Our Product is Explanation
All posts for “rss”
The video that started it all, RSS in Plain English, was published 3 years ago today. We had no idea, three years ago, what we were getting ourselves into, but we're so happy that it has worked out the way it has.
Here's the original version of the video. The one that appears on this site (the one we license) has been updated for color and clarity.
The video currently has over 1.1 million views on You Tube and has been licensed hundreds of times. As much as the technical quality of the... Continue Reading
It's true. Two years ago today, we posted our very first video, RSS in Plain English. We had no idea what we were doing, or how that video would transform our lives.
We had a tripod, camera and a whiteboard, and that was about. The video was lit with bedroom lamps and I was speaking directly into the microphone on the camera as I moved around the pieces of paper. The video was edited with Windows Movie Maker. It was inspired by a blog post from 2004 with the title "RSS Described in Plain... Continue Reading
Why I Stopped Reading Blogs (for a while)
1000+ items. That's what Google Reader told me I need to read to catch up with my RSS subscriptions. It's intimidating. My RSS feeds were mocking me. I could see them with sneaky voices "hee hee, you'll never read me, you don't have the time. ha ha." The sad part is, they were right.
I stopped opening my RSS reader months ago. It wasn't a concerted effort, I just didn't do it. What I found was that longer I stayed away, the easier it was to stay away. Returns diminished with each passing... Continue Reading
The Google Reader team hired us to create this one minute introduction to Google Reader.
Our other videos for Google include:
Google Docs
Mobile Maps (My Location)
Google Apps with Salesforce
View all of our custom client productions.
Apparently, May 1st is RSS Awareness Day! I had no idea such a day existed, but it has it's own site at RSSday.org . Thanks to the nice folks at dailyblogtips.com for making our RSS in Plain English video part of the site - and day for that matter.
I agree that RSS is one of those special technologies. It has the potential to positively impact virtually every Internet user at no cost. A big problem is awareness - it's hard for people to see how it could impact them until they give it a try.... Continue Reading
A couple of weeks ago, we announced The Common Craft Store. It was a pretty soft roll-out, but was a huge moment for us. Not only did it mark the end of a lot of preparation, but a new business model. So far, so good. Plus, the more-ready-for-prime-time Store will soon be coming to an Internet near you. A big part of preparing to open the Store was making new versions of each video in both Windows (.wmv) and Mac (.mov) formats. This gave us a chance to make improvements across the library... Continue Reading
Discovering the RSS Explanation Problem
Posted by: leelefever on January 22, 2008- 4:00pm
Categories: conference, Explanation, explanationproblems, rss
I remember the exact moment when it first became apparent to me that there was such a thing as an explanation problem. I was at a small conference on Silicon Valley in early 2004. There was a CEO of a start up there and during his talk, he mentioned RSS. Someone raised their hand and asked the question "What is RSS?"
This CEO's responses to the question, and I'm not kidding, was "RSS is an XML-based content syndication format." As you might expect, this was met with a look of bewilderment.... Continue Reading
Check this out... someone uploaded a bullshit version of our RSS in Plain English video to YouTube with a crappy ad on it.
I would love it if you could help me rectify this situation by reporting it to YouTube as inappropriate and/or leaving a comment on the video about it being a fake.
Update: After a handful of you good people left comments, the user has now removed the offending video. I think this was, in part, a cross-cultural misunderstanding - he is Malaysian. His comment to me... Continue Reading
Perhaps some of you may be thinking "Why did Lee make such a big deal about adding del.icio.us bookmarks to his RSS feed and then stop bookmarking completely?"
The answer is that I've been scared to. At some point a few weeks ago, Feedburner's Linksplicer (the tool that adds the bookmarks to the RSS feed) added some goofy characters to the feed and made it invalid - broken in a minor way.
If finally got this fixed (thanks to Feedburner's responsive support folks) and now I'm a little gun-... Continue Reading
The Verdict: Exceeded Expectations
You're going to have to forgive me, I'm about to spew all sorts of facts and figures while at the same time stroking my ego. I fear that it will sound like bragging , but we were completely blown away by the success of the RSS in Plain English Video and I want to share.
The video was posted on April 23rd, 2007. Today is May 28th and in just over a month the video has been...
Viewed over 80,000 times across three hosts (Blip.tv, YouTube and DotSub)... Continue Reading