Do you habitually Google topics of random interest? Do you surf YouTube for videos of fun, fantasy, or frolic? Do you browse magazines for special interests or hobby? Is CNN or Talk Radio the background soundtrack of your daily life? Do you scan a local newspaper, USA Today, or Wall Street Journal for general talking points and water cooler conversation?
Now, go with your answer.
Learn/Discover. I recently returned from a 5 day holiday in Cancun. January in Mexico? Or, January in Colorado? An easy choice when bulky sweaters, icy nostrils, and inept snow skiing are not your fancy.
As I drove home from the airport, I pondered what was missed most while away. My missed list: (1) Japanese body pillow (makes it easier for me to sleep on my side without snoring and annoying my wife); (2) my Japanese Toto washlet (see for yourself); and (3) my iPhone.
I didn’t miss my wife (because she was with me). Though absence makes the heart grow fonder…not on this trip.
I didn’t miss my work (because she was with me, too). I taught/monitored an online International Business course while in Mexico. A slow inconvenient Internet connection in the lobby and my borrowed Dell netbook was minimally adequate for this task.
I also didn’t miss American media/entertainment (television, movies, USA Today, music, Wii/Guitar Hero), American food, Chinese food, skiing, snow capped mountains, phone calls, Earl Grey tea, sugar free chocolate, or other daily indulgences. Probably due to the shortness of the travels.
But, I did miss my iPhone.
About two months ago, I traded up to my first smart phone. Prior to this I considered a phone as a phone. Nothing more. Nothing less. My thumbs are too large and my mind too reasonable for SMS text messaging; and, e-mail or Internet browsing on a normal mobile phone connection resurrects my impatience. This all changed when I played with a friend’s 3G iPhone for a few hours and was overwhelmingly surprised at how much fun a phone could be for web browsing, music, games, and e-mail.
So, on that memorable life changing day of November 25, 2008, I rewarded myself and my right brain with an iPhone.
Then and there I discovered the diversions of smart phones and apps from Apple’s iTunes store:
(1) ringtones (personalized from my favorite music; David Bowie’s China Girl alerts me when my wife calls; George Thorogood’s Bad to the Bone warns when a friend calls),
(2) games (Pac-man, iBowl, Brain Toot),
(3) music (legally ripped from my favorite CDs),
(4) photos (from my Google Picasa favorites),
(5) more music/movies (Pandora, Shazam, Joost, Now Playing, Flycast, Youtube),
(6) news (USA Today, NY Times, Newsdesk, Wikiamo),
(7) travel (Lonely Planet Mandarin, World Nomads Spanish, Hear Planet, Convert Any, Currency),
(8) shopping (Amazon, eBay, Munch, The Find),
(9) social networking (LinkedIn, Facebook),
(10) communication (Truphone, reQall, iTalk),
(11) otherwise useful (Outlook Calendar, Yahoo Stocks, Google Maps, Yahoo Weather, Say Who, Contacts), and
(12) wonder wise unusual (iBonsai, Wooo Button, iSteam, Tickle Me!, Rimshot!, Koi Pond).
And if not enough: more importantly I discovered the most interesting and usefulness of the iPhone was to “feed by brain” with planned, focused, random, interesting, entertaining, unexpected cross-fertilization for creative thinking. Let me explain.
With work or life, it is easy for your brain to unbalance, left brain overload, right brain under load. This PWYRB Blog was designed to help you and I with the rebalancing. Creative cross-fertilization is yet another means or activity for rebalancing. With each blog post, I try to provide web links to videos and interesting topics for creative cross-fertilization: planned, yet unexpected; focused, yet irreverent; serious, yet funny; left brained, yet right brained.
To seek creative cross-fertilization is to simply refocus or change focus with an information input so as to improve your creative output. It helps creativity and original thought to think across different and diverse subjects and disciplines. It helps idea generation to read or process information for random fun and interest, and not just for focused work. Creative cross-fertilization offers: food for the brain, a muse for the mind, and mashups for the right brain.
A mashup is where two or more related or unrelated things come together to form something new, possibly different, most likely unexpected. Mashups are found in music, videos, and otherwise; and, in new products. The iPhone, for example, combines the benefits of a phone, internet device, and camera. Yet, with Apple’s iTunes and App Store, the iPhone becomes a mashup offering something quite new and different from other mobile phones. For a more creative life, we need cross-fertilization or mashups for our right brain.
I do this with Google Reader.
Grow/Balance. Google Reader is one of many available RSS feeders on the web. Others have names such as: Atom, My Yahoo!, NewsGator, PageFlakes, etc. I prefer Google Reader because I am already a Google supporter (blogger, gmail, maps, docs, search, tasks, adsense, etc.) and it works perfectly on the iPhone thru Google Mobile Apps. Yes, Google will someday take over the world…okay with me as long as they continue to provide useful and interesting free stuff. For the benefit of Microsoft and Apple: yes, I said “free stuff.”
Try it. Go to Google Reader with your desk or laptop computer, sign in using your gmail account (or start a new account) and begin by creating folders from topics of interest for fun, education, and/or work/career (use the Help button when needed). My Google Reader folders include: Advertising, China, Comics, e-Marketing, iPhone/Apple, Science Technology, Shopping, and more. Then begin your content search and add subscriptions from your favorite blogs (don’t forget to subscribe to this PWYRB blog), news sources, content based web pages, etc., and move them into your folders. You can also go to the “browse for stuff” section and quickly add popular “feed bundles.” Now you can browse for creative cross-fertilization from mashups of random content from all your subscriptions or from specific folders and their topics.
After set up, you can read your focused, fun, or serious content from any device connected to the Internet. What you get are headlines and bite sized summaries from your subscriptions that you can: link thru to the full web articles; share by emailing to a friend; or email to yourself for later reading.
I prefer to connect to Google Reader thru my iPhone and read while:
(1) my wife shops (She thinks I am shopping, too. But, don’t tell her.);
(2) standing in line at the supermarket;
(3) lying in bed waiting for my wife to complete her nightly beauty rituals (A closed door secret, but it works! Do tell her this.);
(4) during television commercials;
(5) at breakfast (when my wife is preoccupied); and
(6) at random free times during the day.
Within minutes, my brain is fed with a mashup of Dilbert comics, an article on the use of Twitter in marketing, the latest economic policy changes in China, the rants of a blogger against teenage social networking, and news that Chimpanzees are illegal as pets in many U.S. states. My subconscious gets fodder for dreams, random thoughts, unusual thinking, informed conversation, and right brained originality.
iPhone. iFeed. iPlay with my right brain. U 2 can PWYRB. TTFN.
Copyright 2009 by Denny E. McCorkle. All rights reserved.
"Play With Your Right Brain," "Thought Breakers," "Aha! Experiments," and “Aha! Lessons”
are trademarks of Denny E. McCorkle.
For more about the “Play with your Right Brain” philosophy, read my short story:
For more about creative cross-fertilization and mashups, read my Squidoo web lens: Mashups for the Right Brain.
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