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Read the original post at Learning from online graffiti, even if you’re not a community manager.

Today’s practice: When you find an online comment or contribution that truly annoys you, put it on your desktop or bulletin board. It’s your own personal classroom for learning about difference, and practicing tolerance.

When companies, organizations or individuals set up their first social web presences, one of the things they often worry about is how to handle online criticism. In most cases, the now-recognized best practice is to err on the side of tolerance, accepting that some level of online criticism is part of life, and that the most effective and credible responses often come not from the community manager, but from the community itself.

Read the original post at What is an ebook? 6 questions about the future of books.

Tonight Emily Carr students presented 5 ebook prototypes developed over the course of this semester in an ebook design course. As the students presented their work, and members of the local business, tech and creative communities responded to them, it was clear that we are grappling with a common set of fundamental questions raised by the emergence of ebooks. Here are the 6 crucial questions we need to address as authors, publishers, designers and readers:

Back in the day, the only real way to have an online conversation was to build your own blog or online community. These days, many people, companies and organizations have their first taste of online conversation and social media through pre-established social networks like Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.

But eventually, you might outgrow what you can do with those sites alone, or decide you want to have a new kind of conversation that is best supported with an online community of your own. When that day comes, you’ll face the painful, terrifying and thrilling experience of building a website — if not with your own bare hands, then through the efforts of an in-house web development team or web development company.

Print books may be under siege from the rise of e-books, but they have a tenacious hold on a particular group: children and toddlers. Their parents are insisting this next generation of readers spend their early years with old-fashioned books. This is the case even with parents who themselves are die-hard downloaders of books onto Kindles, iPads, laptops and phones. They freely acknowledge their digital double standard, saying they want their children to be surrounded by print books, to experience turning physical pages as they learn about shapes, colors and animals.

So the New York Times reports in an article today on resistance to ebooks for young children.