It's a staple of corporate retreats: gather staff, whip out the flip chart and announce that "there are no bad ideas". Many attendees just groan inwardly. Are they just cynics, or are they onto something? Apparently several studies back up the Dilberts of the world, at least to an extent. According to an article in this past Sunday's New York...

Creativity is a good thing. But I think we sometimes fall into the habit of thinking it's the only good thing. Not happy in your job? You probably need more opportunities to be creative. Not happy in your personal life? If you could just express yourself more, you'd feel better. I've been working creatively my whole life, and I feel...

A little while ago I wrote an article about my experience using esession.com, a web-based "virtual recording studio". Esession struck me as having a very well-integrated collection of professional features. Now comes esession.com Version 2, and it looks like it's going to be better - largely by incorporating more non-professional features. (Disclosure: esession founder Gina Fant-Saez has become a friend...

When I worked in Silicon Valley, I realized after a short while that a big part of my job as a manager amounted to finding ways to help people be creative. After all, if you have a collection of very smart employees, it's wasteful to just tell them what to do - they probably know more than you do about...

Recently I needed to develop a storyboard in a hurry for a TV commercial. Problem: I can't draw. Solution: FrameForge 3D Studio 2, a pre-visualization tool popular with film & TV directors. Unexpected extra: Flow! I loved working with this tool. I found that it was so intuitively designed that I was able to learn the basics in an hour...

This was news to me, so I assume it'll be news to others. I've been living, teeth clenched, with the noisy audio output on my G5 Mac since I bought it a few years ago. Apparently the knowledge of how the quiet the durn thing down has been around since 2003, but I'd never found it, despite a few "I...

Who should see this hugely entertaining and educational web video ASAP: Everyone who likes sound Everyone who likes fire Every high school science teacher in the world Who should avoid it (or at least keep quiet about it afterwards): Stoners Thanks to Brendan Stead of Harman and Project Bar-B-Q for the tip....

The California Democratic Party held its annual convention in San Diego April 27-29, and I was there blogging, along with hundreds of other traditional and web-based reporters. Here are some observations. touch. This shot is from a rally of Barack Obama supporters just before Obama went into the main hall to address the 2,000-plus attendees. Notice the hand wrapped around...

Via Tim O'Reilly's blog I come across San Francisco Chronicle publisher Phil Bronstein, predicting layoffs and saying the news business "is broken, and no one knows how to fix it... And if any other paper says they do, they're lying." Meanwhile, according to a Zogby Poll I find in the Financial Times, "Newspaper editors are overwhelmingly optimistic about their businesses,...

In audio, as in the rest of life, the basics rule. For example, you can spend all the money in the world on great gear, but if your room is bad, you're just going to end up with a great recording of a bad room. On the other hand, if you improve the room, everything else will sound much better....