THINKing

Creativity 2010 – Week #35

Hello, thinker. We found some good creativity links for you this week. So, activate those little gray cells.

The Creativity Crisis? What Creativity Crisis?

Balance Spawns Creativity

Creativity & Play (video)

The Brain As A System & Creative Tool

Mindmapping Tool (free option available)

bookmark to:

Creativity 2010 – Week #34

Here’s another dose of creativity inducing links for you:

The Power Of Daydreaming

26 Ways To Beat Creative Block

7 Ways To Smash Procrastination

5 Ways To Foster Your Creativity

The Cure For Boring Meetings

bookmark to:

2010′s Top Five Creativity Links

Our weekly series of creativity links has uncovered some very good tools for you thinkers. What have been the most popular links so far this year? I’m glad you asked.

100 Online Creativity Tools – From tools that help you organize, plan, and brainstorm to tools that inspire through writing prompts and creative photos to tools that work to develop the creative mind, you will find plenty of inspiration in this list.

10 Essential Blogs For Creative Entrepreneurs – Here are 10 blogs that are essential reading for creative entrepreneurs – they will fuel your creativity, sharpen your business skills, connect you with others on the same path, and sustain you through the ups and downs of your entrepreneurial journey.

50 Tools To Improve Your Writing – This extensive list of writing tools can help you improve your writing skills.

Visual Thesaurus – This is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words.

Bad Billboards – Sometimes you just need to see creativity gone wrong.

bookmark to:

Creativity 2010 – Week #33

Without further ado, here are your creativity links for week #33 of 2010:

Doing nothing to enhance creativity

Creative bus ads

Where Do You Draw Your Design Inspiration?

What to blog about when you are stuck creatively

25 Real world creative work spaces

bookmark to:

Creativity 2010 – Week #32

Here’s your weekly dose of creativity links:

Creativity Tips: Stoke Your Creativity

55 Quotes To Spur Creativity

Time Management For Creatives

Downtime: The Key To Creativity

20 Reasons You Get Your Best Ideas In The Shower

bookmark to:

Creativity 2010 – Week #31

Here’s another dash of creativity links to spice up your thinking.

7 Principles Of Creative Problem Solving

Turn Your Idea Into Reality

The History Of Creativity

Color Palette Generator

Eat More Innovation

bookmark to:

Great Images Make Content More Compelling

You are probably wondering what this photo has to do with this post. Well, in part one of this series, Five Key Elements To Creating Compelling Content, our friend, Rubbermaid blogger  Jim Dietzel, laid out his five key elements for creating compelling content. Number 3 was “pictures are good.”

Our digital colleague, Rodger Johnson from GetSocialPR, also thinks that imagery can kick your content up a notch. He says use compelling images to support the story, a lesson he learned from his journalism days that still works today.

The photo above may be interesting, but it doesn’t really go with this post. So, good pictures are not enough. Photos can help draw attention to a post, keeping it from looking like a huge gray mass of words. But – to be most effective – the image must complement, or support the the story in some way.

If you are going to use photos, you also must respect copyright law. Don’t just do a Google search and use the images. They may be copyright protected. We did a piece sometime back about some free photo resources that you may want to revisit.

Below are a few more related posts on the use of images in your blog.

An Introduction To Using Images On Blogs

Finding Compelling Flickr Images

Using Images Legally On Your Blog

Using Images To Take Your Posts To A New Level

Why Images Are Vital To Modern Blogs

bookmark to:

Creativity 2010 – Week #30

2010 keeps flying by – it’s week #30 already. I hope you are enjoying the creativity links we bring you each week. Here are five more.

Absence Thinking: Think about what is not there.

CATWOE: A checklist for thinking about problems and solutions.

Jump Start: Enter a “How can I?” question, then get a list of adjectives that can help start the brainstorming process.

Mindomo: Use this mind mapping tool to organize your thoughts and start your project with a clear plan.

365 Picture Prompts: Use these photos and imagesto spark your creativity.

bookmark to:

How To Be A More Compelling Writer

We’re examining the ways to make your blog more compelling.  A number of Twitterati responded to my request for their ideas. The quality of writing was on their minds:

As we heard from Jim Dietzel, a Fortune 1000 blogger for Rubbermaid, “Hire a good writer. Seriously.”

Colleague Tom Pick of Webbiquity tells us we must do a better job in naming our posts, using compelling headlines like “Common Myths of…” or “Mistakes to Avoid in…”

Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer thinks we need to consider the way we approach the content. He says to think like a movie trailer, not a journalist. Compelling content isn’t reporting. It’s entertaining.

If you can afford it, hiring a good writer for your blog is solid advice. If you can’t, then you need to become a better writer. A few simple things can help take your writing to the next level.  Let’s address a few of these basic ideas that we have tackled here in THINKing previously.

Write Tight -  My first news editor hammered one thing into my consciousness: write tight. Leave out the frills, just present the facts and move on. You don’t have to create an act of literature every time you sit down to write. But remember, as Jason Falls points out, simply reporting is not enough. Don’t edit out the entertainment while editing out the extraneous.

Tell Me A Story – Since the dawn of time mankind has been a sucker for a story. We may be wearing synthetics now instead of skins, but that one truth has not changed. Storytelling is a way to add some passion, interest and drama to your blogging.

Tell Me A Story About Me – Well, it’s all about me after all, isn’t it? Don’t tell a self-serving story. Tell one that speaks to the self-interest of the reader.

Get Active -  My lovely bride and mystery novelist par excellence, Terry Hoover, is the queen of the vivid verb. Peruse the first chapter of her book, Double Dead, to see what I mean.

Storystarters – Sometimes you are just stuck for an idea or an approach to a blog post.  Leap those obstacles with these methods.

Do you have some thoughts on compelling content? Well, what are you waiting for…tell us!

bookmark to:

Creativity 2010 – Week #29

Igor Stravinsky Agrees: Standards Enable Creativity – There is a stereotype of the creative person who chafes at standards, convinced that any sort of process-driven continuous improvement will have a negative effect on how his work is performed. Just the opposite is true.

Can Creativity Be Taught? – Newsweek says creativity scores among children have been falling since 1990. Can we turn it around?

Forget Brainstorming - Brainstorming in a group became popular in 1953 with the publication of a business book, Applied Imagination. But it’s been proven not to work since 1958, so why are we still trying it?

Creative Car Advertising – Campaign for the Smart Car.

43 Things – Publish your lists to keep yourself accountable and browse through other lists to find creative ideas.

bookmark to: