accounts will be available?

I'm not even going to try to find and delete everything I don't use. I'm going to start by cleaning up what I do use. I'll try to define some rules for what I do and don't save that may make maintenance easier going forward.

Take Dropbox, for example. Handy utility. I have that and Google Drive and wherever the images go that are all automatically saved by my cellular service. How much cloud storage does one person need? Not as much as I have access to. Yet I managed to fill the free Dropbox space and start paying for more a few years ago when I was taking lots of pictures in my work as executive director of Washington Bikes. Every bike ride, ribbon-cutting, Bike to Work Day Energizer Station got captured with multiple images.

And they're all still sitting there.

I keep meaning to go in and clean up. Every time I start, I get a few images deleted, then get side-tracked into thinking about whether I want to save some, renaming a few so they have a more meaningful filename than the date they were taken, opening several to determine which one is the best in a series (and I'm no photographer so none of these are very good to begin with), thinking about whether someday I may want to be able to illustrate this particular historic moment for some reason and no one else has any pictures of this, and and and.... You can understand why my Dropbox is so full it will no longer sync across devices and they want me to pay more to get more storage space.

No. It's maintenance time. By which I primarily mean, be bold and hit DELETE, at least on some of those folders.

Like housework in the real world AFK (Away From Keyboard), this may not stay done. The dust bunnies will creep back in. I'll lose track of my good intentions about not saving everything as files when I could simply bookmark a report I want to refer to.

(Oh no, my bookmarks--those need organizing and clean-up too. Or maybe not. My maintenance energy only extends so far and I need to prioritize. Focus, Chamberlain, focus.)

A while back thanks to Twitter, which I do find valuable as a place to give and receive information from people who are still better value filters than a Google search, I encountered The Maintainers, "a global research network interested in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world."

Working in transportation as I do, I know our maintenance backlog is enormous and still growing. The belief that something new is more important than taking care of what we have is evident there as in other sectors of public policy and our economic structures. Lack of maintenance carries a hidden cost to all of us, from repairs to personal vehicles shaken by rough roads and potholes to the broken elbow I received crashing on a trail thanks to a broken surface I tried to avoid on my bike.

One of the costs of failure to maintain my digital space is direct: I'll be charged another year's storage on Dropbox if I don't get my usage down. Another is indirect; if I try to find something in those files I'm digging through all the clutter, just like going through boxes in my garage in search of a specific item time after time.

Maintenance protects, sustains and adds real value in the real world. We need more of it. It may not be shiny, but it's essential.

And here I sit, writing a shiny new blog post instead of digging into those dusty old cloud files.

A Little Love Note to Twitter

I know, I know, Twitter can be a poisonous realm filled with evil trolls.

But it brings me good things in a celebration of serendipity and the spread of good ideas that I don't find elsewhere.

Some examples that inspired this post:

I follow Andrea Learned (@andrealearned) and have for years. I found her when I lived in Spokane, worked in communications, and was building my women's bike blogs list, among other things. We had biking and communications in common. I followed her.

Then I moved to a job in Seattle (for which, by the way, Twitter provided some of my brand-building and influencer identity). I met Andrea in person, we became friends who occasionally get together for bike rides and coffee, and I realized just how much of a leader she was in bridging the worlds of sustainability, bicycling, social impact, green business, and online influence.

So I follow her, retweet her, and look at who she recommends and amplifies. This recently gave me a "you are there" series of tweets as Andrea participated in a climate-action bike ride at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco.

Andrea shared a story recently that taught me how few influencers/changed opinions it takes to turn the tide on something you care about by sharing a link to this Fast Company piece: The magic number of people needed to create social change. The magic number? 25 percent--just one in four.

