27th October 2014

1) A US court has proclaimed that Stairway To Heaven was stolen by Plant, Page etc…

I thought we already knew this? This story was covered by Kirby Ferguson in his excellent Everything is a Remix series and episode The Song Remains the Same.

In the same series – The Elements of Creativity episode, wonderfully debunks the myth that creative thinking is a difficult process.

2) Buzzfeed’s Ze Frank on creating content and the importance of people – “So if we want people to share content – brand content for example – we need to consider what people might want to use it for, not just how beautiful or informative or entertaining it is “.

3) How organisations kill creativity, from HBR …”many managers also hold a rather narrow view of the creative process. To them, creativity refers to the way people think-how inventively they approach problems, for instance. Indeed, thinking imaginatively is one part of creativity, but two others are also essential: expertise and motivation. Expertise encompasses everything that a person knows and can do in the broad domain of his or her work “.

4) How To Win the Lottery (and build a community)…. Darius Kazemi with a tremendous parody of every tech conference presentation … ever(video).

5) Much talk recently about stolen pictures of celebrities and internet trolls, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. The web would be a much worse place, without the services of moderation companies tasked with policing social areas. From Wired, here is the story of the people who keep pornographic pictures and beheadings out of your Facebook feed.

And in a similar vein – this from Pew – ” 73% of adult internet users have seen someone be harassed in some way online and 40% have personally experienced it.” And 12% of people who have experienced online harassment said it involved a family member…..

6) Rooms is the social app ( from Facebook ) that seeks to provide a place where you can avoid your Facebook friends. Looks like Google Plus Circles to me.

7) Parking Meter Activists Under Fire After Saving Drivers $80,000 in Fines.

8) According to the latest survey from Pew, “in America today, it is virtually impossible to live in an ideological bubble.” … We tend to watch news and share social media experiences with those who share our own disputable views.

9) Nothing like the hoo-ha that accompanied Felix Baumgartners’s attempt (maybe because Red Bull weren’t involved), but here Google vice-president Alan Eustace  jumps 130,000 feet from the edge of space.

10) Magic Leap has raised $542 million to develop “a hardware, software, firmware, and development platform that…..replicates the visual perception system of the human brain as a go-anywhere, mobile computing platform”. Sort of a Augmented Reality meets Virtual Reality project.

11) This is a movement as controversial as any you are likely to find. But I’m fully behind it …. Defending The Semi-Colon

….and for those that love grammar – or perhaps more for those who don’t love being corrected by those who claim to love grammar – Here are 10 grammar mistakes people love to correct that aren’t actually wrong.

12) Quite something –  Slumbering lions picture win 2014 Wildlife Photographer of the Year award.

13) This building in Covent Garden, London appears to float in mid air…

14) ….and a Giant sculpture crawls out of the ground in a square in Budapest.

15) RIP Composers…. – we can all be music maestros now – Music Generator Xhail Can Make A Whole Score Based On A Single Word.