Today’s challenge involves promoting a post of our blog. What’s interesting about this task is that Darren points out that sometimes as blogger we fail to realize that promoting the whole blog, or the front page of our blog might be counterproductive, as possibly it is too vague. So he recommends selecting one or two posts a week to which you can give an extra push. In his post on the theoretical aspect of this lesson, Darren suggests a variety of ways in which we can promote our blog post. Here are a few that I think I can do:

• Putting your post on Twitter or Facebeook – I use both of these social networking tools, so this is something I can do.
• Promoting the post on Digg or Stumbleupon – I have registered accounts with both, so I can do this too.
• Comment on other people’s blogs – in this case I would not actually insert a link into the post, but I would get an automatic link by leaving the comment. And if the blog uses Commentluv (a Wordpress plugin that automatically displays the most recent post the commenter published, but which allows them to also choose a different post) then I can select the post in question for display. If people like the title, they will click on it.
• Using your Newsletter – I have a newsletter, so I can send out my newsletter with a plug of that post so people will click on the link.

This is about all I can handle. I mention in the title of this post that this task is especially challenging for me. I am not very good at self-promotion. I would rather just do my thing and wait for people to pick up on it on their own. This blog is slowly climbing the Google Page Rank ladder. I already have a Page Rank of 3 (for those who don’t know what this means, Google has a complicated system based on incoming links and pages loads and a bunch of other things, that it uses to rank websites. It takes some time usually to just get a Page Rank of 1. The highest is 10). But I find it hard to say: hey, look at me, I’m so great, my blog is so entertaining and interesting and informative, you have to read everything I write, and subscribe and get the newsletter and give me lots of money through different channels… But I have to get over that to a certain extent, because I am trying to build an internet business. Turtle^haus may not be “it.” I may end up building another blog entirely (I’ve been thinking of a cooking blog lately, because I’m on a diet and can’t eat anything. When I’m on a diet I get the urge to cook like crazy, so I can have at least the vicarious pleasure of seeing my family and friends enjoy the food I make. And I love food so much, just handling it… well, you understand why I’m fat, don’t you?)

Oh, my post of choice… let me select one. Hang on, I’ll be right back.

Okay, the post I am going to promote is the first segment of my 3-part interview with my friend Amanda Ackroyd, of Leeds, Yorkshire, England. Amanda and I went to boarding school together and have recently found each other again. We are as close today as we were then, in fact I would daresay that we are closer now. She is a writer and I very much want to help her publish her novel. So, here goes, the post I am promoting is: Author Interview: Amanda Ackroyd – part I.

(By the way, a suggestion that is frequently given by Darren and other blogging gurus is to occasionally link to your own posts inside newer posts so as to lead your readers back into your archives.)

I will report back in a bit. Off I go!

Okay, I’ve done three of the four tasks for both blogs (this one and Life+Web), and the Newsletter will have to wait until after the family Easter get-together, for which I’m leaving right now! Happy Easter everyone (or happy whatever you celebrate)

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This is the first post of a series on bloggers who inspire me. It is also day 2 of the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge, and today’s task is to write a “list post.” As far as possible, I have decided to adapt the tasks of the Challenge to the posts I had already scheduled on my editorial calendar. Since there are so many things about my friend Mario Kluser that I admire and find inspiring, I think it will be very helpful to take the approach of a list post.
I have already spoken extensively of Mario in this blog. I interviewed him with reference to his two novels (and there are podcasts to go with his interviews), and I have linked to his blog on various occasions. I have never talked in depth about our friendship or about our professional relationship, nor have I really spoken much about his blog.
His blog is called Mario LIVE! and the tag line is “The People Blog.” No tag line has ever been more apt. For those who may not be familiar with our history, as it is a good story, here’s a little background. Mario and I met on Twitter in November of 2007. I was new to Twitter and Mario was one of my first two friends. Both he and the other friend, an Italian, went on to become “real life” friends, and visited me in New York in 2008. Both will be friends for life. What induced me to ask Mario to be my friend was his tone. I could sense kindness, warmth, friendliness and a sense of humor in his tweets (amazing what 140 little characters will reveal about a person), and I was right. He is a kindred spirit, and as they are hard to find, it’s a good idea to befriend one when you spot one.


After a short while we began to correspond via email, and we soon discovered that we were in similar professional situations, both looking for work in our chosen fields and not finding it in the current economic climate, and both in the process of deciding to make our own fortunes so as not to have to live with the pain and suffering of depending on an employer. We would both rather depend on the world at large.

