all posts tagged “technology”
Recently Jay Rosen published a fascinating article on his PressThink blog that focuses on politics and how the parties have learned to exploit an “electoral blind spot”. As Rosen puts it:
The blind spot is the point at which voters stop paying attention because the costs of figuring out what’s really going on are too high.
It’s a fascinating article, and I really love this idea of “costs of figuring something out”. The article is about politics and the press, but I think the idea applies to many other subjects.
Think about Twitter or QR codes or almost any innovation. In the beginning, the costs to figuring the subject out are high. It takes valuable time to do research, to find the right tools, to be informed enough to have an educated opinion. It’s a barrier that creates a blind spot for the mainstream, who simply can’t justify the costs.
The geeks and early adopters are motivated and they get over the barrier easily. While they understand these new ideas, they are not often well equipped to make them understandable for others. The blind spot remains.
The question becomes - how do we fill these blind spots? How do we get the mainstream, your mom, your teacher, your boss, over that barrier?
My answer, to use Rosen's words, is that we lower the cost of figuring something out. How? My answer is to focus on explanations - create packages of ideas that are designed to fill the blind spot and help people say “Oh, I get it now!”
While explanations can come in many forms, we’re oriented around video explanations. We do the research, so you don’t have to. It’s all about providing information to fill the blind spot and help people feel informed enough to have an opinion and care enough to want to learn more. That’s where the magic really begins.
New Video: QR Codes Explained by Common Craft
Posted by: leelefever on September 6, 2011- 10:21am
Categories: Common Craft Video, Explanation, mobile, technology
You may have seen these little codes around. They're in newspapers, on storefronts and products. They're called Quick Response (QR) Codes and they're meant to used with your smartphone. They could be a very big deal in the future. This video is one of our most requested titles and explains how QR codes make the real world clickable.
This video, like most in our library, is available with voice-overs in 8 languages. The languages are:
- English
- French
- German
- Spanish
- Portuguese
- Dutch
- Italian
- Japanese
This video and our complete library is available via Common Craft membership. As a member, you can display the high quality versions of the videos in person, embed them on websites or download the videos for offline or internal use.
In fact, our members learn about new videos before we announce them to the public. Common Craft member Lee Kolbert was the first to use this video in a blog post and break the news.
Video: BitTorrent - Explained by Common Craft
Posted by: leelefever on January 31, 2011- 4:00pm
Categories: Bittorrent, Common Craft Video, Explanation, technology, video
Today we’re publishing a new video: BitTorrent Explained by Common Craft
Chances are, even if you’re one of the millions who use BitTorrent every day, you don’t really know how it works. That’s part of the magic that makes it so popular - it just works. It helps you download files from the Internet faster than any other method. This video explains the moving parts that work together to deliver the file to your computer.
Those of you who tune-in to the Common Craft blog may remember that we made a custom video for BitTorrent a while back. This video is very similar. Because BitTorrent is such a popular and misunderstood technology, we made a deal with the BitTorrent to be able to publish the video for our library. So, it is now available for licensing and use in education.
Custom Video: BitTorrent Explained
Posted by: leelefever on September 27, 2010- 5:00pm
Categories: bittorent, Custom Video, Explanation, paperworks, technology, video
BitTorrent, which offers a faster way to download files from the Internet, has had a serious explanation problem. It’s one of the most used and least understood products on the Web. After working with BitTorrent on a video, it’s easy to see why this is the case - the inner-workings of BitTorrent are complex. It exists in a world that defies comparison. Millions of users know it works exceptionally well, but explaining why and how it works is another story.
This video was a challenge and we were lucky to have the time and attention of Brett Nishi, Product Director at BitTorrent, who served as our guide. It was a joy to work with Brett and we’re really excited to see how they’ve put the video to work on their website.
Here’s how the company has integrated the video into BitTorrent.com:
Watch the video at BitTorrent.com.
If you're interested in a custom video for your product or service, check out our Custom Video page or Contact Us.
Video: Truly Uncut - A Complete Common Craft Video Shoot
Posted by: leelefever on March 9, 2009- 5:00pm
Categories: music, stopmotion, technology, uncut, video
This video captures the raw footage from the shooting of "Computer Hardware in Plain English. Video shoots like this usually take 4-6 hours.
Music: Thanks to Deff Syndicate for licensing the song "Hip-Hop-1" with a Creative Commons Attribution license.
This is a story about something that many of us are faced with – the dominance of the PC and the appeal of the Mac.
I’ve worked on a project at a local Fortune 50 company on-and-off for over a year. When the project started, we all had PCs. We didn’t have a hard time getting onto the company Intranet, using VPN, sharing docs, etc. It worked pretty smoothly.
Along the way, the team morphed and a Mac user came on. He struggled with integration, downloading multiple tools and using virtual PC. He made it work and all was well.
I left the team for a few months and in the mean time, a number of new people came onto the team- all Mac users. When I came back, I came back into a Mac world – I was the odd man out with a PC.
The team I needed to work with were all saying I needed to switch so we could share docs more easily (namely OmniGraffle / Visio docs). It was suddenly my problem for *not* having a Mac and not being able to use OmniGraffle.
Still the odd man out, I didn’t have any answers. I felt (imagined?) this tension of the team saying “Lee, you’ll love the Mac and if you switch, it will make our team more effective.�? Costs and viability aside, I decided that I couldn’t switch.
The platform issue got escalated, as it had the potential to cause major problems. As it turned out- the answer was simple. Our project leader simply said that the company uses Microsoft products and that means that all diagrams, wireframes, etc. need to be done in Visio because of future hand-off to enterprise teams.
Suddenly, all the Mac people were faced with the possibility that the Mac was not perfect in every way. It can’t use a standard program of the enterprise. They were suddenly the odd men out.
Of course, being playfully triumphant, I could only turn to my team after hearing the news and say with a smile “UH! In your face!�? It was not my problem anymore.
The reality of the situation, good or bad, was suddenly crystal clear. The enterprise world is a PC world and the enterprise expects you to play well with their systems. The Mac being better designed, more secure, more compliant, more cool doesn’t matter (unless you're a designer).
At the end of the day, I really just want things to work together. I value great design and impressive hardware, but I really just want to make sure that I can work with everyone on a team using the same documents. It would be great if it were a Mac world, but it’s not in most companies, so I’m OK with the PC for now.
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Geeky question: The problem we were having was related to being able to save OmniGraffle and Visio files as XML documents and then sharing them across platforms. When we did, the diagrams would get rearranged and generally funky. Does anyone know a solution for sharing OmniGraffle and Visio docs across the Mac and PC?
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