How about a little crowd-wisdom here? Vote for your favorite logo below.
I’m in the process of redesigning my blog. I’ve gone through a few rounds with some of my super designer friends who have been advising me on developing a logotype (a lot more work than expected for an amateur!). These are my top six. Now I gotta narrow it down to ONE and I figured I could get a little outside perspective.
Rule #3 Share it with an Audience
Another rule in The Five Obstructions is that Leth must show his films to Von Trier and be present for his critique (they drink champagne and eat caviar for every showing). Von Trier is Leth’s audience. The embodiment of his critic increases the pressure but also fuels Leth’s labor to impress his friend.
Rule #2 Find a Story you connect with
Throughout most of The Five Obstructions, it is unclear why Leth subjects himself to this tortuous exercise. But at the end we discover that this is a therapeutic process to help him come out of his depression and get in touch with his real emotions in the storytelling process. Von Trier wants Leth to produce something honest from his heart, not his head.
I only started making videos six months ago, and before that all my creative endeavors were creative writing, dancing and doodling. With these hobbies it was fairly easy to me to access my heart and enjoy the process. But in making videos, I got caught up in the gadgets, the software, the codecs, and more.
Comments(1) Ever stared at the metaphorical white page in MS Word pondering what to write? In my second storytelling class I learned that the biggest constraint for creativity is the infinite number of possibilities from having no constraints (the white space).
Rule #1: Set Rules
Every week, for the last twelve weeks, we had to produce a video – a self-imposed requirement. The most successful videos came from an assigned theme or a rule. Having a rule or parameter was the biggest jump-start to creating a video, but I didn’t understand why until we watched The Five Obstructions (2003).
The film depicts a director (Lars Von Trier) who makes his mentor (Joergen Leth) redo his movie — the Perfect Human (1967) — five times, following different constraints each time. In every instance, Leth outsmarts the limitations and produces an incredible film. It was amazing to watch the same film rendered in such different ways, and every time it was jaw dropping good. This was only possible because Leth had to follow the obstructions imposed on him by Von Trier.
Comments(0) Comments(0) Jeff Khadavi is the founder of the soon to be born GoTime.com, a site that leverages social network, data mining and venue info to do answer the quintessential question of what’s going on tonight.
He came to one of my class at UW and proudly announced his Columbia MBA drop-out status. He knew that he would immediately gain respect as an entrepreneur and innovator. “We just got together, my two friends from MIT and I and we came to Seattle to do follow execute our vision.” Yes, inspiring.
Comments(0) As a follow up to my last post, I got this article “Research funds for technophiles” by Mark Bauerlein. He criticizes the tech fanatism (the author takes some stabs at some of my favorite people like Jenkjins and boyd) which fails to address the central question of how digital media is changing learning.
Comments(2) 
Every where I turn there seems to be a foundation, organization or center developing curriculum to teach kids how to develop their digital skills. I confess I’m very skeptical of whether we really need this, though I’m recognize that there are tremendous divides among the different social, economical and mental abilities among young people and perhaps this is the main reason why we need to develops new educational standards that include digital skills. Not everyone can pick up a computer and figure out how to blog…
I found this presentation on Slideshare and found it to be right on the money and provocative.
**UPDATE**
Lately I’ve been wondering why is entertainment so successful on the web. It seems to be the magic formula to making something viral or getting a lot of hits (that or pure controversy). You wouldn’t be sending your friends product recommendations (lame) but you sure will send them a little funny video like this:
Twitting
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