He was already experienced in internet marketing, with AdWords, AdSense, landing pages, squeeze pages, etc., but knew very little about blogging, having always been under the impression that it was for whiny teenagers who just wanted to put their “diaries” online, and things of that nature. I, on the other hand, had already had a very intense blogging experience and was in the process of launching what are my two current blogs, turtle^haus and Life+Web. I told him a little about what I thought blogging was and could be, and he was convinced. Thus, Mario LIVE! was born. Mario and I discovered that we have complementary skills in business and complementary work experiences, and decided to join forces on special projects. Now, in addition to our blogs, we are helping a few corporate clients increase their online visibility and bring more clients through the virtual doors of their companies.

So, without further ado, here are 6 of the many reasons why Mario of Mario LIVE! inspires me:

1. He is a DOER and not a TALKER. I told him I was launching a blog and he was still quite skeptical. Within two short weeks, his blog was up and running, with a dozen posts, active comments, and so on, while mine was still heavily in the “design” phase and only had two or three posts. He has now well surpassed 100 posts in 6 months, and has now started a lovely newsletter;
2. He is absolutely AUTHENTIC (an overused buzz word in the world of blogging) in a way that is difficult to find;
3. He is not afraid to EXPRESS HIS OPINION and has no concern for what others might think or whether they may disagree with him. Don’t misunderstand me, he is not defiant and “in-your-face.” Quite the contrary. He is willing to bare his soul and share his innermost thoughts and feelings with the world, and does not let fads, trends, political correctness or the media influence his voice;
4. He is GUILELESS, CANDID, and POSITIVE. This does not mean that he never has negative feelings or that he is immune from being a little depressed or overwhelmed at times, but he always bounces back, and has a SOLUTION-ORIENTED attitude. Rather than dwelling on what is going wrong, he very quickly focuses on HOW CAN WE FIX THE PROBLEM AND MOVE ON.
5. His sense of WONDER is still very much alive. This is perhaps his most unique characteristic and one I find very winning. In fact, I think it is what sets him apart from other bloggers and will ultimately make his success online. It is a CHILDLIKE (not to be confused with childish) quality that allows us, his readers, to see his eyes widen in the face of extraordinary events or personal actions, and our eyes widen with his.
6. He KNOWS WHO HE IS as a person and as a blogger.

As with most bloggers, Mario did not immediately know what his blog was going to be about, what his MISSION was. At first he had a ton of different categories. He still has several categories, but nowadays they are much more coherent and the parts meld nicely into a recognizable and very pleasing whole.

His blog is tagged as “the people blog” because Mario finds inspiration in the actions of others. And these others don’t have to be celebrities. Anyone is worthy of a blog post, even a conversation overheard at the bus stop can inspire a story. But what he has to say is always interesting. Human interest, I would say, is the main focus of his posts. His stories are always heartfelt and entertaining, and I am always sucked in right from the opening sentence.

An overview of the things that interest him:

• The human mind
• Hypnosis
• Depression and overcoming it
• Friendship
• Overcoming life’s obstacles
• Personal finances
• Curious, fun, amazing things he finds surfing the web
• Music
• Photography
• Videography
• Films – he writes regular film reviews
• Books – as a writer he also reads a lot, and writes book reviews
• Animals – he has a pet rabbit, some hamsters (or is it gerbils?) and a cat. His girlfriend has a dog. They are sometimes featured
• Twitter
• Social media
• Motivation
• Television shows (he wants to be a corpse on one of the CSI shows)
• Fulfilling his dreams – this is another reason I should have mentioned. He is not afraid of pursuing his dreams, and he puts them right out there in the universe. I have no doubt that he will achieve most if not all of them
• New York and Brooklyn (where I live, now a second home to him)
• People and their stories.

When I get discouraged or a little “blocked” with my blogging or our online ventures, he always knows what to say to encourage me and get me going again. We motivate and encourage each other, we are each other’s biggest fans. At the end of his visit with me in November, on the day he was leaving, he said, “From now on, if they ask me whether I have any siblings, I will say yes, two: a brother in Germany and a sister in New York.” That’s the kind of person he is.

I am proud to be his friend and adopted sister, and so very happy to have found him. Thanks, Mario!

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Cristina and Lisa’s social experiment with Twitter has come to an end, and I am thrilled to present the final analysis of their tweets. First, let’s review their basic situation and the purposes of this experiment.

