Bruce Eisner took a swing at sharing some of the cool features in the newest version of ThoughtOffice on his blog.
You can get a view of it here at the Mindware Forum.
Thanks for the great insights, and the IdeaFisher reference, Bruce!
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Mind Maps Get Smart -- ThoughtOffice Adds Intelligence to Popular Brainstorming Solutions
We've just started using ThoughtOffice to storyboard ideas for our new Online Media broadcasting business, RichContent.com
Brainstorming Takes Courage...
Brave - not exactly the first thing you think of when it comes to brainstorming, creativity, innovation.
But in reality, you're laughing in the face of convention.
Creatives, and the creative process, are often looked at as either:
1) Some weird, unpredictable and unplannable occurrence... the hand of God touching a select few at just the right moment, or...
2) Those freaks in your Advertising department.
Now, given those two definitions, don't you think it takes some cajones to speak out with an unconventional concept... an unproven idea?
That's one reason we built the Branding, Copyright and Author fields into ThoughtOffice. because more often than not, the truly creative idea ought to be both credited to its author, and tracked to its mother. (you remember, The Mother of Invention? Yeah, like Frank Zappa's band).
So... there's a lot more we could address on this subject... but in the interim, I'd love to have a few of your horror stories, and grand successes in sharing your creative ideas.
And I'll do a bit of my own on the next post.
To your wildly creative success,
Mark Alan Effinger
Chief Creatographer
The Creative's 11th Hour...
"It goes on and on and on and on..." croons Steve Perry.
Yup. The development team and I are sequestered in Skyrocket Developments Open Source Lab, pushing code snippets of PHP, Perl, HTML and javascript through their paces...
It works. It's broke.
It works! Yea!
We're in the midst of developing the final interface and broadcast technologies for RichContent Media Momentum. It's a media optimization and distribution engine for "rich content": video, audio, images and text.
We've been developing it over the last few years, with real focus coming together this last 18 months.
Why? And what the heck does this have to do with the creative process?
Because we need to do this. And: Lots.
I founded an ecommerce company in 1998, and sold it in 1999. Then divorced and went through the whole rewriting of my life and hard drive.
I had a budget of $2500-$3000 per month for purchasing domains back then (those were the days of $70 domains).
I wasn't speculating. I wanted to build that many companies (as an internet incubator).
One of those names was ExitPath.com (because I've started and sold a business every 18-36 months ever since 1986). PerfectCars.com (because I love automobiles... even started a performance electric car company in '96 called LightningRods). Liquid8.com (building that this year).
So here we are in 2007. Broadband is ubiquitous. Google and Microsoft are building datacenters just 90 minutes away from us here in Portland.
And RichContent can now come out and play. And optimized correctly, good rich content will get your web site on top of the rankings, and saturate the search engines in less than 7 days.
And that's important.
If you're an online retailer. Or a brick and mortar player competing with industry giants. Or a politician who is underfunded.
So it goes live next week. And you'll get to see how ThoughtOffice helped our team develop, brand, expand-on and clarify this process.
So... watch this space for more on the launch, and why so much creativity comes down to the last pass, the final 4, the 11th hour.
Best of success to you,
Mark Alan Effinger
EntreVangelist.
Peter Pan & Superman...
Oh, how I wish I was clever enough to have crafted that headline,
Maybe next year.
What I would like to do is invite all of you to check out The Monday Morning Memo by Roy Williams. This week's is especially valuable when it comes to Associative Thinking and "6-degrees of separation".
I'm going to take the liberty, as a graduate of the Wizard Academy, to post Roy's missive here... but please visit his site, read the complete memo (it's short... maybe 2-3 minutes to read at a conversational speed).
The focus on pattern Recognition is worth it to clarifying your creative process.
From Monumental to Incremental...
Anyone who knows me well knows I have this sort of overarching personal mission:
"To make a Monumental Improvement in Every Life I Touch".
Now that sounds really big and all, but it's not.
Mostly because I "fail" at that every day.
Monumental's a big word. Four syllables, usually reserved for descriptions of climbing Everest or performing face transplants.
But it does have a nice rhythm: Mon-you-men-tel.
What I've learned over the last 20 years in business is that you can make a few very small, incremental improvement's, changes, comments, ideas... and the end result is often more than cumulative.
There appears to be a lever "out there". Syncronicity almost always comes into being. People show up. Things happen. Momentum begins to take hold.
Suddenly you're not driving this thing... it's sort of on auto-pilot. Not completely, but enough that you can step away at times and just watch. And be amazed.
The gist of this post?
Do something incremental today. In fact, do a few incrementally positive and creative things. Write them down in your mental memory bank. And watch.
Get back to me in a week, a month, or a year. Let me know which of those incremental improvements has suddenly taken on a life of its own.
To your monumental success,
Mark Alan Effinger
P.S. The image at the link below ought to be changing and moving as an example of Time Synchronicity. Here's the explanation provided by Jim Levin:
A Time Gestalt, Principle Example: Synchronicity
When the animation stops, hold down the "Shift" key and push the "reload" or "refresh" button to start it again. If an animation never starts, check your browser preferences and turn on "Animated GIFs" and "Allow looping".
The Zen of Chess...
I awoke to this article this morning... one of many surrounding my bedside (I still have a big thing for printed media: Dwell, Inc., Fast Company, eWeek, BusinessWeek, Wired, Williamette Week and more litter my bedside table).
My notebook and MacBook Pro join me at times (today, for instance).
Which brings me to a point (really): Gary Kasparov, chess and making multiple, parallel moves; thinking completely through a strategy before executing and; thinking from BOTH sides of the coin: you AND your opponent's.
Read Gary's missive. It's the logical extension of dynamic, creative thought.
