1. Story Building vs Story Telling - Really interesting article on how the internet and social media is allowing us to build stories in real-time.
2. The Say100 - 10 experts in 10 fields pick 10 people working in that field that you should be following. Some serious brainfood on offer. Let me warn you though, this kept me up very late on Tuesday night.
3. Gum Election - A guerrilla art project from New York that help keep gum off the sidewalk. Ludicrous and brilliant in equal measures.
4. Advertising as Data Packets - Interesting post from Google's Tom Uglow who has done some brilliant stuff around the principle that good advertising is the product.
After my post yesterday I stumbled across this brilliant article on 'Literature on the Frontlines'. It looks at how the Council on Books in Wartime (whose motto is the title of this post) used books to maintain morale during wartime by sending books to soldiers. They started off by sending donated books but these usually lacked quality... they must have got some of mine then.
So they decided to start printing editions of classics like Oliver Twist and Huckleberry Finn. The problem they faced was that the books had to be cheap enough to enable to mass produce and small enough to fit in a soldier's cargo pocket. So they needed a creative solution:
"The answer was to use pulp paper and the rotary presses typically employed in printing digest magazines. Since these presses produced digests that were too long to be easily portable, the books were printed “two-up;” two books would be printed together as one, and then sliced in half to make two separate books. Because of this, the books were longer horizontally than vertically, the opposite of a typical paperback."
Westerns and adventure stories were amongst the most popular with the men. Not only did the books help maintain morale but they also served as a tool for giving context to the war. By distributing their foreign policy as a book the young soldiers could not only relieve the boredom but also get some sort of handle on why they were fighting in the first place.
Someone emailed me this last week which I found fascinating. It's the U.S. Army's Social Media Strategy Handbook. It's really interesting to see that an organisation that fundamentally depends on secrecy is encouraging soldiers to use social media to maintain morale when they are away from home. In a 2011 kinda way you could say that Facebook is replacing the role of the book in the war.
It's very brave, well written and makes good sense. Knowing that the enemy are watching it will be interesting to see how the army use social media propaganda tool in the future. Hats off to them. Amazing to think I have trouble convincing UK brands to use social media as part of their marketing and PR strategy.
I found this old film documenting the process of books being made a delight to watch. I don't know if it's because I'm currently thinking of writing a book or because I'm maintaining, in fact smashing, my New Year target of reading a book a week. Perhaps it's simply because like these kind of films.
I'm a big fan of audiobooks because they allow me to 'read' at times when clutching a book isn't an option. I'm thinking abut getting a Kindle too. Though both make the process of consuming the content easier, what is unusual is that they are forms of digital media that will reduce the social sharing nature of the content. It's usually the other way around.
Because books are less re-readable than records and CDs are re-playable they become more shareable. I love giving my books away once I've done with them and there's nothing better than being given a book that someone demands you to read. Whilst it's possible to give away audiobooks there is something about the thumb marked dog-eared pages of a paper book that adds weight to the content. Like a silent later of commentary that says 'This is where it gets exciting'.
Maybe when I write my book I'll do an audiobook app with some way of allowing users to clip bits they like for reference or sharing. Has anyone done that yet? No? Best had get a move on writing this book then.
1. How the internet gets inside us - A really interesting article from the New Yorker on the 'Never Betters' and the 'Better Nevers'. We all know that I sit on the Never Better side of the fence.
It was from Russell Davies that I first heard 'The way to be interesting is to be interested'. It's a great bit of advice and a key tool of creativity to have in your box. You have got a creativity toolbox, right?
In 'A Technique for Producing Ideas' James Webb Young said 'It is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk'. A multidisciplined mind and a broad spectrum of experience comes from curiosity, exploration and connectivity. But simply browsing, as we know it, isn't enough. To discover new worlds you need to become an explorer.
Fear of failure restricts most people to doing things they know how. I'm guilty of doing a lot of that. Great learnings come from taking on challenges that produce an outcome you could never predict. I really should do more of that. After all it was Christopher Columbus confusing Arabic and Italian miles that took him to America when all he was looking for was a better way to the Indies.
There's a lot to appreciate in Galilean serendipity. Most people's jump off point in the creative process is 'What's the problem I am trying to solve'. And it is a very good starting point. In the future I want to do a few more projects whereby the answer to 'Why are you doing this?' is 'Because I can'. There is a lot more to know of what we don't know than what we do know.
2. How Xerox invented the information age and gave it away - This is the amazing story of how on a visit to Xerox Steve Jobs and Bill gates stumbled across something interesting in the R&D department that would change our lives for ever.
3. Erase and Rewind - Why the BBC should not be binning all the websites that are no longer being updated.
4. You. Me. Us. - A different way of curating content than slapping 5 links in a blog post every Friday. This introduced me to Amy Krouse Rosenthal who does interesting things.
Foraging through the archive of This American Life I came across this remarkable story of a software engineer who was sacked from Apple but refused to leave.
Having spent so much time developing software for a 'graphing calculator view' he simply refused to give up. Why take all the good work he had done and simply throw it away just because the company no longer needed him?
So, he continued to come into work every day, hiding out in empty offices, working through the night, just to get the project he so passionately believed in finished for a company that no longer wanted him. It's heartwarming to hear such a story about a man with passion and a desire to create regardless of his circumstance.
I won't give away what happens. You can listen to the story here.
I really like this. I've always loved watching films about things being made and always been secretly jealous of all those people who were great at tinkering.
Released in 1961 the first 3 minutes nails most of what you need to know about being creative. Quite simply 'we gather, we form and we fashion'. As the film says we begin by collecting materials. We may get rid of what isn't needed or add materials. We may combine materials. We then shape and finally add some finishing touches. That's it in a nutshell.
There is a lot written about the creative process (I'm ploughing through huge amounts of books and essays on the subject at the moment), and there are brilliant companies out there with great processes doing amazing things. Yet some of the best writing I've come across on the subject originates from a time before connectivity or colour TV.
In particular I'm talking about James Webb Young's 'A Technique for Producing Ideas', which was first published in 1965 and has been one of the most inspirational and influential books in the world of advertising. It's brilliantly concise and to the point. It's as relevant today as it was when first written and will continue to be for the next 100 years. You must read it.
In particular I liked this quote:
Every really good creative person in advertising has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun he could not easily get interested in - from say Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had a fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk.
Being interested is essential if you want to deliver interesting things. Without a huge desire to acquire knowledge you won't get much further than the 'gathering' stage of your creative process.
Here's a great Ted talk on Makers that I serendipitously stumbled across after watching American Makers.
3. There's a Tiny Pony in the Apple Store - The brilliant Toby Barnes talks at Interesting North about Modernism and ask the question 'Why have we become so acclimatised to the exceptional? Really looking forward to diving into the rest of the collection.
4. If It Were My Home - Read any book on the subject of happiness and you will at some point be told that one of the keys for unlocking it is appreciation. This tool tells you how different your life would be if you were born somewhere else. Reminds me a little bit of Poke's excellent Global Rich List. Give them both a quick spin.
5. Press, Pause, Play - A film about hope, fear and digital culture. Looks good. some great videos and quotes on the site.