1. Cristina and Lisa share a life, two houses and a main area of interest in their profession, but they spend most of the time in two different cities: Cristina in New York, in the new apartment they have just purchased, and Lisa in North Carolina, in the “old” house they bought together several years ago and shared until a professional engagement brought Cristina to New York.
2. The house in North Carolina, having been lived in by the couple for quite some time, is already set up to accommodate their lifestyle, but the new apartment in New York presented a white canvas, as it were, to be customized as much as space and finances allowed. Our goal was to make Lisa’s visits as seamless and convenient as possible, by allowing her to travel light and to have the “perfect” setup waiting for her on her arrival. All this while accommodating Cristina’s needs on a daily basis.

By analyzing the hourly tweets of Cristina and Lisa over a two-week period, we set out to:

1. Capture their “life flow,” the rhythm of their daily lives, their routines and habits;
2. Gain insight into their relationship with their home and work spaces (they often overlap);
3. Understand what is important to them in their relationship with their space.

At the end of the first week, I printed out and analyzed their tweets, and reached a fair number of preliminary conclusions and tentative recommendations. Now the second week has ended, and I am curious to find out whether one week might have been enough to get a fairly good picture of their situation, or whether this second week has given us some deeper glimpses that we might have missed had we stopped the experiment after the first seven days. So, here goes.

First, some statistics:

Cristina:

• Total number of tweets in the second week: 205
• from computer: 205 (almost all from Twitterfox, a small number from Twitter.com)
• from iPhone: none

Lisa:

• Total number of tweets in the second week: 66
• from computer: 42 (Twitter.com)
• from iPhone: 24 (Twitterific)

They both did a great job again. The discrepancy in numbers is due not to the fact that Lisa’s commitment is lacking, but to the fact that her semester had already begun while Cristina’s was still gearing up.

New Insights into Cristina’s Life Flow

• Now that some more furniture has arrived, Cristina has been able to add to her morning ritual the reading of the paper in the kitchen. The best thing about this apartment is the light. The quantity and the quality. She can also read the paper in the dining room, where there is a new very large table from CB2.
• This week was very busy, between furniture deliveries and preparations for the new semester at school, so Cristina was even worse about her eating habits than usual: she neglected her shopping, cooking and eating, frequently skipping lunch and/or snacks or highly necessary cups of espresso!
• I can confirm that morning is the most important time in Cristina’s day, in terms not only of the ritual of awakening, breakfast, radio, communication with family, paper reading, etc. but also as far as setting the tone for the day. This week, in anticipation of the new semester and experiencing a mixture of anxiety and excitement about all the furniture deliveries and assembly, as well as managing and coordinating the various helpers, Cristina woke up very early several times, but I never detected a feeling of unease, which is comforting. She reads in bed, almost always on her Kindle ***an interesting detail vis-a-vis gadgets***.
• The home office seems to be gearing up nicely. Cristina is able to communicate with family via Skype, use Google Docs to collaborate with her Graduate Assistants (GAs), and of course do her own research and writing, and let’s not forget Twitter!
• Her days at work have been more intense but similar in pattern to those of the previous week.
• An important new development of this week has been that Cristina has begun to familiarize herself not only with her apartment but also with her building and her neighborhood. She is definitely a city girl, loves the fact that she can walk everywhere in very little time and that almost everything she needs is located conveniently nearby. There is a gym, so the next thing that is going to be included in her daily routine is some kind of exercise, like yoga perhaps. ***apartment vs. house — my outlook vs. hers, see below in the conclusion***
• I can foresee that evenings will begin to rival mornings in terms of rituals.  The slow, languid teeth brushing in front of the tv, the Kindle reading in bed, the takeout dinner with a friend in front of a movie… it all sounds lovely.

Observations on Cristina’s Experience of Her New Apartment

• The washer/dryer cannot be installed soon enough, as far as I can tell. This week Cristina has repeatedly tweeted about her procrastination with the laundry, and I’m sure it’s due to the fact that it’s not fun to go down to the basement. Once she installs the appliance in her kitchen the quality of her daily life will improve tremendously.
• The kitchen has already improved quite a bit with the simple addition of a table, and Cristina’s gladness is apparent from her tweets about her morning ritual. She might benefit from having a tiny tv in the kitchen.

