Given that today is Valentine’s Day, it seems appropriate to post a little something about keeping the passion alive all year long. No, not that way… though that’s nice, too. I mean keeping passion as a user and as a creator.

My new favorite blog for business and creativity is Creating Passionate Users, (CPU) a group effort by the authors of the Head First book series. The posts are just absolutely stocked to the gills with great ways to look at creating relationships between users and companies. Here are a few that I picked out recently:

• Doing a 180 – about changing your perspective on suckiness. How to get better at the things you don’t do as well as you’d like, and how can you think differently at your level of achievement in a particular skill.

• Creating Playful Users – about how playfulness and fun are essential to creating peak user experiences.

• Cognitive bandwidth is like dial-up – give your users an experience that helps them think about the right things. In other words, don’t load them up with information they don’t need.

• The WTF learning principle – learn, and help others learn, by mixing in FERN the unexpected.

• Creative workouts for your brain &ndash points to some websites that’ll help you kickstart your motorbike. If you know what I mean.

• Sentimental Moonshine – about balancing common sense with play.

• How to break through – about… how to break through. Advertising is dead, folks. It just doesn’t know it yet.

• The future is in not learning – being nimble requires unlearning what you know. This may be the big one, the unappreciated essential skill. Think of almost any breakthrough, and chances are it required forgetting the rules.

Read these and others at the Creating Passionate Users site. This is good, good stuff.

CPU has my antennae tuned to more tips and tricks for creating cool user experiences. Here’s a few others from ‘round the blogosphere:

• Teresa Nielsen Hayden has compiled a list of tips for moderating online communities. (Via Boing Boing)

• There’s also this post about passion from Evelyn Rodriguez, who reminds us that sticking to your passion and sharing it wholeheartedly is the key to blogging… and everything else, too.

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Monday, February 14th, 2005 @ 7:25 pm Nothings
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