The whole notion of hashtags as a way to link people with common interests illustrates how Twitter can bring strangers together around a shared idea. A few examples from my interests, and there are many:

• When I look at the spread of concepts like #CrashNotAccident, with people calling out media coverage that doesn't follow the AP stylebook and makes it sound as if a driver hitting someone was somehow inevitable or unavoidable, I know it's worth engaging to keep up the drumbeat.
• More recently #DriverNotCar has emerged--an especially important distinction as we begin to have self-driving cars tested on public roads. The next time you read an article about someone injured or killed while walking or bicycling, look at whether the reporter actually says the driver did it or whether all the actions are attributed to the vehicle.
• Andrea started the use of #bikes4climate to highlight the value of bicycling as carbon-free transportation. 
• Every Thursday night from 6-7pm Pacific time #bikeschool takes place: A "guest prof" asks bikey questions, people chime in with answers. I regularly serve as guest prof and it builds such community that when a #bikeschool regular came to Seattle on a visit, several of us got together for beer and met in real life for the first time.

A #bikeschool #SEAbikes meet-up at @flyingbikecoop with @HyperboreanWolf + her hubs Ben + @bcmartinson @AndreaLearned. Bikey + political talk + a bunch about Alaska. Tons of fun. pic.twitter.com/hGqgX3mtvl

— Barb Chamberlain (@barbchamberlain) July 29, 2018

Another phenomenon I can attribute directly to Twitter activity: The number of people I meet at conferences with whom I can forge a strong and immediate connection. When I introduce myself if the response in a tone of recognition is, "You're Barb Chamberlain?!" I know to answer with, "You must be on Twitter." The answer is always yes.

Why? Because I live-tweet conferences, briefings, any setting in which I'm able to use Twitter to disseminate information relevant to my work and my passions. I type like the wind and I'm good at picking out sound bites--or what we used to refer to as sound bites before they became tweetable comments. A few examples from September 2018, which was a somewhat over-conferenced month for me but one full of great learning and connecting:
#BikeShareConference2018
#WalkBikePlaces (which was attended by more good live-tweeters than many I go to)
#aashtoAM

If you've been avoiding Twitter because you know it's abused by bots and ranters, you don't have to let them scare you away. It can be a space in which to connect, share and learn. And there's always the function that lets you mute certain keywords for a much more...civilized experience.

Wondering where to start? I've compiled some lists around various interests, particularly active transportation and equity. Andrea has a big batch of lists focused around sustainability, climate change and corporate social responsibility. You can follow a list or just look at it to pick out a few people you find interesting. You can always unfollow later if you change your mind. It's not like Facebook, where people (should) only let you connect if they know you in real life and then get their feelings hurt if you unfriend because you're not all that interested in pictures of their grandchildren.

At its best, Twitter lets you learn from and connect with total strangers. If this post encourages you to give it a try--or to come back to an account you started years ago but haven't been active on--give me a shout at @barbchamberlain to let me know. Then we won't be strangers.

Related Reading

• A Tale of Two Climate Weeks: Great piece by Andrea on using social media for influence and connections
• Conclusive Evidence: How the Media Fails Bicyclists

Frittering Away My Mental Energies, Thanks—How About You?

I wrote a lengthy and boring piece quite a while ago about the ramblings and byways I get sucked into working on the computer. That still happens.

It happens even more now that I’ve started a second blog with a bike focus and am seeking to build its traffic. I’ve been pouring energies into promotional efforts for the new blog that result in a lot of Web time that doesn’t ever seem to end.

How could it end? The Web doesn’t--and now I carry it around in the palm of my hand so I don't even have to sit down to click.

There’s always one more blog post I could read and comment on, one more Twitter account I could follow and interact with, one more Facebook page I could give a thumbs-up to and then tag in an update, another question I can answer on Quora to establish my expertise and credentials.

Then I read this piece by Suze Muse, whom I follow on Twitter: Are you using time or wasting it? The answer to that is yes.

By which I mean some of that online time is well-spent—some of it is wasted.

I've found myself thinking of this piece several times since reading it, telling people about it, and applying the principles she outlines (so you need to go read it).

In particular, the social media tab dance (round and round and round between Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Quora, and other “important spaces”) sucks time like a black hole sucks gravity.

