There is a new meme going around the BlogTown, started by Brian Gardner who only a year ago never designed a blog, and now he’s releasing one wordpress masterpiece after another. His theme Vertigo is one of the most popular in the blogiverse and his most recent theme Revolution did just that - revolutionized the use of Wordpress as a CMS tool.
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It’s hard to find anything more elusive than time. There are only a few things in life as precious as time. I often find it unfair that we’re allotted only 24 hours a day. It is the fact that I have a hard time coping with, constantly wishing to add if not another 24 then at least, 12 more hours to every passing day.
It’s because of the Time we “can’t step the same river twice”. We can’t bring back the time, nor can we move it forward. We can’t unsend the email we sent a few seconds ago written in anger or frustration, and now wishing we weren’t so hasty with it. We can’t stop the time to meet the deadline, nor can we make it go faster to find out the results of the competition and whether or not we were selected.
One thing we can do with time is manage it. It’s not the easiest task in the world, and those who did master it deserve a medal of honour or a lifetime achievement award. For the rest of us, mortals, I’ve decided to host another group writing project and invite all of you, time management gurus, to participate.
If I confused you with the label “guru”, don’t be. To see whether or not you qualify for this project, complete the following test questions:
If you answered YES to at least one of the questions above, you’ve successfully passed the test, deserve to be called a guru and now required to share your Time Management tips with the rest of us.
There are many books and articles written on this topic, but I find most of them lacking in the fields of reality and practicality. What I’d like to achieve with this group writing project is getting the real-life solutions to Time Management by real people: working parents, busy freelancers, swamped bloggers. Even if you don’t consider yourself as a very organized person, you must have at least one tip to share with others, the most essential time management trick that works for you.
The rules for this group writing project are very simple:
I will send you a confirmation email once I get your entry and will publish the complete list with links to all your posts on Saturday, September 29th, 2007.
Those who’ve participated in my previous Group Writing Project - Source of Inspiration, remember how successful it was, reaching the Digg’s front page, was bookmarked on del.icio.us by hundreds of people. Every participant got his/her share of big traffic waves. So, hurry up and be sure to carve a small time frame and participate in this group project.
I’ll be posting my own Time Management Tips soon, will tell you how I juggle with a full-time job, family (my 30-months-old daughter starts a pre-school this week), my Fall lectures once a week (including checking and marking students work), freelancing in evenings and blogging in-between. I look forward to getting help from all of you to manage that elusive precious Time.
“Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words”, said Dorothy Parker. At the age of 24 she sold a poem to Vanity Fair in 1917, and a few months later was hired as an editorial assistant for Vogue. In 1919 she was writing for Vanity Fair, and despite becoming readers favourite for her wit and wisecracking, she was fired in 1920 after “her criticisms began to offend too often”. Two of her colleagues, Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood, resigned in protest.
Hope you too will enjoy reading today’s satirical bit of literature about the consequences of having a wee bit too much to drink.
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Guest blogging is becoming a very common trend among many bloggers, especially the prominent ones. Many articles have been written about the benefits of guest blogging for the blog’s owner and for the guest writer, but only a few have mentioned its value for the blog’s readers. What the readers think about the value of guest blogging? How comfortable are they feeling to be in a company of a guest writer on a blog with only one author?
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It’s no secret that an advertising campaign can either propel anyone’s business or name to the stratosphere or make it extinct quicker than the nature did with dinosaurs.
Of course I rather write about some of the most successful and memorable campaigns in the modern history, the ones that either made some companies rule the world practically overnight or established them as THE company to hold in high regard and even imitate. These are the campaigns who took advertising in print and TV to the whole new level, with their printed ads looking more like a work of art and commercials that people don’t mind watching more than once. The campaigns whose slogans became as popular as the company’s name, if not more.
Fortunately there are many such advertising masterpieces, but I’ll limit them to 8 Bits of what in my opinion are the most brilliant campaigns in advertising history (featured in chronological order) and invite you to share who you think deserves to be on this list.
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Today I’d like to take you to about trillions year in the future and see it the way one of my most favourite science-fiction writers saw. Read this short story and you’ll see why I chose M.C. Escher’s work ‘Bond Of Union’ to illustrate Isaak Asimov’s vision of our future. I should warn you though - it was commissioned by Playboy magazine as a story to be based on a photograph of a clay head without ears. However, Asimov’s story was rejected, while the magazine accepted the stories by two other writers. Fortunately it was published later in Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1965.
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We’ve all heard many times that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. I wonder who said that first? A quick search on Google leads me to Wikipedia with a fascinating exposé on the origins of this phrase. In 1927 an ad by Fred R. Barnard appeared in the advertising journal that said “One Picture is Worth Ten Thousand Words” and was falsely labeled as a Chinese proverb “so that people would take it seriously”. Earlier in 1862 Russian writer Ivan Turgenev wrote “A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound”. And before him Napoleon Bonaparte said “A good sketch is better than a long speech”.
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I’m starting a new regular feature on InspirationBit: every weekend I will be posting a Bit of Literature, presenting you short stories by masters of the written word. At first I’ll be offering you a classical fiction by well-known authors, but I’m hoping to extend this weekend spotlight and draw some inspiration from present-day literature and not-so-famous writers. So if you would like me to feature your short story here then please, contact me to discuss the details.
The First Bit of Literature on InspirationBit presents a bit of Anton Chekhov - Russian playwright and master of the modern short story who once said “Conciseness is the sister of talent”.
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