This one was difficult. My hard drive crashed in the middle of recording this one, so there was about a week lost between stopping at that point and getting a new drive up & running. Then I had to re-type the script and re-screen capture the Power Point presentation.

Installing a new hard drive turned out to be an exercise in Serendipity:

• One of the things I had to do was reinstall the software development tools I use for developing the Web2Intranet.com website. I downloaded a more recent tool, which showed some software problems that the older version did not, so this has helped improve the quality of the software.
• A long-standing problem I’ve had with my laptop’s video driver was solved.
• The new hard drive has a much larger capacity than  the one it replaced, so I no longer have to shuffle videos around to an external drive just so I don’t run out of room on my internal drive.

Coincidentally, I’ve started reading Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science, by Charles S. Jacobs, and it seems to me there’s some good correspondence. Jacobs writes about how functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is giving us a better understanding of how the brain works and the resulting consequences of that. (For a contrary opinion on the use of fMRI and brain studies, see Jonah Lehrer’s Wired article, Lost in the Details: How Breaking Everything Down to Particles Blinds Scientists to the Big Picture.)

I’ve only just started reading chapter 3 of this book, but one of the things that has been emphasized so far is the importance of stories on how we think and act; to change the way we and others think and act; and to better understand ourselves and others and even the way things work (e.g. natural processes and businesses). The difference is between the statement of a fact, theory, or belief and the telling of a story that describes who you are, how you got to where you are, and why it is you believe in the fact, theory, or belief, which is much more persuasive.

Both Jacobs and the good folks of the evolutionary spirituality audio casts discuss evolution. And the evolutionary spirituality folks do a good job in telling stories to help the listeners change their thinking from what Jacobs would describe as a Aristotelian view, looking at everything as purely objects, to a more mental or higher reasoning view, which the evolutionary spirituality folks would describe as a spiritual viewpoint.

Stories, metaphores, and paradigms, all discussed in Management Rewired, directly relate to creativity, which I’ll either write about in a future blog entry or talk about in a future podcast episode. Stay tuned!

I’ve had a Twitter account for a while now, but didn’t do anything with it. Like many of my friends whom I’ve recently looked up on Twitter, I was curious, signed up for an account, and then didn’t do anything with it for, I don’t know, a year or two. Periodically I’d get an email indicating someone had started following me, which inevitably turned out to be a person with a link to the adult site xxxblackbook.com.

So anyway, with Web2Intranet.com, I thought I’d be more social network active, and this past weekend started being active with Twitter. I must say, I do see the appeal now. I look at it more like a focused RSS feed, where you pick the individuals and organizations to get info from. And info is what you make of it–news stories from local, national, and international news organizations; personal updates; marketing messages and customer service support from organizations; calls for help on personal and business issues; etc.

It is odd, though. You’ll find people following thousands of others, tens-of-thousands and hundreds-of-thousands of others. How can that be? People are spending a LOT of time on Twitter and I’ve read where companies hire staff whose job is to maintain their Twitter presence. Interesting stuff.

For both of them, I go through a script-writing process, first deciding the topic and then outlining the points I want to make. This part of the process is actually a bit more time consuming for an Exploding Creativity podcast episode, as I guess it’s a bit more “scholarly” in its research. When I actually sit down and start writing, it takes 2-4 days to finish a script.

The production process for both takes a single day to record the content, edit it, and produce the final image — an MP3 file for an Exploding Creativity podcast and a WMV file (Windows Media Video) for a Web2Intranet.com video. The production of the video is more time consuming with the addition of video files and titling, plus the fact I can’t flub up my lines and heavily edit the content as I can with an audio-only file (the video would probably look pretty jumpy). I also use the same microphone for the videos that I do for the podcast episodes, and the same audio software (Audacity) to massage the audio (compress, D-ess, and normalize) for the videos so the audio quality is consistent, or at least as consistent as I can make it, throughout the video.

If you have any problem viewing the video, please go to Web2Intranet’s YouTube page. To see the text within the video more clearly, click on the button that expands the video to full screen. Enjoy!

I’ve planned for a long time now to create a webpage for ExplodingCreativity detailing my podcast setup and procedure–for those who are interested in such things and those who might be able to use it themselves for producing their own podcasts, but also for me as a reference when I go months and months between podcast episodes. Maybe now I’ll plan on also creating a page for how I do videos, though I’m still learning a lot as I go along.

I have a huge amount of fun creating a podcast episode and it was certainly a lot of fun to create the video, which is a characteristic of creativity–a sense of joy or play–or at least should be.

If you have any problem viewing the video, please go to Web2Intranet’s YouTube page. To see the text within the video more clearly, click on the button that expands the video to full screen. Enjoy!

Web2Intranet provides services commonly found on Intranets for for-profit and non-profit organizations and for individuals who don’t have the resources to rent or build and maintain their own Intranet infrastructure, or who just don’t want to bother with that so they can focus on their primary business and not on IT.

My hope for Web2Intranet is that it will help unleash the creativity of folks in small and lean-run organizations and for individuals starting out. In software engineering, organizations likely have a programming style specification, one of the ideas of which is that instead of the engineer focusing his/her creativity and effort on developing their own coding style, they use the existing predefined style so they can focus all of their creativity and energy on solving the problem at hand. And now with Web2Intranet, instead of folks focusing their time, money, and effort on developing and maintaining an IT infrastructure for managing and sharing their information and to collaborate, they can use the services of Web2Intranet and focus more of their resources on their primary mission.

One of my strengths has always been organization, so creating tools for information management has been a good, natural fit. These tools include:

• Blogging
• Forums
• Wikis
• Issue Management
• Project Management
• Email
• Search
• RSS for easily tracking changes

Check it out if you can, and please pass the website on to others you think could benefit from it.

Anyway, I’ve been collecting a lot of notes for my next podcast on Serendipity and Creativity. Stay tuned!

• Lots of fighting with WordPress to get my feed without oddities and then linking it in with Feedburner.
• Saturday I loaded and switched over to the xMark theme by Lisa Sabin-Wilson. I found this through Lisa’s Book, WordPress for Dummies. I also installed several of the widgets discussed in the book (some you see on the blog, some you don’t), and I’m really quite happy with the way the blog looks now. Thank you, Lisa!
• After some final touches on the blog, today I registered the podcast with iTunes, Podcast Alley, Podcast Pickle, and several others. For anyone else interested in doing such a thing, definitely checkout this Podcast 411 link.

For upcoming shows, my immediate plan is to next record shows on (titles subject to change) “Variety, Personality Styles, and Creativity” and “Leadership and Creativity.” These episodes will close out a good run of Fundamentals of Creativity episodes, needed for next discussing a series on Creativity Tips and Techniques. The first two shows I plan for that series are on Brainstorming and Mind Mapping. I’ll do some more shows in Creativity Tips and Techniques and then start on interviewing.

I’ve got a couple of people lined-up already for interviews, and I’ve already apologized to them for running so far behind of where I thought I’d be by now. Developing the blog is time-consuming by itself, and producing the shows is very time-consuming by itself (but both are highly rewarding!). Coupled with doing some part-time contracting work, time becomes very precious indeed. Anyway, little-by-little things are coming along nicely.

I also have in mind a couple of pages (as opposed to posts) I want to write-up. Plus I’d like to put in a Wiki or a Forum so that others can share their creativity fundamentals, tips/techniques, experiences, etc. More on all this later.

Thanks for reading!

Bob