I can always "justify" it as professional development, engagement with friends, and promotion of my blog.

Or, as Suze suggests, I can give myself a certain number of minutes in pursuit of those particular outcomes, then close the tabs and go do something else with purpose. 

Powerful stuff.

I just read this older piece by Conversation Agent (another thinker I wouldn’t know if it weren’t for that Twitter time) with some complementary thoughts about cutting down on distractions in order to focus on the destination.

This same theme abounds in blog posts around the globe. You’d think with the number of times I read it and say, “Yes! I agree!” that by now I would have achieved the calm focus of a Zen master. Heh.

One of the things that helps my mental discipline--when I make time for it!--is a regular yoga practice. That serves as moving meditation and makes me much more mindful of all kinds of choices, from how I spend my time to what foods I consume. But I don't have (make!) time for it right now.

Biking, which I do daily for transportation, gives me another tech-free space in which to change up my mental habits and it’s easier to work that into my schedule than a class that has to happen at a specific time.

I also love to cook. Last year I created a lot of non-tech time by preserving up a storm: canning, freezing, drying, making jams and jellies.

This year the new blog launch, putting on Bike Style Spokane shopping events, and other commitments ate up the time I could have put into putting up food and I haven’t been cooking as often (good thing Sweet Hubs loves my Crockpot soups). One priority crowds out another.

So much of our time is spent in technology spaces. Time away from the screen, using our bodies and our hands, can make our mental work better, fresher, and more enjoyable. But none of these really change my habits.

What do you do to stay focused on priorities? (If you manage to pull this off, that is.)

Social media: Drinking from the firehose, being the ocean

Over a year ago I read three questions from @RickButts on Twitter. To experience them the way I did, scrolling back through a few pages of tweets that came up while I was catching up on blog posts in my Google Reader feeds, you have to see them in reverse order, last one first:

• Do we REALLY need all the new resources that provide useful information - when it comes as interruption to our goals?
• By this I mean higher thinking vs over-focusing on trivial to useless information?
• Do you think reading Twitter stream every day makes you smarter or dumber?

The same day, I read a blog post from Zen Habits on the six gifts we can give our loved ones of presence, love, compassion, voice, healthy lifestyle, and belief in them (don’t just read the list of words here—go read the post. Just don’t forget to come back).

The combination of these two inputs made me think about the amount and type of input I receive—and what my output looks like.


Am I present in these spaces, as well as for my family? If not, I shouldn’t waste my time and yours. But it’s really, really tough to be present—in the sense of being mindful and aware—in the online medium that invites you every nano-second to click away to another bright, shiny new toy.

You only learn social media by doing: reading and commenting on blog posts, setting up a Facebook page and finding friends, starting a blog (which I did with no clear idea of its voice or purpose—definitely something to do differently the next time), creating a Twitter account/finding people to follow/attracting followers.

This is professional development for me, keeping up on the latest communication tools. Doing all this as an individual let me learn before applying the lessons to my institution so the mistakes are in my name, not theirs.

Drinking from a firehose is time-consuming. There’s just no way to accomplish this in a standard 40-hour work week; I spend plenty of late nights and weekends. As I noted a year ago, I tend to take on an overload when I plunge into something anyway.

I’ve brought that same intensity to my social media explorations. I didn’t just focus on the main channel, whatever that might be—Facebook? Blog? Twitter? I checked out all the tributaries with the same gusto. Or, you might say, I flitted like a hummingbird from flower to flower, sipping sipping sipping (although the attraction to shiny new objects makes me more magpie than hummingbird).

The learning experience has been great. I’ve used the lessons for work—we won an award for my use of the Twitter account @WSUSpokane as an identity-building tool and I was named a Senior Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research. I’ve also built some online presence for the volunteer organizations I love like Bike to Work Spokane. I became an invited blogger—love the sound of that—on Cycling Spokane. I now speak regularly at local and regional conferences on Twitter and other uses of social media. I even got interviewed on Gov 2.0 radio.

