Operation

Excerpted from The Myths of Innovation (O'Reilly Media)

By Scott Berkun

Pitching is for the powerless. You don’t pitch unless you need something from someone else, whether it’s money for a start-up or permission to go out on a date. If you put yourself into a position where you need to pitch to get what you want, don’t mess it up by pretending you are in control. You’re not. You are asking, and if you want to get what you are asking for, you must prepare. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for someone to say yes, and that doesn’t happen all on its own.

In my experience, the skill most deficient among people with good ideas is the ability to persuade others on the merits of those ideas. In what follows, I’ll provide you with a simple way to think about pitching that will dramatically improve your chances.

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Adobe CS5 is here. At creativebits we celebrate this occasion with a new background for 5 weeks. If you want to join the party you can do so here.

Just a short service announcement. I've installed file attachments to comments to help with critique and forum support questions feedback. Images appear inline and other files are as attachments. Hope you'll find it useful.

Mediabistro, Brands of the World, Ads of the World, creativebits and several other webistes together launched a logo award to recognize the best work and designers from the past 2 years. The idea is to promote all participants and especially the winners to millions of visitors of these websites and help designers get exposure.

There are more than 40 categories you can submit your logo to and there will be 3 gold, 3 silver and 3 bronze winners in each category, so there is a high chance of getting recognition for your good work.

There will be 12 judges from all over the world, including celebrity designers like Armin Vit from BrandNew.

Make sure to select whether you accept freelance jobs or job offers when signing up as we expect clients and design studio heads hunting for the best talent on the site.

Consider that the logo will stay up on the site whether you win or not for years to come which is a good way to generate leads to your business and helps with SEO as well.

If you don't mind spending US$30 to secure this channel for recognition and getting more business for the new year, head to Mediabistro Logo Awards and sign up now. You can create your profile, upload your logos and pay later when you're happy with your submission.

Dear creativebits readers. I'd like to thank you for all the support and participation on creativebits in 2009 and I wish you a successful and exciting new year for 2010. For those of us with small kids enjoy this coloring page together.

There was an error in our email subscription module which resulted in sending out a lot of email notifications from creativebits to some members. I would like to ask for apologies and report that the problem has been fixed. You won't be getting any such emails unless you specifically subscribe to them.

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Google Wave seems to be a game changer in online collaboration. It's improving every day and several people started using it seriously for real work.

Following up on our tradition of giving away invites to beta services I would like to offer up my invites to creativebits members. The first 12 commenters will get the invites.

No need to give your email in the comment. I can get it from your account.

Hope you will enjoy it!

As you already noticed creativebits got a fresh new design.

The objectives were to bring the design closer to AotW and BotW, since they are all part of the same family of sites. I wanted to give more space in the sidebar for the latest critiques and forum topics. Also, I needed a rectangle adspace above the fold instead of the skyscrapers, which are hard to design good ads for.

I'm aware there are still issues with the theme here and there. It will be fine tuned in the next few weeks. Click around and let me know how you like it, also report any bugs you find.

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Just a quick note that creativebits has been upgraded to Drupal 6 now, which at this point should not affect user experience in any way. If you do find any problems please let me know!

However, this upgrade opens up the possibility for future developments and a redesign. I'm thinking to update the layout with a new homepage that let's you see all new content at one glance.

If you have any suggestions for the redesign or features please let me know so I can build it into the plans. Thank you!

I've updated the user profiles, so they are now neatly organized into tabs and we have a couple of new fields, so please go to My account, then Edit and update the 4 tabs. Most importantly make sure you select your preference if you want to be contacted for freelance jobs and job offers.

Also, you will notice that there are points associated with your account. These points are activated retroactively for your activity on creativebits and they will be added to your account every time you create any piece of content. Here are the values given for different activities:

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I have some ideas on how we could use this point system in the future, and I'm happy to receive any suggestions.

Finally I've updated the News section, so now it shows embedded images for topics, which makes this page much more useful. Let me know if you think I should add any important news source that is currently missing.

Do let me know what other things shall I work on, so I can add them to my to-do list.