Not Talking Politics is Hard

Sachi and I have an ongoing discussion that I want to share with you, dear reader, because I want to hear your feedback.

When I was a consultant, people would ask me what subjects are appropriate for a blog.  Inevitably I would say that it should reflect the person behind the blog and what is important to them. It should be multi-faceted and provide personality along with on-topic content.  I would also say that context matters - company blogs deserve special care, for instance.

So here I am with the Common Craft blog and there are two things that are very important to me right now:

1. Making videos

2. The Presidential Elections

View With Comments

Dear Subscribers, Sorry To Confuse You

Subscribers to the Common Craft Blog may have seen a strange message today about licensing that included the line "Your application will be reviewed."

This is a mistake - you should not have received this message.  We created a new page and for some reason, the introduction on that page got included in the messages that go to subscribers.  We'll make sure it doens't happen again. 

Sorry to confuse you - we'll be back to normal programming this week.

View With Comments

Wow, Thanks So Much for the Feedback

We are blown away with the response to the recent post "What Videos Should We Make?"  Not just the quantity (over 50 comments and lots of email), but the quality.  It's exciting to see suggestions that have opened up new ideas and ones that fit with a couple of the themes that have been top-of-mind. 

View With Comments

What Videos Should We Make?

Our big transition is almost complete and we need your help.  The new Store is up, we're finishing up the last custom projects and now is the time to plan what videos we'll offer in the Store over the next year.  We have lots of ideas, but we really want to know what you think.

We want to make videos that:

View With Comments

Kansas, We Owe You One (Updated Election Video)

I'm not sure how this happened, but there is an error in the original version of the "Electing a US President" video.  The original version says that there are 3 congressional districts in Kansas.  As we discovered today, via a nice email from Gerry Deman of Kansas, there are actually 4 districts.

View With Comments

Please Help Us Break In Common Craft's New Digs

This evening we've taken the wraps off the new CommonCraft.com and we'd love your feedback and help.

The biggest change is the new and improved video Store, which is fashioned after the shopping experience on sites like NetFlix. As I've said before, we see the Store as the centerpiece of our future business and we're so excited to have a foundation on which we can build.

To go with the new Store, we've made a video (below) that explains the way our video licensing works.  "Common Craft Licensing in Plain English" also appears on the Store's front page.

View With Comments

SSPR - Please Stop Spamming Bloggers (Updated with SSPR Response)

Dear SSPR,
You have been sending me emails for months now, apparently from someone named Sarah who always has a "Story Idea:" for me. Since then I have asked three times (including a voicemail) to be removed from your distribution list. What happened today?  I received another email from Sarah about another awesome "STORY IDEA".

I've given up trying to stop your emails. You obviously don't care about my requests, or care that you're proving to me and a lot of others that you accomplish the opposite effect of PR - you demean your clients in front of the very people you're trying to reach. I would never write a story after receiving a pitch from you.

View With Comments

Common Craft is 5!

It's true, Common Craft (the company and blog) is 5 years old today, or sometime around now.  I recently went back to the very first blog posts I wrote in 2003.

One of first was called "My Intentions for this Weblog" of June 24, 2003. Here are two quotes:

This weblog will be written in the language of a lay person. I feel strongly that a key to my success is being able to relate technology and technical concepts to people that are not educated or well-versed in technology. I think that the language of technology is very much focused on technologists. My goal is to make communication technology easy to understand for people like my Mom.

And...

View With Comments

Our Story of Getting Started with Online Video

We're often asked how we got started with our videos.  Here's the story.

It all started with an online community.  It was the latter part of 1999 and I was working in a healthcare data company called HBSI (which was eventually merged into non-existence).  The customers were asking for a way to work together across hospitals.  So, a few of us started an email group on eGroups, which is now Yahoo Groups.  Through this experiment and the online community that grew out of it, I discovered my passion.

View With Comments

Our Videos at One Year: Facts and Figures

Well, as of today it has been exactly one year since all this video craziness began.  On April 22, 2007 we published RSS in Plain English.  We never guessed these videos would take us so far - it was just a problem that begged to be solved.  Did you ever see a blog post with the same name from 2004?

Since our work is in front of people often, we both feel a little self conscious in talking about the numbers behind the videos. We don't want to seem ostentatious or too self-promotional.  But, at the same time, I think that exposing some of the figures provides context and hopefully examples of the power of Social Media.

View With Comments