Metadata for the people

Après deux ans et demi de blogging erratique, dans un peu toutes les directions, j’ai le sentiment qu’Heavy Mental arrive enfin quelque part. Un territoire où confluent un certain nombre des courants qui ont innervé ce blog : connaissance, entreprise, culture, geeking, innovation, réseaux sociaux, expressions créatives et réflexions sociétales.

God bless http : Sir Ken Robinson

(Ok it’s shamefully easy to blog about TED presentations (again and again and again), but hey this is, again, awesome stuff).

Sir Ken Robinson explains how public education system all around the world educates people out of creativity. British wit and creativity insight at its best.

God bless http : Elizabeth Gilbert on creativity

“I am a … writer”. That’s how it starts. . Elizabeth Gilbert is a bit of a romantic comedy character : studying and living in NYC, she used to write in magazines and did quite a few different things for a living (cook, waitress, etc …) until she wrote a New York Times best seller : Eat Pray Love. Not very good critics but tremendous success – romantic comedy indeed.

In this talk she speaks about creativity and how to lighten the burden of genius in each of us.

Baseline : in ancient Rome, artists HAD a genius that came and visit them. With Renaissance, human is put right in the center of the universe : artists ARE genius. This is a mistake which put a huge pressure on artists shoulder and doom them with anxiety, hence the very high numbers of artists that died before their time.

It’s like asking them to swallow the sun.

20mn of empowering witty wisdom to bring art and creativity back at mortal human reach. (I facebooked it a while back but I feel more comfortable heavymentaling it as it fits here nicely).

Larry Lessig : You can’t kill the instincts our technology produce

While we have these endless conversations about the new law which is currently debated in the french parlement, it sometimes helps to look what other people say on the subject. Larry Lessig, a founding board member of Creative Commons offers a great speech on the subject at TED last year.

His proposal (not surprinsingly) is to apply Creative Commons licensing schemes to artistic content. The history and examples are quite telling and that may be a god route to go. Just curious about how artists in my country would feel with their work treated like software. Some transcript included.

Fast food for thoughts : innovation

The aim of this new serie is to propose quick (errrm…) and synthetic overview of a key concept of the IT industry, based on various media and quotes.

Lately, I have spent some time googling around for some innovation inputs and it took me a while to gather all this material. So this comes as some sort of digest.

Scott Berkun (again and again !) has been the constant inspiration of this digest. He will lead us through this bulletin with this brilliant video of his lecture on the topic @ Carnegie Mellon (50ish minutes – recommend to view after reading the post).

Also featuring : Brad Bird (Pixar), Steve Jobs, Douglas Merrill (Google), Linda Naiman, DHH (37Signals), Kathy Sierra (Head First series), etc … 

Gaping Void : creativity on business cards

Mind the gap

Okay I know you guys gonna think I am a bit of a late adopter.

You web2.0ers may have known Hugh for ages, have your own dedicated GV business card, or even the gaping void widget on your blog. Well, that’s not my case.

I’ve landed on Gaping Voids a few times before but I didn’t really notice until today while I was reading this How To be creative post. This is one of the most inspirational posts (okay it’s a pretty big one) I have ever read.

So if, just like me, you’ve one of the last human beings on this planet ignoring what Gaping Void is and who this Hugh McLeod can be, just do yourself a favor and check it out.