Tag: connections

13 Tools to Promote Divergent Thinking

New ideas can come from anywhere, but are often hardest to find when you’re actually looking for them. However, I believe it’s possible to jumpstart your brain, even under pressure, by applying yourself to a bit of divergent thinking:

Divergent thinking typically occurs in a spontaneous, free-flowing manner, such that many ideas are generated in an emergent cognitive fashion. Many possible solutions are explored in a short amount of time, and unexpected connections are drawn. After the process of divergent thinking has been completed, ideas and information are organized and structured using convergent thinking.

Wikipedia

So to help anyone out there who may be stuck for ideas, here’s my list of divergent thought helpers:

  1. Stumbleupon – highly recommended: tell it your interests and hit ‘stumble’ to be sent to a random site
  2. Buzzfeed – hit the randomize button in the top right corner (occasionally NSFW) to see something usually quite cool
  3. Mystery Seeker – type something in the search box and receive a set of google results for a totally different subject
  4. The Wiki Game – start in one place on wikipedia, and try to end up in another, while seeing loads of content on the way
  5. We Heart It – inspiring and high-quality imagery, often captioned, and with decent search functionality
  6. We Feel Fine – an emotional search tool, potentially good for scanning & visualising need states
  7. Popurls – see the freshest stories from a range of great online sources, with customisation options
  8. Newsmap – a visualisation of the latest news, powered by google (quite old but potentially interesting)
  9. Thesaurus.net – high quality thesaurus dictionary: search synonyms, antonyms, rhymes, quotes and idioms
  10. Visual Thesaurus – see the associated meanings between concepts – worth paying for
  11. Bing Visual Search – search the web visually in an intuitive, exploratory way
  12. oSkope – discover images, videos and products related to a search query
  13. TouchGraph SEO – see the links between topics and websites

Finally, and it may take more time for ideas to emerge this way, but TED really is an amazing resource for this kind of thing. I recently attended TEDxObserver, after which my head was swimming with ideas.

Can you suggest any of your own?

The Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus

The “Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus” is a drawing machine illustrating a never-ending story by the use of patent drawings.

The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. Seven million patents — linked by over 22 million references — form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext.

New visual connections and narrative layers emerge through the interweaving of the story with the depiction of technical developments.

Why Facebook Is Awesome

Recently I’ve been using Facebook a lot more than usual, in order to:

  • Reconnect with old friends
  • Arrange ‘real world’ meetups
  • Plug gaps in my network that I should have filled ages ago
  • Build a page for Digital Cortex (right here!)
  • Organise my contacts into groups
  • Do a bit of peer-analysis (spying)
  • Try some FB apps and tools for work

Now that I’ve got all of my contacts sorted, I thought I’d try one of those friend wheels, just out of interest. I chose the one with most users, which is called Nexus, and I’ve gotta tell you – it is seriously good!

Nexus creates a interactive image of your friends’ interrelations, their shared interests, and their profile information. It is really powerful, takes about four minutes, and it’s results are guaranteed if not to please, then at least to look cool.

Here’s my Nexus analysis, with some text roughly labelling my groups:

freedimensional friend wheel

If, like me, you use Facebook as a life-management tool, you may find it interesting to see your whole network presented in this way.

I was surprised at how this complex display of some 460 connections made me really nostalgic (soppy, I know) and has driven me to reconnect with people I haven’t thought about in ages. Seeing everyone like this revealed that this is basically who I am: a series of connections. So you could say, this friend wheel has reaffirmed me as a human! Who thought Facebook could be so deep?!

Where do you fit in to the wheel? Let me know if you recognise yourself amongst the connections. I’d love to know!

P.S:

Subscribe via FacebookInspired by all this, I’m adding a new icon to Subscription Options, my WordPress Plugin, in the next release.
It will allow bloggers to create subscribers to a Facebook page.
Try it by clicking this icon, and subscribing to Digital Cortex.