In the year since I read those tweets and that post, the reasons to be thoughtful about inputs and outputs have only increased. 

• I’ve subscribed to and unsubscribed from quite a few blogs, seeking the right mix of creative inspiration, fresh insights, and a manageable Google Reader queue. 
• I’ve scrubbed the list of people I follow on Twitter several times and finally instituted a comprehensive use of lists to help me remember why I wanted to follow a particular account in the first place. (I don't use utilities like Tweetdeck to organize--I prefer to view Twitter as a river flowing by and sip from the stream as I have time.)
• I keep making another run at using LinkedIn more effectively to find resources and connect with people—I know it has value I haven’t found because I haven’t put in the time. 
• One of these days maybe I’ll really start utilizing LaunchPadINW, the local social network.

What I’m trying to do in all these spaces is be more thoughtful about whether I’m truly adding value when I tweet or post versus just distributing random mist. A sense that I’m adding value will keep the firehose manageable for me.

Mindfulness is the secret. The tweets that just pop out like a flood—say, when I’m live-tweeting a conference—aren’t mindful ones. If I’m making a conscious decision about whether or not to subscribe, follow or tweet, it will mean I’m aware and present in the moment. That will slow me down.

This question of value will continue to grow in importance for all of us as the volume just continues to increase. Otherwise how will our little drops of water jump out above the torrent and get noticed?

Bearing in mind, that is, that our sense of being separate droplets is an illusion. We’re all the ocean.

• Deep thoughts on attention as a scarce resource by Daniel Tunkelang

Ways the World Wide Web Allows Me to Procrastinate. Food for Thought, but You Should Do Something Productive Instead of Reading This.

Image via CrunchBase

I could take this one step further and make it a Facebook meme, but I do have a life. Somewhere around here. Backed up on a flash drive. If I remembered to back it up. Dang, I really need to back up more often.

How many of these have you done within the last day? Subtract points if your living actually depends on any of these. Add points if you have no product or service you market online.

1. Logged onto Twitter and read random bits of noise from strangers.
2. Responded to these random bits with your own witty observation.
3. Checked and responded on a second (or third or fourth) Twitter account you also manage.
4. Followed a link someone tweeted.
5. Retweeted a link (extra points if you changed someone else’s short URL to your own system so you can track clickthroughs).
6. Searched on Twitter or any related utility to find interesting people to follow.
7. Updated your Facebook status. (bonus point for doing this several times a day)
8. Written on someone’s Facebook wall.
9. Commented on someone’s update.
10. Commented on someone’s comment on someone else’s update.
11. Did one of those ubiquitous Facebook lists.
12. Tagged friends with said ubiquitous list.
13. Responded to a tag from a friend with another ubiquitous list.
14. (awarded yourself points in your head for having an excuse to use ubiquitous everywhere.)
15. Browsed the Facebook “People You May Know” list and sent out friend requests.
16. Started a blog post.
17. Finished a blog post.
18. Actually posted a blog post.
19. Commented on someone else’s blog.
20. Tweeted a link to your blog.
21. Tweeted a link to someone else’s blog.
22. Clicked “Mark All As Read” in Google Reader because you have several hundred unread blog posts waiting for you.
23. Read something in Google Reader, then clicked on it to read it at the original site, then followed links to other posts, then forgotten where you were and closed the tab without remembering to back up to the post you really, really wanted to tweet about, so now you have to go back to Google Reader and find it again.
24. Favorited, shared, stumbled upon, or whatever-ed anything, anywhere.
25. Checked your work email junk folder.
26. Reviewed and deleted email messages because your IT system sent you one of those annoying messages about how much mail you have stored on the server.
27. Checked your personal email spam folder.
28. Spent time on Facebook or Twitter to avoid looking at your personal email account because of the backlog.
29. Responded to someone’s whitelisting email so your email account can get through to that email account. So you can get more email. Think about this.

Okay, now that you’ve spent time on this, admit it: You’re going to turn it into a blog post, post it on Facebook, tweet about it, or email a link to a friend.