Lisa’s Life Flow

• This week Lisa’s semester has really picked up, and therefore she has had even less time to tweet. But her routine seems to be much the same as last week’s. Much of her day is taken up by work, whether she is at home or at school. When at home, as always, work is conducted on the floor with a laptop.
• Lisa’s habits have overall been confirmed. I find it wonderful how in sync these two people are! Lisa too barely speaks of cooking, preparing food or eating (both Lisa and Cristina are miniscule women. They each weigh about four ounces.)

Conclusions and Recommendations

• First of all, I don’t think that the second week of tweeting yielded any very deep insights that I had not already intuited after the first week, but something very interesting did happen. The tweets became at the same time more self-conscious and more relaxed and meditative, like musings. Cristina and Lisa started to become accustomed to Twitter, and began to breathe into their tweets. Not to sound too new-agey, but that is what tends to happen. After the first week I was already impressed by how much the lives of these two very different people were in harmony. Through two very different routes, somehow they have arrived at the same place. Both appreciate simplicity, modern lines, organization. Neither of them wants to have to devote too much time to housework, but both need their space to be clean, in order and efficient. They are in the same field of work, are very devoted to their work, mix their work with their play. Lisa, after reading my analysis of the first week of tweets, commented that their lives are pathetic, probably in reference to the fact that they both work so much. I, on the other hand, find their lives to be very Zen. They have intertwined their professional and personal interests in a way that seamlessly weaves their “real” life into their “work” life and each component feeds and enriches the other.
• For the apartment in New York I recommend taking the maximum advantage of the storage space in the basement, freeing up as much of the space as possible in the apartment, so that both Cristina and Lisa can allow their minds to open to all the light and white surfaces that the apartment is now filling up with. Cristina repeatedly mentioned that she spends very little time in the kitchen preparing food because while she is doing it she can’t really “relax,” but her hints at the lack of a tv in there make me think that she equates relaxing and watching tv to a high degree. So I definitely recommend a small television in the kitchen. Lisa would like a microwave, and I think it would be a good addition, since cooking is not high on the agenda. A microwave is also useful to heat up leftovers that have been frozen, and since these two eat like sparrows, I think it highly likely that there will be plenty of leftovers.
• The dining room now has the lovely white table from CB2, but I think it should also house the sofabed for guests. It might seem, at first glance, that the best room for guests would be the study at the end of the apartment, but I don’t think that would be a good idea. Cristina’s mother from Italy comes to visit once a year or so, and naturally, having come so far she tends to stay for a while. Both Cristina and Lisa are early risers and immediately sit down at their computers to check emails and flex their brain muscles. If there were a guest in the study they could not do this, and in the long run it might make the hosting experience stressful, when it doesn’t need to be. If the guest were sleeping in the dining room, they could just slip by, move into the study, and everyone would be happy.
• The bathroom has acquired some new fixtures and seems to be very functional already. One day there will be money to redo the tiles and things like that, but for the time being I would say it’s fine as it is.
• Storage has been added to the bedroom, as we had all reached the conclusion that this is the room in the house that receives the least amount of “love” from the two women. They sleep in the bedroom and read in bed, but no significant amount of daytime is spent there and it is not a focus of their domestic attention.
• I would definitely invest in a radio wiring or wireless (even better) system throughout the house, so that NPR can follow them around during their morning routine.

As a final note, I would just like to speak about my friendship with Cristina for a moment. We have been friends for over a year now, I think, and I have been able to follow the acquisition of this apartment from the first glimmer in her eye to the furnishing and inhabiting phase. When she first started talking about buying a place I encouraged her to buy a house rather than an apartment. For nearly the same amount of money she could have much more space for herself and perhaps also a tenant, like I have. But she stuck to her guns and said that since she spends most of her time alone, a house would make her feel lonely. That an apartment building is a small community, where you can hear other people around you. I must say that now that it’s all over, I think she did the right thing. Both women care about the shape of the house, but neither wants to spend too much time taking care of it (they have too many much more interesting things to do) and I couldn’t agree more. This way, they have the best of all worlds. A house in North Carolina, an apartment in New York, two spaces perfectly in sync with their respective environments.

I am going to be visiting the apartment again very soon and taking a new set of pictures, so stay tuned for the completion of this wonderful and inspiring experiment. Thank you, Cristina and Lisa, for allowing me and the world into your wonderful lives. I wish you joy and serenity in your new place, and I think you’re off to a great start!

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Cristina and Lisa have been tweeting (or Twittering, or using Twitter) for a whole week, and they have been fantastic. The regularity and quality of their tweets have been exceptional, so I think I can already glean some juicy information on their lifestyle, the flow of their day, as it were.

