A few months ago, we spent an afternoon with Jamie Friddle, a writer for Seattle Magazine, who was putting together a story on Common Craft. We were so excited. A few weeks later a photographer came to take pictures.
As Sachi will tell you, the process added a layer of anxiety to her day over the next few months. What would the article say? What photos would they use? I'm happy to report that the anxiety was all for naught. The 4 page feature appears in the May 2009 issue of Seattle Magazine and we love it. Jamie's writing captured, in a compelling and interesting way, what we're all about.
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.
Our very own Sachi LeFever is the "Geek of the Week" on the Big Blog at the Seattle PI. The Geek of the Week is a series of short interviews that highlight local Seattle geeks. Last week's geek was Bryan Zug.
My favorite answer:
When did you first know you were a geek?Describe that moment: My first grade teacher scolded me for finishing too many Schoolhouse Math worksheets, so I began sneaking them until I finished the entire box.
I've been wanting to tell that story for a while. It's sooo Sachi. As it turns out, Sachi is a geek in some ways, but not the sci-fi-loving kind. Read the interview.
But what does that mean? Here's what it says on the Webby Award website:
As a result of the exceptional quality of submissions this year, the Academy has chosen to recognize work exhibiting remarkable achievement that was not selected as a Nominee. Out of the nearly 10,000 entries submitted to the 13th Annual Webby Awards, less than 15% are awarded the status of Official Honorees.
So, we made the short-list, but were not selected for a nomination. We're completely excited to be an honoree and congratulate the nominees and look forward to seeing who takes the prize.
Marshall at ReadWriteWeb, posted a story today about Common Craft that was actually published a few months back, but has been reposted at a "redux." It's one of my favorite bits of press and called "How Common Craft Stopped Doing Client Work, in Plain English." I don't know of any other blog post that tells our story better.
Since the original story was posted in September, we've created a resource that helps organizations in need of custom videos find producers who can help. It's called the Common Craft Explainer Network. I wrote about it here.
While we've significantly limited our client work to focus on our educational videos, we see an opportunity to play a role in the growing niche around explanatory videos of all types. We want to help talented producers find great projects and create a community around explanatory videos.