What color are your kids’ eyes again?

And admit it—it’s bothering you that this list has an odd number of items, because you now think everything in a list should have 5, 7, 10, 20, 50, or 100 entries.

Admit a little bit more--you're waiting for some kind of rankings based on accumulated points, or instructions for what you're supposed to do with your point total. You might just reflect on it. And check your kids' eyes.

Tweeting, Twittering, Friending, Following: My Connection Policies & Practices

If you’re here, it’s because you followed a link from one of my profile pages (or for some strange reason you actually read my personal blog—I needed a place to park this). I will keep revising this as I think of new points and as policies change.

I’m on several social networks and use slightly different policies for deciding who I connect with in each. This will explain why I did or didn’t accept your request, follow you back, friend you, or whatever verb you’re expecting, and what kind of content you’re likely to see from me in that space.

Twitter: If you follow me, I look at your profile. Reasons I won’t follow you back include seeing any or all of the following, which are just my preferences (so it's not you, it's me):

• No bio.
• No tweets.
• Tweets that reflect only a desire to sell me something that doesn’t interest me.
• Most of your tweets tell me what you're doing moment to moment, including when you get up in the morning, what you had for breakfast/lunch/dinner, and when you went to bed. A few of these, sure--I do a few myself. Blow-by-blow daily itineraries--not so much.
• You don't appear to share much in the way of information or resources. If I had my way, the Twitter prompt would read, "What are you sharing?" I'm more apt to follow someone when a certain percentage of tweets contains something interesting-looking: a blog, a news item, a site that does something cool, fun, or useful.
• Page after page of @ messages without general tweets to all. I appreciate a mix of @ conversations and general "y'all come!" comments and questions--goes along with the sharing mentality I appreciate. If all your tweets are interactions with individuals, I don't feel as welcome, somehow.
• No @ messages at all. So you're not in any direct conversations at all; you're broadcasting.
• No interests in common from my perspective. You may be interested in some topic(s) that I tweet about, while the reverse may not be true. I’m not looking to build a huge following, and if you unfollow me it’s no big deal—you’re just changing the channel.

If you choose to follow me, I really appreciate it if you send me an @ message to tell me why, or what interests you in my tweetstream. I do that for people I follow to establish an initial connection.

Why I’m on Twitter: For me, the point of Twitter is learning and conversing. I typically follow people with interest or expertise in the same things I tweet about: social media, communications, PR, higher education, bike commuting, active transportation, public policy, government, urban planning, health care, environment, the nonprofit sector, and my geographic region of Spokane/Inland Northwest.

Twitter accounts I manage: @Bike2WrkSpokane, @WSUSpokane, @FriendsofFalls.

Facebook: This is the most “closed” of my social network spaces. If you send me a friend request, I will only accept it if I know you personally. Even if we have common interests, or have a connection through a project I’m involved with such as Bike to Work Spokane, that doesn’t mean I’ll friend you.

My status updates there are fairly personal: what I’m up to, what the family’s doing, my latest blog post, with a little work stuff mixed in. I also manage the WSU Spokane page, and hope you’ll be a fan if it interests you.

LinkedIn: I will accept an invitation to connect if we have had enough interaction that I feel I know you professionally or personally. This could be direct personal contact, or through the medium of discussions on Twitter or via email that have given me some understanding of who you are.

LaunchPadINW: I’m actually still figuring this one out. I am somewhat reluctant to “friend” someone I haven’t met who actually lives in my town. For now, I’m using my Facebook policy, so I have to know you in the real world before I’ll accept your invitation on LaunchPad.

The rest of the world, outside social networks: My email is widely available, so if you want to establish a connection get in touch with me at work.

Better yet, jump into a cause that we both care about--I'm always recruiting for volunteers!

