Indexed is a great little blog I love and subscribe to. The creator, Jessica Hagy, uses simple charts and graphs to, as she puts it, “…make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math.” Her ideas are thought-provoking—and sometimes just really fun to wake-up to in the morning.
Sometimes explaining what we mean by immersion and why it matters can be tricky. But not for the ever-prolific Seth Godin. This blog post that he titles “Idea tourism” brilliantly makes a case for the philosophy we so deeply believe in and call “whole brand immersion.”
Thanks Seth.
A year ago today we posted our very first post here at Stranger than Fiction. Since then, we’ve given you a peek into the wonderful world of Sawtooth. We’ve shared truths that we couldn’t resist sharing. We laughed. We cried. We blogged.
Exactly one year and almost two hundred posts later, we’re so thankful to all of our readers and all of our contributors that make this blog exactly what it is. Truly fun. Truly inspiring. And truly Stranger than Fiction.
We want to hear from you. What are your favorite blog posts from this year? Use these categories or feel free to add your own.
Most fun
Most relevant
Most Sawtooth
Most surprising
Most passionate
Most thought-provoking
Most Stranger than Fiction
Please share the link for each post and one sentence explaining your choice.
Email your votes to blog [at] sawtoothgroup [dot] com
Entries due this Friday, March 18.
As part of the team that helps run this very blog, I can attest to how much work goes into keeping a blog alive and well and current and fun. The great thing is that we love doing it so the energy continually refuels itself. We love when our fellow agency team members send us awesome ideas. We’re passionate about giving the world-at-large a little peek into the culture that is Sawtooth. But it takes work, time, patience and persistence.
So yesterday afternoon, when I came upon this tweet: @mashable From Blog to Book Deal: How 6 Authors Did It, I was instantly compelled to click. How do these bloggers do it? What’s their secret? What’s their story? And most of all, what can we learn from this?
I proceeded to get completely absorbed into the success stories of these six bloggers whose passions–and labors of love–have landed them book deals.
Here are the books that their blogs and/or tweets have inspired:
Fail Nation: A Visual Romp Through the World of Epic Fails
by Ben Huh
Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less
by Nick Douglas
Escape From Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur
by Pamela Slim
Rules for My Unborn Son
by Walker Lamond
F U, Penguin: Telling Cute Animals What’s What
by Matthew Gasteier
This Is Why You’re Fat: Where Dreams Become Heart Attacks
by Jessica Amason
My advice to you is to go make yourself a cup of coffee or tea – or a glass of wine – depending on where you are in your day. And take a little journey down inspirational lane. Read the Mashable article and see what these bloggers have to say. I know I laughed and learned all the way.
While we don’t necessarily see ourselves landing a book deal out of Stranger than Fiction, (though we are known to dream big) we’d sure love to land some new business or attract some new friends. Anything to get our name out there to share the work that we do, that we really love and really believe in.
If it were easy to write about dance, we probably wouldn’t dance. Why not just talk? But there’s something ephemeral about dance (movements in space and time and then, swish, it’s over), making it a unique delivery system for information. It takes over your brain in a distinct way; it’s not a song (information in time) or a painting (space, unattached to time). It’s a three-dimensional unfolding in the present tense.
In his newly launched blog, choreographer Tere O’Connor attempts to tackle this ephemeral unfolding, cleverly presenting it as an ongoing “book” (words not fixed in time). Verbose, curious and quick with a joke or gesture, O’Connor has been engaged in making dance for over 25 years. In his first heady post, he reveals some of the processes through which his piece “Wrought Iron Fog” came to be. His writing reads like his dances (“What’s going on? Something’s going on! Ooh! An image, a glimmer!”). O’Connor, in true form, offers something to grasp before it slips away into surging forward motion. I particularly appreciate his insight on his role as a dance maker (be the nurse, not the surgeon of the dance) and his perspective on editing (observe vigorously and investigate your editing motives thoroughly). I tip my hat (with sweeping, irregular arm circles) to this freshly born blog. It promises to be an evocative, evolving portrait of the creative process—that maddening mix of elbow grease, relentless vigilance, passive coexistence and magical happenings (all in real time, of course).
Catch the return engagement of “Wrought Iron Fog” at Dance Theater Workshop June 23-26.