It took a few days to adjust to the quiet of Woodstock. Dylan was suddenly alone with nothing but an empty notebook. And there was no need to fill this notebook – Dylan had been relieved of his creative burden. But then, just when Dylan was most determined to stop creating music, he was overcome with a strange feeling. “It’s a hard thing to describe,” Dylan would later remember. “It’s just this sense that you got something to say.” What he felt was the itch of an imminent insight, the tickle of lyrics that needed to be written down. “I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit,” Dylan said. “I’d never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me that this is what I should do.” Vomit is the essential word here. Dylan was describing, with characteristic vividness, the uncontrollable rush of a creative insight. “I don’t know where my songs come from,” Dylan said. “It’s like a ghost is writing a song.” This was the thrilling discovery that saved Dylan’s career: he could write vivid lines filled with possibility without knowing exactly what those possibilities were. He didn’t need to know. He just needed to trust the ghost.

This was a staggeringly strange way to create a piece of pop music. At the time, there were two basic ways to write a song. The first was to be like the Bob Dylan that Dylan was trying to escape: compose serious lyrics on a serious topic. The second way was to compose an irresistible jingle full of major chords. Such predictability is precisely what Dylan wanted to avoid; he couldn’t stand the clichéd constraints of pop music. And this is why that “vomitific” writing was so important: Dylan suddenly realised that it was possible to celebrate vagueness, to write lines that didn’t insist on making sense. He would later say that Like A Rolling Stone was his first “completely free song… the one that opened it up for me”.

A little-known American charity dedicated to helping victims of African conflict has scored a public relations coup. Invisible Children‘s new 30-minute Kony 2012 video, directed by Jason Russell, has been viewed over 440,000 times since being placed on YouTube on March 5. The film is intended to raise public awareness of the devastating Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) conflict in Uganda; Fast Company has written previously about the LRA’s routine use of child labor and rape.

So far, the campaign has managed to get more than 4 million total views across the web in a little more than 48 hours. The documentary focuses on Joseph Kony, the LRA leader responsible for years of violent atrocities in Uganda and nearby countries. According to Invisible Children, the film and a related campaign “aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.” Invisible Children has been canny about marketing the film through social media via the use of Twitter hashtags (#kony2012) and celebrities. Rihanna, Stephen Fry, and The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston have all tweeted about the film. In addition, Invisible Children is organizing a celebrity pressure campaign to get, among others, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Lady Gaga to publicize #kony2012.

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

There’s a widely held trope in the tech community — strong even among Mr. Jobs’ disciples — that the product is the marketing. Or as venture capitalist Fred Wilson once wrote, “marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks.”

But Mr. Jobs didn’t see it that way. While Apple’s seductive products and luminous storefronts are core elements of its brand, Mr. Jobs saw the advertising as inextricable from the product. That’s because the product wasn’t an iMac, iPod or iPhone, it was the brand itself and how a well-designed product — any product — can make your life better.

“Even a great brand needs investment and caring if it is going to retain its relevance and vitality,” Mr. Jobs said to staff at after he returned to Apple in 1997 and unveiled the “Think Different” campaign.

Heineken continues to roll out some of my favorite TV spots – nicely done.

I love this observation about taste and creative work from Ira Glass:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.

The quote is an abridged version of the transcript from this video interview with Glass:

No one wants to go concerts or sports events alone.

So its not surprising that when Facebook users see that their friends are going to an event, they’re more likely to go too. What’s more surprising, perhaps, is how much more likely.

Facebook said Wednesday that every time a user posted on their news feed that they bought a ticket from TicketMaster, friends spent an additional $5.30 on TicketMaster (presumably for the same event). At Eventbrite, a social site for selling tickets to lesser known events, every link shared on Facebook generated $2.52 in ticket sales, Facebook said.