• Citizens for Spokane Schools: Election Day is March 10, 2009, for a renewal of the levy and bond funding essential to Spokane Public Schools.
• Friends of the Falls: We work to engage people directly with the Great Spokane River Gorge so they learn to love our river and work to keep it clean and accessible for generations to come. We should be constructing our whitewater feature in 2009, and your membership dollars will help us keep working on projects in the Strategic Master Plan for the gorge.
• Bike to Work Spokane: We work to promote commuting and community for Spokane cyclists. We partner with the SpokeFest Association, Bicycle Alliance of Washington, and the Spokane Bicycle Advisory Board to educate, encourage, and support bike commuters and the drivers who interact with them.

I’m always happy to build new relationships in the actual real world where we have faces, voices—you know, all three dimensions, or better yet four (being acquainted over time) :D.

ADD on the Interwebz: Where my blog posts come from

Characters:

• Sweetest Husband in the World
• Easily Distracted Wife-Mom
• Eldest Daughter
• Second Daughter

Note: Entire scene must be played out at high speed. Actress cast for Easily Distracted must be able to type at 110 WPM.

Scene: Dining room table. Sweetest Husband is seated at the table, laptop open, cup of coffee on a coaster. Eldest Daughter and Second Daughter lounge on a red sofa against a nearby wall, texting rapidly and giggling occasionally or saying something to each other, sotto voce.

EDWM strides into the room. She pulls her laptop out of a large duffel bag and sets it on the table, then pulls two USB flash drives out of a smaller purse hidden in the large one. SHW watches as she plugs the laptop in, notices the flash drives.

SHW: Have you backed up your drives yet?

EDWM (sheepishly, spoken in the tone of someone who received one particular flash drive in her Christmas stocking two weeks ago, one who has been asked this question before and who really, really meant to get to the task before this):

I knew you were going to ask, and I was just about to!

SHW: Ri-i-i-ght…

EDWM: Seriously, that’s the first thing I’m doing. I won’t even open the Twitter tab.

She begins working at the computer.

EDWM (to no one in particular): I need to back up the old flash drive and My Documents. I’d better do some clean-up first.

At back of stage, large screen shows projection of the tasks she is performing on the computer.

1. Select My Computer.

2. Select old flash drive, check properties. It’s nearly full.

3. Open flash drive. There are 11 folders on the screen, and another dozen or so individual files.

4. Open first folder on list: Accounting.

5. Open subfolder KidAccounting.

6. Open each of the 3 spreadsheets there. Scroll down, lingering a while in two with similar time frames in the file names to see if they’re actually the same document renamed back in 2006 for some long forgotten reason. Decide they need to be kept, close each.

7. Back up a level to Accounting.

8. Open subfolder QuickenData.

9. Change view from Thumbnail to List. Spend time figuring out Quicken’s strange way of naming backup files. Delete all but the most recent, realizing just in time that there are several different file extensions and you should probably keep all with the same dates in the name, just in case.

10. Back up a level to Accounting.

11. Open subfolder Taxes.

12. All files in this folder have a date in the filename that is more recent than 7 years ago, so don’t delete any.

13. Back up a level to Accounting.

14. Open file named for house address. On screen is a calculation of the ownership shares of two unmarried individuals buying a house together, showing the expenses of the purchase and an estimated household budget. Delete this, because these two individuals are now married, community property law applies, and SHW is the love of EDW’s life (third time IS the charm).

15. Open a file named Account Summaries because you can’t remember what’s in there. It’s a list of financial accounts—surprise!—last updated over 18 months ago. Close file, but don’t delete—you never know when you might actually update it.

16. Back up another level to the flash drive directory.

17. Open next file in alphabetical list: Blog.

18. Long list of obscure and cryptic file names appears on screen.

19. Scroll somewhat aimlessly up and down. Create a subfolder named Posted.

20. Move several files quickly into this folder. Open a few more to be reminded which ones they were; move some into the folder, leave some in the main folder.

21. Two have similar names: Everyday Heroes, and Useful Super Hero Traits. Open each one to see what it’s about.

22. Close Everyday Heroes, move it into the Posted subfolder.

23. Realize that it has been a few days since you put up a blog post, and Useful Super Hero Traits is just about good to go.

