Myths of Innovation – at CMU

Scott Berkun returned to his alma-mater, Carnige Mellon University, on March 27th, 2008 to talk about his book,  The Myths of Innovation. This 51 minute video captures the talk, where he presented a few of the ideas from the book.

Berkun is a former manager / team-leader from Microsoft — now a successful author and public speaker. While at Microsoft, Scott worked for six years on the Internet Explorer browser, during the browser wars of the 90′s. So he knows a few things about creativity, team-work, innovation, perseverance, tenacity, and success habits.

People love new ideas. People love innovative new products.

Scott’s job at Microsoft was to come up with new ideas — innovative ideas. But his job involved more then just coming up new ideas. He had to lead his team to develop the ideas into new product features and functions quickly as possible and ship a new version out as quickly as possible.

In this video (borrowing some great material from the book) Scott shows that much of what we know (or what we think we know) about innovation is wrong — as he explores the history of innovation and creative thinking.

Travelin’ Blues — I am Detroit

Here’s a short video from Mr. Travelin Blues of Detroit.

I love Detroit. I love the people of Detroit… and I love Mr. Travelin Blues from Detroit … the other day we stood and talked for a while by the SMART bus stop near St. Andrews Hall.  A lot of days you can find him downtown (playing his guitar and singing the blues) in Greek Town, near Pegasus, the new Greek Town Hotel, or old St. Mary’s church.

CSS Gurus Help You Learn and Master CSS

Jacob Gube at Six Revisions provides an excellent roundup of 20 websites to help you learn and master CSS.  Of course, Jeffrey Zeldman‘s A List Apart is at the top of the list.  Jacob mentions Eric Meyer (who tutored Zeldman) and CSS Zen Garden, but also highlights a few blogs (and talented writers/designers) that were not on my radar.

Afruj Jahan also rounded up some excellent websites to learn CSS.

Every standardista knows you have to learn CSS to follow web standards. Speaking of which … did you hear that the Facebook Designing With Web Standards Group is giving away a few free copies of Designing with Web Standards (DWWS), by Zeldman.  ( We reviewed the DWWS book here, and the article is one of our most popular links. )

Want more help? Try following these 9 great web developers on Twitter.