Elizabeth Gilbert: A new way to think about creativity

If you are a creative person and pursuing a career in a creative industry and/or field, you should check out Elizabeth Gilbert's lecture on TED Talks.

Elizabeth attended New York University, where she studied political science by day and worked on her short stories by night. After college, she spent several years traveling around the country, working in bars, diners and ranches, collecting experiences to transform into fiction. These explorations eventually formed the basis of her first book - a short story collection calledPILGRIMS, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. During these early years in New York, she also worked as a journalist for such publications as Spin, GQ and The New York Times Magazine. She was a three-time finalist for The National Magazine work, and an article she wrote in GQ about her experiences bartending on the Lower East Side eventually became the basis for the movie COYOTE UGLY.

In 2000, Elizabeth published her first novel, STERN MEN (a story of brutal territory wars between two remote fishing islands off the coast of Maine) which was a New York Times Notable Book. In 2002, Elizabeth published THE LAST AMERICAN MAN - the true story of the modern day woodsman Eustace Conway. This book, her first work of non-fiction, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Elizabeth is best known, however for her 2006 memoir EAT PRAY LOVE, which chronicled her journey alone around the world, looking for solace after a difficult divorce. The book was an international bestseller, translated into over thirty languages, with over 10 million copies sold worldwide, and a movie version in the making, starring Julia Roberts. The book became so popular that, in 2008, Time Magazine named Elizabeth as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

In 2010, Elizabeth published a follow-up to EAT PRAY LOVE called COMMITTED -- a memoir which explored her ambivalent feelings about the institution of marriage. The book immediately became a number one New York Times bestseller, and was also received with warm critical praise. As Newsweek wrote, COMMITTED "retains plenty of Gilbert's comic ruefulness and wide-eyed wonder", and NPR called the book "a rich brew of newfound insight and wisdom." COMMITTED will be published in paperback in February 2011.

Tony Porter - Break free of the "man box."

Tony Porter makes a call to men everywhere: Don't "act like a man." Telling powerful stories from his own life, he shows how this mentality, drummed into so many men and boys, can lead men to disrespect, mistreat and abuse women and each other. His solution: Break free of the "man box."

Tony Porter is the visionary and co-founder behind the nonprofit A Call to Men: The National Association of Men and Women Committed to Ending Violence Against Women. Porter’s message of engagement and self-examination has connected powerfully with numerous domestic and sexual violence programs for such high-profile groups as the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, and colleges and universities around the country, including the US Military Academy at West Point and the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. Porter is also an international lecturer for the U.S. State Department, having done extensive work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

He is a faculty member of the New York State Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services Academy of Addiction Studies, where he co-authored their curriculum for clinicians who work with chemically dependent African-Americans. He also specializes in developing social justice models for human service organizations.

"Ted Bunch and Tony Porter shared their expertise in riveting testimony about men’s responsibility for ending violence against women, and they challenged well-meaning men to become part of the solution. The men spoke of their own journeys in understanding that domestic violence is a civil rights issue." From My Sister’s Place

Web Video Is The Future Television

Video overwhelms the Web. And it should.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Internet, at one time the plumbing that connected pages of text and occasional images, is rapidly transforming itself to be a network of video publishing and viewing.

At first glance, this seems quite terrible. But in fact the emergence of the Video Web is critically important, intellectually exciting, and entirely inevitable.

There are historic reasons why we fear video. For most of us who grew up on Batman, or Gilligan's Island, or Charlie’s Angels, we've known that TV was at best junk food... and at worst, a cognitive cancer. In recent years, television has become far less benign, filling hours with a grim view of our world with programs like Fear Factor, Big Brother, GLO TV or the Jersey Shore. As television increasingly dominates our leisure and screen time, it has continued to spiral down toward base human fears and car-wreck peeping tom voyeurism.

When it came along in 2005, Youtube could have been viewed as an accelerator of this trend toward trivial amusement and video junk food. Certainly, squirrels on skateboards didn't qualify as height art. But Web video isn't television. It's something else entirely. And in the past 5 years, from 2005 to 2010, as Web video has moved to become the fastest growing and most prevalent form of traffic emerging on the Web, something else happened.

Web video abandoned TV.

There are plenty of examples of this — but the perhaps most dramatic one is the growth of TED Talks. TED Curator, Chris Anderson, calls this emergence Crowd Accelerated Innovation. His thesis is that Web video accelerates the cycle of humans creating, sharing, and iterating.

YOU MUST WATCH:

Chris Anderson: How web video powers global innovation

Three things have changed in past five years — the combination is like rocket fuel for Web video.

1. Cameras. Web video cameras are now standard fare on cell phones. Flip Cams are cheap and record remarkable HD video. The sales of Digital SLRs (DSLR's) put high quality camera with interchangeable lenses in the hands of mid-budget pro-sumers.

2. Bandwidth. Back in 2005, broadband was still elusive for many Web surfers. And video just wasn't a very good experience on dial up. Now, video moves with rare buffering as users find they are able to get a HD experience with relative ease.

3. Distribution. Youtube was important in breaking the monopoly that broadcast and cable had over video distribution, but since 2005 more and more distribution solutions have come on line. Devices like the iPhone and iPad have made Web video viewing far more ubiquitous. But the barrier between the Web and the living room flatscreen is about to burst wide open. With boxes like Roku, Boxee, and AppleTV(2) on the way, viewers are going to be able to choose between broad Web video offerings, and more limited cable/entertainment packages. And 'over the top' solutions like Netflix make the Internet to flatscreen option all the more reasonable.

The trifecta of change — Cameras, Bandwidth,and Distribution promises a future where change happens quickly. Of course, there can't only be winners. The broadcasters and cable companies that have for decades been able to be the exclusive distributor of video via closed one-way networks are now starting to feel the sands shift under their feet.