First off, some stats:

Cristina:

• total updates: 193
• from computer: 192 (either from Twitter.com or Twitterfox)
• from iPhone: 1 (Twitterific)

Lisa:

• total updates: 101
• from computer: 81 (either from Twitter.com or Twitterfox)
• from iPhone: 20 (Twitterific)

As you can see, they both did a great job!

Cristina’s Life Flow

• The morning ritual seems well fixed and harmonious with her usual tendencies. In other words, she is not expressing a need to adjust to the new environment. The order of the rooms works well for her morning routine. Up from bed, quick bathroom stop, kitchen for coffee and frugal breakfast, paper.
• The radio is a very important component of Cristina’s home life. ***Perhaps a radio system throughout the house*** [She mentions that she would like the radio to follow her from room to room].
• When she doesn’t have to go to school, she settles in her study after breakfast and takes care of email and Skype calls to her family in Italy — This ritual is performed with high regularity every morning. Her desk is against the far wall of the room, with the windows to her right, but she finds her body turning toward the light and says she feels like a sunflower. ***Suggestion for week 2: Experiment by putting the desk between the two windows, so she can see the sky (which she has mentioned has a meditative, soothing effect on her) and avoid glare on her computer screen.***
• Food is not a focus for Cristina, or should I say cooking. She likes to eat very healthy food, preferably a vegetarian diet, but prefers frequent small snacks to fewer larger meals. Her cooking is reduced to a minimum but she takes great pleasure in cleaning and organizing the kitchen. By the end of the first week she has set the kitchen up quite to her satisfaction. ***Note: the kitchen needs to be entirely redone, but now is not the time. This is perhaps the best that can be done in the short term.***
• It is clear to me that breakfast is the most important meal of the day for Cristina. She has tweeted more and in much more detail about her entire morning ritual, from the moment of awakening to the espresso coffee on the stove and the healthy slice of toasted bread, to the reading of the paper and listening to the radio, on to emails and Skype calls home. Her morning ritual is very important to her and it seems that this apartment is well suited to her rhythm.
• Lunch is a quick affair: if at work, takeout or a quick lunch place with colleagues, on which not much emphasis has been put. If at home, also a quick and light meal with very little fuss in the kitchen, and then back to work.
• After work hours are over, in the evening there is some relaxed computer work with perhaps the accompaniment of the television or radio, and reading in bed before sleeping.

General Observations on Cristina’s experience of her new apartment

• It is no coincidence that Cristina has chosen the top floor of her building. The light is extremely important to her. She notes that she and Lisa disagree on the color of the paint on the walls of the study, but during this week has had a revelation. Having for the first time had the opportunity to spend some time in the room, she has noted that when the sky is overcast the color of the walls merges, almost melds with the color of the sky outside, giving her a wonderful feeling of peace. ***I recommend that before any changes are made to the colors of the walls both Cristina and Lisa should experience the various feelings that different weather conditions create, with changing light and shades of sky.***
• The kitchen, while small and antiquated, is for the moment adequate. It has been fitted for a washer/dryer, which will improve the quality of their lives immensely. Cristina has quickly outfitted and configured the kitchen to fit her regimen, and she has repeatedly expressed satisfaction with the current layout. ***I recommend that when the time comes to redo some parts of the apartment, care should be taken to consider the morning flow, in particular, as that is the most important moment of the day for Cristina.***
• Not many tweets focus on the bedroom. I deduce from this that Cristina mainly uses the bedroom for sleeping, reading in bed and storing clothing, but that her emotional attachment to the room is not great. ***Since storage space is very scarce in the apartment and the bedroom seems to be used really only at night, I recommend making the most of the space in terms of storage potential, with perhaps a wardrobe and drawer or shelving combination.***

