Last night I watched news story on CBC’s The National that talked about various lawsuits against a handful of bloggers, Google, Wikipedia and a number of other sites. Since then all I can think of is that not only the freedom of speech but the core values of sharing and linking are too now under attack in blogiverse.
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Since about the middle of the twentieth century our society became obsessed with headlines. They are everywhere: on the magazine covers, newspapers, most of the news stations start their program with headlines. If you want a story to get noticed it has to be announced pompously in all its glory.
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It’s been four days since I last time checked my emails, studied my blog stats, surfed the Web, chatted online, published a post, worked on a project or talked to a client. And how am I doing? I’m perfectly fine with it. What’s more - I’m finally enjoying some time off and spending it with my family. At this moment my husband and daughter are napping, while I’m writing down my thoughts on being unplugged.
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Most commercials nowadays quite effectively manage to bombard us with with influential messages in just 20 seconds. But for creative people even 5 seconds are enough to make their point clear and get an immediate reaction from the target audience. Sometimes you don’t have to say anything but Thank You, like in the following 5 second commercial. Can you guess what is this ad for?
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I was working on my upcoming post How To Come Up With Eye-Catching Titles, browsing some popular magazine covers to see how do they come up with sensational headlines. I stumbled upon an article on Cosmopolitan magazine on Wikipedia. My eyes were immediately drawn to the cover of the 1936 June issue that looked like a work of art, so strikingly different from the June 2001 issue.
I was so amazed by the contrast, not only in images but also in the absence of all those catchy headlines on the old magazine cover. That’s when I became very curious to see how other magazine covers evolved over time. When and how did our perceptions and values change? How was the branding developed? When did we start promote magazines, books, websites, blogs differently? What’s with our obsession with writing the eye-catching titles, when did that become so important?
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Rory from CleanCutBlog has launched a very interesting Group Writing Project, asking everyone What Is Your FIRST Rule Of Writing?
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Over a week ago I asked “Who Are The Most Creative People?“, my answer was “Children” and I explained why. A couple of days later my cousin emailed me a psychedelic work done by my nephew in Photoshop. He is only 11 and just recently started playing with Photoshop. He didn’t take any courses and nobody taught him how to use that software. But that didn’t stop him from exploring the program and discovering what can be achieved there.
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There are many articles on the Web dedicated to the cure of writer’s block. But what to do if you’re bursting out with the ready-to-go topics to talk about? What is the opposite of writer’s block? No, I’m not talking about “hypergraphia” here either. Just a sudden wave of ideas and thoughts that hate being lined up in suspense which one would get a privilege and attention of the “master”.
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