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Vine, a mobile app that allows users to record and share 6-second videos, launched for Android today. In short, it’s like Instagram but for videos.

To celebrate the Android launch, we had some fun creating HTC’s first Vine. Props to Nick Sherrill for writing, casting, directing, and producing this video all on the HTC One.

Also, props to Vine for having an easy-to-use embed option built into each post!

There are no words to describe the tragedy that happened yesterday in Boston. I was not there and I am not a runner. But I am an athlete and my friends are athletes. I have gone to their events and sat in the stands, cheering them on, anxiously waiting for them to finish. As I watch the news and wait for truth to unfold, I think same thoughts as the rest of the nation.

This morning, Scott Poole, a poet who I deeply respect and had the opportunity to work for in the past, posted this poem on Facebook hoping that someone from Boston would see it and his words would help them heal. Through the magic of social media, his poem caught the attention of Boston’s NPR station, WBUR, and they’ve asked him to read it tomorrow on their show Here and Now. And it is my pleasure to share it with you.

Thinking of Boston.

To Run

a prayer for Boston by Scott Poole

To run
is to rise above the weak spirit
is to take on pain
is to push pain in the chest
with both palms

stumbling over garbage,
gravel, fragments of life,

is to say I will take you
on in the street.
Every breath of mine
is a battering ram,

shoving, crushing,
swinging a hammer of air.

I am a body of fast moving blood
inhaling you
taking you in like a tank.
I will consume your hate.

I will run straight into you
as if you were a finish line of joy,
picking up the fallen along the way
and you will never stop me,
you will never
stop me.

Image via Live Wire Radio

Two weeks ago, my blog turned three. And I celebrated the occasion with a tweet and a Facebook post and intentions to publish the post that I’m writing right now. And here we are.

In the first year, I published 55 blogs. In the second year, 59 blogs. And in the third year. I published 30 blog posts. And yet, the third year was one of the best years in my blog’s history because of two separate, but connected events – speaking at WordCamp Seattle and WordCamp Portland.

I started this blog to find my voice and have a place to write. But it quickly turned into a hub around connecting with people. From random conversations with people I meet on Twitter to coffee shop dates with bloggers I admire, or three-degrees of separation that turn into job offers, most of the people I have met over the past three years have been connected to this blog and the doors that it has opened to me. And for all of the specific and vague connections I have made over the past three years, I am grateful.

My blog’s third year started off with more momentum, posts, and excitement than I could imagine. But after the second speaking event at the end of summer, everything went into a quiet hiatus. I still wrote and published blogs, but things slowed way down over here as I focused my creative energy into a new fulltime job I started in September. But when I look at the past year as a whole and ignore my goal of publishing more posts than I had in the previous year, my blog’s third year was a momentous one.

And to commemorate its birthday, here’s a little roundup of lessons learned, best posts, and the random ways that people find my blog.

The Three Most Important Lessons I’ve learned in Three Years of Blogging

1. You never have enough time to blog as you want to. I laughed when putting together my slides about blogging every day because I knew someone would ask, “How do you find the time to blog?” and the answer I prepared the following answer: you just do.  For whatever reason, this fall I really understood what it meant to not have enough time to do anything other than go to work, eat, and barely get enough sleep to be energized to tackle the next day. I’ve had fulltime jobs before, but the one I started was different and I could not (still cannot) explain why. And while, for the first time in my life, I’m happy going through the motions and just being that person who goes to work and comes home, the writer inside of me is aching to write more. And the only way to satisfy her is to steal that time from somewhere else and, sit down, shut up, and pound the keyboard until words appear.

2. The post you pour your heart and soul into writing will never resonate with readers as much as the one you write and publish in the moment. There is a time and a place for epic blog posts that you spend hours researching, writing, editing, and perfecting. And while it feels good to write those essays, when it comes to blogs and writing content that people (you) care about, are posts that are written in an hour’s notice based on the ideas that you’ve been chewing on over the past few days. Stop thinking. Start writing.

3. Numbers alone don’t measure success. I’ve been struggling to write this recap and feel good about my third year of blogging because I haven’t been blogging lately. I didn’t blog every day in November. And I didn’t post at all in December. But when I think about all the people I have met and the opportunities I have had because of the work I have put into my blog since the beginning, it has been a damn successful year.  Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: I realize it’s the last week of January and it’s a tad tacky to post my “year in review” blog post. But do you know what’s even tackier than that? Publishing a year-in-review blog post in February.

Days before the clock struck midnight and we rang in a New Year, I sat on Skype having a conversation with a dear friend about anything and everything that happened in the year that the world did not end. In the middle of the call, my husband dropped in and showed off the framed piece of artwork he illustrated for our nephew. This piece he drew, brushed, and water colored in his studio on a desk that he didn’t imagine owning a year ago. But over the past year, it has been the location where his best work has come to life.

Back on the call, my friend described the successes and detours his business had throughout the past year; a business that was a glimmer of an idea less than two years before. Then I connected the dots that lead me to the day job that I’m so fortunate to have landed, happy to be at, and invested in today.

At the end of my story said the something that I’ve been repeating over and over to myself as I entered the New Year: How did we get here?

Every year when holidays settle down and the clock runs out, I try to reflect on how I started the previous year and how it ultimately ended. It’s at this point when I see the things that were such a struggle, the moments that were absolutely wretched, and the moments when everything happened for a reason and the stress was totally worth it.

2012 was—without a doubt—a crazy year. As I look back on my 2011 year in review, I had no idea how completely different life would be a year later due to things that were beyond my control. I knew the year would take it’s own shape, so I said “no” to resolutions and framed the year around goals, mantras, and priorities. But as the note cards lost their adhesion, goals literally fell off the wall, and life marched on. But unlike last year that ended with me feeling disappointed that things didn’t go as planned, this year I’m okay with that 2012 had a different ending than how it began. Read the rest of this entry »

Museums are not places that we go to be entertained, they are places that we go to come together and discuss ideas. They exist to make us think.

Wendy Simons, a docent at the Seattle Art Museum, said a version of the above at the end of our tour. A few weeks ago, the Seattle Art Museum invited a group of bloggers to the museum for a preview and a guided tour of Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou, Paris exhibit. Elles at the Seattle Art Museum features more than 125 works of art made by 75 women artists from 1909 to 2007 and through their work reveals a history of 20th and 21st century art from a perspective that we’ve never seen before, women. And this exhibit is a fraction of the 500 pieces that were part of the original exhibit at the Pompidou in Paris, France.

Before Elles first appeared in at the Pompidou from May 2009 to March 2011, art by women were never part of discourse on the history of art and culture. Think back to when you were in school and learned the names of Henri Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gaguin, and many other artists of the 20^th century. Did you ever stop to ask why there wasn’t a single female artist included in those lessons?

It wasn’t that women weren’t creating art during this time. They were painting; we just didn’t know their names.

Elles exists to change that and show how the twentieth century looked through the eyes of women like Natalia Gontcharova, Tamara de Lempicka, Suzanne Valadon, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Hannah Wilke, Dora Maar, Diane Arbus, and many more. Names that I didn’t know until I saw their art for the first time at the Seattle Art Museum. Read the rest of this entry »