Lisa’s Life Flow

• I deduce from the tweets that the house in North Carolina is on two levels, because she tweets about “back upstairs” at one point. So, here’s how I see her morning routine: Wake up, go downstairs to make coffee, back up with coffee in hand, shower upstairs where the bedroom and master bath is, back downstairs for breakfast, and then out to work.
• During the day Lisa is very busy and had many meetings.  She doesn’t really talk about lunch, so I assume she has a quick bite while she works. Lunch is always referred to as “going to grab some lunch,” so it must be on the go.
• At the end of the work day she almost always bring work home with her. She often complains of clutter in her work space, on her desk, in her office and about needing a better filing system for her various projects and assignments. ***I suggest moving as much of her work online as possible, something like Google Docs, so she can work anywhere at all, at home and also in New York (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).***
• A very interesting characteristic of Lisa is that when she is at home in the evening or on the weekend and she is working (which she seems to be doing non-stop, seven days a week, she always sits on the floor. She speaks of leaning against the couch with a couple of cushions and mentions that more back support would be a good thing. ***Accommodations must be made in the study in New York for her work habits on the floor. There are floor cushions made for sitting, with back support, like the BackJack Chair, which folds away flat and is easy to store in between visits.***
• When at home, Lisa too listens to the radio, and in the evening likes to watch a little television.

Tentative Conclusions

1. Cristina and Lisa seem to have very compatible lifestyles, preferences and habits. Having spent only one morning with the two of them together, I had a great feeling of ease and comfort, a very nice vibe.
2. They both listen to the radio and both can have the tv in the background when they work at night.
3. Neither of them seems to spend a lot of time cooking, so the small kitchen is not too much of a drawback. And their kitchen habits seem complementary, because from what I understand when they are together Lisa does the cooking and Cristina does the cleaning up, which we already know she enjoys greatly [I love to clean the kitchen too, so I understand the feeling].
4. Neither of them spent any significant time talking about the bedroom as an important space to inhabit, so I am confirmed in my intuition that it is a good room in which to store things (storage space is very scarce in the apartment, but they do have a storage room in the basement of the building).

Tentative Recommendations

• Right after the purchase of a new home there is not a lot of money to spend on fixing the place up or renovating, so it’s important to be able to focus on what is really important.
• I would give top priority to the study, where Cristina spends most of her time and the two of them would probably spend most of their time when together. It is important for this room to have Cristina’s desk (which I have suggested she move to the wall between the two windows, experimentally, to see if she likes that position better. It should also have a rug and a few cushions and some kind of seating arrangement on the floor for Lisa. I would also put a couch in this room, perhaps a loveseat.
• I would recommend moving the television, which is currently in the position where I would put the desk, in the corner, to the left of the double glass door, so that it can be seen from the desk and also from the floor where Lisa would sit, and also from the couch, which I would put on the wall opposite the windows. I would definitely put at least one bookcase in the room, on the wall where Cristina’s desk is currently situated.
• Cristina bought a table for the dining room, and it is quite large but I think it will work out. When work overflows Cristina likes a large surface to spread out on.

For now, these are my recommendations. At the end of the two weeks I will analyze the remainder of their tweets and give room-by-room recommendations. Stay tuned for the final installment of this exciting experiment!

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Announcing our first social experiment on improving the quality of our daily life with the use of a new social media tool: Twitter.

Twitter

Readers will remember our house tour of my friend Cristina’s new apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It struck me that this apartment, being empty, had unlimited potential for invention.

I was inspired to attempt this social experiment by an article I read in the New York Times a few months ago, by Clive Thompson. Here is the point in the article that really got me thinking:

Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends’ updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like “I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus”; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich — and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.

I realized that this “picture” of the rhythm of people’s lives could be put to many practical uses. So I spoke to Cristina and her partner Lisa about it and we decided to embark on this experiment together. Here’s how it’s going to work:

1. They have opened a Twitter account and have followed each other. I have followed them and they have followed me;
2. Starting tomorrow, Monday, January 5, 2009, they will tweet every hour or every time they change their activity, whichever comes first, answering the typical Twitter question: What are you doing? The total duration of the experiment will be two weeks.
3. They have to be factual in their tweets, detailing where they are standing or sitting and what they are doing;
4. They must also give some kind of qualitative evaluation of their activity. Are they comfortable, do they like the light where they are sitting, could this activity be more pleasurable on the other side of the room, sitting, standing… and so forth.

At the end of week one I will post a mid-experiment update in which I will publish a few of the tweets and attempt to analyze them. I believe that I will get a very interesting picture of their daily rhythms and that at the end I will be able to give them some valuable advice on how to arrange the layout and functionality of their new home.

Their living situation presents some unique challenges that have to be addressed in setting up the new apartment. Cristina lives and works in New York. Lisa lives and works in North Carolina and visits New York as often as possible, but might be able to visit more often if the setup in the new apartment allowed her to transition more seamlessly and just pick up where she left off with her work. They are both academics and a lot of their work is computer-based research and writing.

