The Story of Our First Video, 2 Years Ago Today

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 English."

Of course, the technical quality of the video clearly shows that we had many, um, many opportunities to improve:

We posted it about 10pm on the night of the 23rd and by noon the next day it hit the front page of Digg, partially thanks to our first comment by Rob Cottingham, minutes after it was posted. We were both blown away by its popularity. Here are a couple of tweets from that day:

This blog post (which makes me smile) captured some of the initial buzz:

It's been 24 hours since the video was posted and we've seen 15,000+ page views, 800 Diggs , 350 Delicious bookmarks and 50 comments.

Of course, the big question for us became, can we do it again? Soon after we started work on our second video, Wikis in Plain English. Once that was complete, we started to feel confident that this was something we could do.

Looking back at the RSS video, it's a bit painful to see how rough it is compared to our work now. However, I'm struck that the roughness didn't matter. It was the message, the script, the communication that mattered far more than the bad lighting and sound. While we feel good about technical quality now, we still focus the majority of our attention on what made that first RSS video work: a simple and clear explanation.

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.

Custom Video: Google Reader in Plain English

The Google Reader team hired us to create this one minute introduction to Google Reader.

Our other videos for Google include:

Custom Video: Google Reader in Plain English

May 1st is RSS Awareness Day

Apparently, May 1st is RSS Awareness Day!

Major Updates to Our Videos (2 Examples)

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 - especially to our first few videos, which has sound and color issues.

Discovering the RSS Explanation Problem

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.

Our RSS Video - Hijacked on YouTube

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.

So About Those Delicious Bookmarks

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-shy. The bookmarked items will come back soon, I just want to make sure my feed stays valid along the way. We all need more validation, right?

The Verdict (and stats) on the RSS Video

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...