Krista Stevens
Krista is the Editor-in-Chief of A List Apart and the co-founder of Contents, a magazine focusing on content strategy and online publishing. She is a merry Automattician. Krista happily describes herself as a hopeless introvert. She lives in Winnipeg, Canada.
You can read her blog and follow her on Twitter @kristastevens.
More thoughts by Krista Stevens:
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Working on the web is tremendously exciting. I believe that the concept of open source has the power to change the world. I know of no other industry where people routinely create things and give them away, with the hope that someone will take what they made, make it better, and release it back into the world to repeat that cycle.
We need to go beyond teaching our kids to read, write, calculate, and think. We need to teach them markup and how to code.
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Think back a mere 10 years ago. Nearly everything was paper-based. You had to go to the bookstore to buy a book. You wrote letters that required a stamp to get to their destination, which took days and sometimes weeks. I have a few shoeboxes of letters and cards I've received. These are artifacts. Meaningless to nearly everyone, they're priceless to me: they mark points in my personal history, my story. When we first started to use the web, we printed out articles to read later. I still have articles I printed out several years ago, that I re-read and refer to on occasion.
Today, nearly everything is digital. We have email. We have digital bookstores. We read on iPads and Kindles. The web is still young, but already, the question becomes, "Is there an app for that?" We need to be careful about who we choose to entrust with our data, our digital artifacts. Services come and services go. Companies fail, they get sold. We have yet to master the art of archiving digital content on the web. We can and must do a much better job preserving the content we work so hard to create, not just for nostalgia's sake, but to ensure that we leave records and artifacts for the generations to come.
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Experience broadens your perspective and makes you better at what you do, though you must be awake to new ideas that can come from even the most mundane meeting and seemingly-unrelated chance encounter. Routine can help you be productive, but boredom can dull your senses. Take every opportunity you can to travel. Exploit every opportunity you have to meet new people and ask them about their ideas: what's most important to them in their work? How did they devise this? A walk in the park at lunch time can change you, provided you're open to examining what you see and experience. Be reflective, be thoughtful. Question yourself, your motives, your work. Write about these things: be it on a public or private blog or in a journal. To me, this is the only way to keep getting better at what I do.
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Attention is finite: you only get so much energy to use each day. What if we considered spending attention as if it were money, a currency to spend carefully and wisely? How would that change how you choose to spend your focus? Would you spend less time on Twitter and Facebook and more on making and creating?
Here are the dates of Krista Stevens's future thoughts:
- Saturday, 26 May
- Wednesday, 27 June
- Friday, 20 July
- Saturday, 25 August
- Saturday, 29 September
- Thursday, 25 October
- Wednesday, 21 November
- Tuesday, 25 December