What I am hoping that we will achieve with this experiment is this:

1. Cristina and Lisa will gain insight into their own lives, learning things they had previously overlooked, ignored or were not even aware of;
2. Priorities will shift — things that seemed unimportant will be revealed as more essential to their well-being and vice versa;
3. They will be inspired by the patterns that emerge from the tweets and will hatch new ideas on the distribution of the space in the new apartment;
4. I will be able to use my expertise on interior design and my own analysis of the tweets to give some valuable contribution to this process.

Stay tuned. A week from today I will post the mid-experiment update and we will assess our progress. I think this will be a fascinating experience for all three of us!

Related posts:

1. (Re)Arrange Your House with Twitter: Mid-Experiment Update In this post I analyze the first week of tweets...
2. (Re)Arrange Your House With Twitter: Final Analysis In this post I analyze the second and final week...
3. (Re)Arrange Your House With Twitter: The “after” photos In this final post of the series, I offer some...

I am greatly honored to host our first author interview.

This is the result of a Twitter love story (friendship love, not romantic love!). While I was training to become a librarian, I decided that I had to explore the new social networking sites, so I created a Twitter account. If I had known then what I know now about Twitter I probably never would have met the people I did meet. I didn’t know anyone who used Twitter at the time, so I just logged on to the public timeline. At any given instant there are at least tens of thousands of people writing a Tweet (as Twitter posts are called). If you refresh your page the landscape will change completely from one second to the next and you may never again see the people who were on that first screen.

Having said that, the first two people I met turned out to be two extraordinary and wonderful people who are now “real” friends and probably will be for the duration. I am half Italian and half American and have the good fortune of having two mother tongues. I was surprised to see some Italian tweets, and of course there were a bunch of other languages I did not speak. I ended up befriending a Dutch writer (who had just finished National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo for short) and an Italian journalist who is an anchor on the news in Basilicata. The journalist and his newly married wife came to visit me on their honeymoon in September and Mario Kluser, the Dutch writer, was here for a week, from Nov. 2 to Nov. 9.

Mario on the Brooklyn Bridge

We were both embarking on internet ventures and we decided to pool our brains and collaborate for a few days in person in Brooklyn, and he came and stayed with me during election week. One of the highlights of his visit was that they let him come into the voting booth with me and we pulled the lever for Obama together. So he voted for Obama too!

I have divided the interview in three segments, and you can listen to the podcast of each segment, download the segments or the entire podcast to your computer or iPod, or download the PDF file to read during your subway commute. Enjoy!