24. Go to Internet browser tab at bottom of screen and click to maximize.

25. The browser has several tabs already open: Gmail, Facebook, Google Reader, Twitter, Twurl, Hotmail, ESD101.

26. Open a new tab, begin typing in blog URL, select Google’s autocomplete suggestion. It shows the account is already signed in.

27. Click on New Post at upper right.

Eldest Daughter and Second Daughter are talking, loudly enough for EDW to hear:

ED: Is school closed again tomorrow?

SD (looking down at cell phone screen): Karl says so. He goes to Rogers and that’s District 81.

ED: They wouldn’t close just one school in the district.

Screen projection:

28. Open another tab in the browser.

29. Type esd101.net.

30. Click on red-letter bold-type Snow Closures at top of lefthand nav bar.

31. Scroll down on resulting page to reach a text box.

32. Scroll down inside the textbox, reach the bottom, start back up again reading slowly because these alerts are posted as they come in, and the most recent is on the bottom. Shake head sadly at the poor user interface design this reflects.

33. Spot School District 81, stop scrolling.

EDW reads aloud: Spokane Public Schools will be closed on Thursday January 8, 2009 due to dangerous residential road conditions and rapidly melting snow.

ED and SD (more or less simultaneously): Yay! No school!

EDW: Oh! I already had ESD open. I just automatically started typing.

Screen projection:

34. Closes righthand tab, revealing that the next tab to the left is the same page.

SHW, to EDW (taking advantage of the opening): You know my incomplete? I talked to my prof and he said the paper has to be 10 pages long. I’m supposed to collect real customer data and analyze that. That’s where I ran into the problem because I can’t get a list of the dealers to survey.

EDW: I asked a question about this on Twitter today. I got those responses I already sent you but I didn’t ask the question the right way, so I sent another tweet. Let me see what they said.

Screen projection:

35. Click on Twitter tab.

36. Go to DMs. Scroll down, pause on one.

EDW (reading aloud): Can you tell me which product or products he is interested in manufacturing? That may help me help you.

EDW (turns from screen to face SHW): Is it okay to tell him what you’re making? This is in a DM so nobody else will see it.

SHW: Sure, I don’t see why not. Accessories for the Hobie Mirage Adventure Island.

EDW (repeating, stumbling slightly): The Adventure Mirage Island?

SHW (patiently): The Hobie Mirage Adventure Island.

Screen projection:

37. Click on DM reply button next to the message she read aloud.

ESDW says (typing simultaneously): That's what's so cool about Twitter! I don't know this guy--I think it's a guy. I just put out a question and I got answers.

Screen projection:

38. Type: We need to know how many Hobie dealers there are & how many Adventure Mirage Islands they sell ea yr (for 1 product); making an accessory.

39. Hit Enter. DM appears on screen.

EDW: Adventure Mirage Islands, right?

SHW (enunciating clearly and slowly): Mirage. Adventure. Island. M-A-I.

EDW: I got it wrong!

Screen projection:

40. Click on DM reply next to the same message.

41. Type: I got the name wrong! Hobie Mirage Adventure Island (MAI) is the product for which we need annual sales figures & dealer #s/contact info

Voiceover narration of EDW’s thoughts: Hey, this would make a great blog post! I'm supposed to be backing up my files.

Screen projection continues:

42. Maximize Word tab at bottom of screen.

43. In Word, click on New Document shortcut at top of screen. That annoying screen that requires you to acknowledge that yes, when you say New Document, you mean Blank Document--not a Calendar or anything else involving a Wizard or other magical creature--appears.

44. Click on Blank Document. Remember that it requires a double click. Sigh impatiently. Click twice. Firmly.

45. Begin typing: ADD.

46. Hit Ctrl-S.

47. When file name entry box appears, type ADD on the interwebz and click Save.

48. Back in new document, begin typing: Characters: Sweetest Husband in the World....