My Secret Crush xoxo

Her hair is the color of strawberry lemonade. She has blue eyes and a nose with a ring like a cute little bull. She likes cats and vegan food. She has a tattoo of a bathtub on the back of her leg. She hates bugs and wears a lot of scarves. Her gauges are like tiny little dinner plates that maybe she’d like to eat her vegan food off of. Sometimes she gets mad if she drives her car to class and can’t find a parking spot. She always writes with a fine-tipped Sharpie.

So cool

Christmas Sushi

The Sophie Project

For our final group project, we were struggling to find a platform that would allow us to accurately present our findings from this semester. Tumblr was too choppy, a Power Point didn't allow for easy reading, a traditional Word Document didn't allow for turning pages or incorporating multimedia.

Finally, I remembered using a digital book-authoring program called Sophie in another class freshman year, and decided it would be the perfect way to present our project. Sophie is a new program that allows you to put together a book that includes links to websites, videos, photos, even links that jump between pages or chapters.

What does everyone think about this kind of platform? With the popularity of readers like Kindle and Nook, it seems like someday soon all books will be presented in this type of mixed media.

Kelly Oxford

I've recently developed an obsession with blogger Kelly Oxford and the idea of creating a career out of creative social networking. Kelly is a smart, sarcastic, fashionable young mother, and she operates a blog with observations about her life and pop culture and has thousands of followers on Twitter. In a way, I want to be Kelly -- she seems to have it all, and a TV pilot and book deal in the works, all from Twitter and Tumblr.

How is this possible? To me, it seems like there is a paradox surrounding social networking. In order to attract followers to your blog, you have to post interesting/funny/intelligent things. But in order to have the motivation to post these things, you (or I) have to at least feel like someone is reading them. Sometimes I want to ask how people on Twitter feel about 80s movies, but I feel like a crazy person if no one replies. Or other

days I want to make a Tumblr post about a concert that I went to, but it seems like a waste of time if no one reads it.

Kelly, how did you do it? And more importantly, how can I do it??

Hunter S Thompson Tumblr

The Tumblr I created for Hunter S Thompson.

Rebecca Skloot's Fascinating Twitter Chat on Creative Nonfiction

My Newly Acquired Byliner.com Account

The first author that I began following on Byliner was Zadie Smith. I chose her immediately upon seeing her name because I'm a huge fan of her as a novelist, so I was very excited to see that the website has some of her short stories. I read her book On Beauty for a Women in Literature class last year and absolutely loved it, and after the class was over I went out and bought White Teeth to read on my own. I haven't read any of her pieces on Byliner yet, but judging from the titles it seems like she writes about a much more varied group of topics than she does in her novels.

Next, I started following Evan Wright -- probably for very simple, gratuitous reasons, however. I first noticed his story "Scenes From My Life in Porn" and I was interested in seeing more of his work. The rest of his subjects range from war to anarchists to the inner workings of Hollywood, and of course I was very interested in all of them in the same way anyone would be interested in such flashy subjects. His bio says that he has written for both Hustler and Vanity Fair, which also intrigues me very much (how one writer can contribute to such opposite publications).

Finally, I started following arts writer Alex Pappademas. Though he doesn't have a bio on the site, he writes articles on topics like teenage werewolves and Winona Ryder, extremely popular elements of pop culture. I am interested in his writing because it has always been my dream to write for a music publication, and I thought that through following him I will be able to see what it's like to write about entertainment.