Thankyou for the links, i missed the conversation online. I am having a creative dilemma of my own right now. I will check the site out.

WOW! - what a great site.  thanks for sharing this.  I signed up straight away when you suggested it.  Being a creative myself it is good to have a place you can call home.  Are you working with creative? - they could not have picked a better person to promote them and what they do.

Christian, what a fascinating discussion - was great to see the diversity in the answers you go to the question. I guess you're going to get people who fall into two broad camps - 'nature' (no you can't learn, you're born with it) and nurture (of course, you can learn anything), with a fair amount of grey area in the middle ("yes, we're born with a level of creativity, but people can learn to fake it", for example).

As a teacher, I HAVE to believe that everyone has potential, latent ability and just needs guiding to an area where their understanding of who they are and what creativity is can be unlocked through music (the subject I teach)... It's worked so far!

Good stuff!  

True creativity needs input - as a Marketeer, I throw around words like 'brainstorming' so often I forget what they really mean... and, yes you guessed it, what they really mean is this. This is a forward-reaching platform that has huge potential to build creativity from co-operation, and through inspiration.

Fantastic!

Cheers for the comments guys.. I never thought of using Skitch as a place for conversation. Phil, thanks for your kind words and i hope you will be reading the blogs when they go live.. Steve, love the breakdown of the two camps.. Nature-Nurture etc.. I can see from listening to the replies how different people now parent and how our children can be so very varied given the same material to learn from.
Thanks also Danacea, we need more forward reaching platforms.. this last year has taught me more about creativity through co-operation than any other time in my life.

Christian this is awesome.

Hi Christian, I'm at work and was thinking about this on my ride to work this morning, so I can't post anything on Seesmic or Phreadz til much later, so here's my thoughts:

I think creativity is a fundamental aspect of how our brains work.  If we weren't creative we wouldn't enjoy TV or films or books. We have to be creative to get involved in the story.

Even more than that, we have to be creative to be able to string two words together to have a conversation with someone.

I'm in the camp of film editors that say that the best editing is when the audience is forced to work out what is happening from the juxtaposition of two images.  It requires a level of paranoia to make links between the two images.

This paranoia is what drives our imaginations, making links between things, and when we can't easily make links, inventing concepts to provide the links.

In terms of creativity, I guess it's more about having the aptitude and willingness to learn the technical skills to do this (learning to speak, learning to paint, to play an instrument, to write a novel or screenplay).

When I'm jamming with the band, I'm using my technical skills to bridge the gap between what I'm hearing the others playing and how I fit into that.

It's the drive to fill the gaps I perceive, and the success or failure of doing that, that gives me the emotional fulfilment (or lack of).  And the bonus is, if we get it right, it sounds good and others enjoy it too.

So, I would say that yes, we can all be creative, but some people are better at being creative in specific ways than others and some people have the ability to sense the gaps and fill them satisfactorily more than others.

Hmm, bit of a ramble there, sorry about that.

I'm going to go really broad here and say no, you can't learn how to be creative. Having said that, I believe everyone is born with the ability to be naturally creative in *something*. It's the basis of what it means to be human. So is it artistic? Problem-solving? Business? Is there a really creative surgeon running around somewhere (shit, I hope so)? That's up to the individual. The creative process is in almost everything. Some of it glamorous. Most of it not.

What I think you can learn though are ways of opening up the creative talents you already have.

Andy and Geoff, you are really opening my eyes to how Skitch can be used creatively. Great comments, thank you. I can see here how the word imagination can be interchanged with the word creative in many places.

In the current digital age I really think that everyone can be creative, or its much easier as the tools are so much more readily available, I never thought I was that good at drawing but now im grown up and using tools like illustrator, photoshop and indesign I do a lot of design work. Theres my 2 cents, really wish I could get more involved with seesmic discussions but too much work to do yadda yadda.

I've been watching this discussion over the past few days and it's so timely for me, in the middle of my own creative block. Also, trying to encourage creativity in my kids at the same time. I lean toward the skills can be learned but creativity is something you're born with camp. But I also think that we're all creative in some way !

Hey, I think the other commenters have done a good just of saying what I feel although Tiil's comments on Seesmic were the most profound.

Hi Clarence.. Tiil has a way of doing that. Like skinning a beast and showing you the guts. So often I find he has a single sentence for an hour of my ramblings.

It was amazing to see the way he looked at the drunk yesterday as well, the man is amazing. When I first started following him I didn't really like him, creative people don't always produce stuff that works, but failure is the price for creativity.