• mario-kluser-interview-part-1-10-mins
• mario-kluser-interview

Ilaria:   Hello, everybody. I’m here today with my friend Mario Kluser from Holland. He’s a writer and I’m going to interview him on the story of how he began to write and how he went from starting to write in his own living room to being published and distributed throughout Holland. So, welcome, good afternoon.
Mario: Welcome. Hello.
Ilaria:   First of all, I’d like to know what brought you to writing? How did you decide to start writing? Is it something you always wanted to do or is it something you discovered as you were older? How did it all start?
Mario: I always wanted to write a book. When I was a child I wanted to write a book, and I forgot about it for the rest of my life. And when I met my girlfriend and I saw that she was always reading books and she sat on top of the chair, I thought, now I can do this too. And so I began to write my first book, gave her the first chapter, and said to her, don’t lie to me. If it’s crap, just say it and I’ll stop. But she couldn’t stop. And at that time I was a member of a forum for stock exchanges and my first novel, my first thriller is situated partly on Wall Street. And I asked the people who were trading stocks what they thought about the story, and they all replied, they thought it was brilliant. So I moved on and I finished the book.
Ilaria:   That’s great, that’s a great story.
Mario: In fact, the story of my first book was… I had this plan, I always was thinking about how to trick, how you could trick the system if you had the right person in the right place. And I was thinking about it and it actually could work, what I had found out. And one day I awoke and I had the whole plot in my mind. The whole plot from beginning to end.
Ilaria:   And when you wrote the novel, did it… were you able to keep it that way or did it change as you wrote it?
Mario: It changed a little bit. You know, you have some blank spots that you have to fill up. You have to put subplot and something like that, and different characters have to feel something…
Ilaria:   Yes, they do. Okay, that’s very interesting. So tell me a little bit about where you live, because you are not originally from Holland. So you live in a town called…
Mario: Heerlen.
Ilaria:   And that’s spelled?
Mario: H-E-E-R-L-E-N.
Ilaria:   And that’s close to the German border, right?
Mario: It’s close to the German border, yes. Fifteen kilometers or something like that.
Ilaria:   So Dutch is not your first language, of course.
Mario: No, it’s not my first language.
Ilaria:   So you’re originally German.
Mario: Yeah.
Ilaria:   Your heritage is part German, part Dutch and part Italian, right?
Mario: Yes. My mother was half German and half Dutch, and my father was an Italian.
Ilaria:   Okay. So you grew up speaking German.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria:   And you visited Holland often. You liked it and you decided to move there, and you learned Dutch this way.
Mario: And I learned Dutch.
Ilaria:   But you’re self-taught, right? You didn’t go to school, you learned it by yourself.
Mario: I learned it by myself, yes.
Ilaria:   So how did you decide to write your novel in Dutch rather than in German, which is your native language?
Mario: Because I felt more comfortable writing it in Dutch.
Ilaria:   You did?
Mario: Yeah, because I was at a point where you think in another language. I stopped translating in my head from German to Dutch, and that’s the point where you actually speak the language, where you can say, I speak the language.
Ilaria:   Yes, that’s great. And so, okay, so now you’ve written a novel and you have to decide how to get it published. Now, did you decide to self-publish from the get-go, or did you try to find a traditional publisher first?
Mario: At first I tried to find a traditional publisher. I decided to publish the novel before I wrote the first sentence, because I thought, I don’t write a novel, a couple of hundred pages, and then put them into a drawer. I was knowing that I was going for the whole thing. So it has to be published.
Ilaria:   One way or another.
Mario: One way or another. And I first contacted a publisher. I sent my manuscript on Friday, get it back on Thursday, a brief note that it doesn’t fit into their…
Ilaria:   It’s not the kind of thing that they publish, right.
Mario: Yeah. And then I went to a bigger publisher and it took, I think a month, and I didn’t hear anything. I called them and I just asked on which pile is it laying. And they said that they had to find out. And at some point I said, I don’t wait any longer. I didn’t contact them anymore. I just didn’t want to wait that long. In the meantime I already had informed how to publish, how to self-publish my book. I contacted the biggest printer in the Netherlands, so my books are made with the same machines that Michael Crichton and Lord of the Rings all roll out, with the same printer. So I had the warranty that I had a good quality.
Ilaria:   But you had to pay for it yourself.
Mario: I had to pay for it myself, yes.
Ilaria:   And how many copies did you decide to have printed?
Mario: A couple of hundred. Just a couple of hundred copies.
Ilaria:   Okay. Now, let’s go back one step. So when you get together with a big publisher, or a publisher, a traditional publisher, you also get an editor, who will go through the book with you and give you some suggestions of… you know, make this section longer, make this section shorter, this character is not developed enough, we want to know more about this person, we need some more back story on this… you know, things like that. And of course you didn’t have the benefit of an editor because you chose to self-publish. So how did you go about editing the book?
Mario: Editing in the way you described it, about the characters, I decided everything myself. When I had the feeling this character is described enough, then it was described enough, and so on. Of course, I needed the support of a native speaker. And my girlfriend just corrected all my errors.
Ilaria:   And did she make any recommendations of changing the style of the way some things were said, or shortening something or lengthening something else, or anything like that?
Mario: No.
Ilaria:   Okay, she just corrected typos or grammatical errors or whatever. Okay. So you printed a couple of hundred copies and at this point you had to distribute the novel.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria:   So, how did you go about finding distribution?
Mario: I first sent two copies to a service. In the Netherlands there is one organization where you can send your books to, and where all publishers send books to, and then they decide if they put it in the catalog for the libraries. This catalog goes to the libraries and libraries decide what books they are going to order, and they ordered my book. So I got… most of my books that I had already printed were sold to the libraries.
Ilaria:   And so that was how you gained your first recognition.
Mario: Yes.
Ilaria:   And how was it that you were interviewed—you were interviewed by newspapers and radio, right?
Mario: Yeah.
Ilaria:   How did that happen?
Mario: The radio interview came half a year after publishing. I just got an e-mail because they read it… I had sent to one big newspaper in the town where I came from, or the region where I come from, and they wrote a review about the book. And after that I was contacted by a radio station.
Ilaria:   After the review came out.
Mario: Yeah. And then we talked about everything, publishing stuff and the book itself. It was pretty funny.
Ilaria:   That’s wonderful.
*** End of part 1 ***

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