LeFever is the founder of Common Craft and his story is an inspiring one.

Editor's note: Looking back over 2008, there were some posts on ReadWriteWeb that did not get the attention we felt they deserved - whether because of timing, competing news stories, etc. So in this end-of-year series, called Redux, we're resurrecting some of those hidden gems. This is one of them, we hope you enjoy (re)reading it!

The History of Common Craft

Common Craft started out as a consultancy focused on creating and teaching organizations about online communities. Lee LeFever left his day job and opened up shop in 2003. He blogged prolifically and worked with a number of large clients in the earliest days of social media.

One of his most notable projects was working with consultant Nancy White on the very successful community Share Your Story, a March of Dimes site where parents with children in the neonatal ICU could find support. Share Your Story is still one of the most successful use cases of niche social networking online.

By 2007 the LeFevers began trying something that many social media consultants and trainers try - they began making videos explaining certain tools and trends emerging online. They tried using white boards and other methods but nothing really stood out - until Sachi LeFever thought to put the white board on the ground, cut out some simple cartoon figures and use a stop motion method of animation.

The Common Craft Show was thus born. April 2007 saw the company's first video in their now famous style, called RSS in Plain English. Though Common Craft's production skills have improved dramatically as they've produced video after video - RSS in Plain English remains the best introduction to RSS on the web.

One month later, Common Craft published a video called Wikis in Plain English.

Two months after this five year old consultancy began producing the simple introductory videos, the LeFevers decided they wanted to dedicate 100% of their time to the series and they stopped doing online community consulting.

Over the next year, Common Craft produced videos for clients, for general interest and for fun on a wide variety of topics. From California School Financing, to the company PR Web, to Zombies in Plain English (not to be confused with the PR Web client video) - the breadth was really impressive.

Hold the Show!

The Common Craft show was a huge success. Inquiries from clients were coming fast and furious, the company saw between five and ten inquiries for custom videos every day. Why have Lee and Sachi decided to stop making custom videos then? We asked them and this is what they told us.

"This was a perfect fit for us - we could work from home, make a good living and work on fun projects with interesting companies and people. And it's been a blast. But soon we started to look at the possibilities. A few things were clear:

1. Custom videos do not scale. We would have to hire people to grow the company and we don't want to hire. We are a two person company.


2. Custom videos are usually promotional. We are more comfortable with education than promotion. Another realization is that promotion is fad-driven and education isn't as much. We see a longer lifespan for our videos in education.


3. Our goal is independence - we want to work for our own goals on our own schedule and maintain a lifestyle that supports us."

What Now?

What is Common Craft going to do instead of making themselves available for hire making custom videos? Lee says that for the past year they've been getting requests three or four times a week for permission to re-use their Plain English videos. The solution they decided on was licensing them for corporate and eductional use.

Common Craft now sells licenses for high-quality, downloadable versions of their explanatory videos. All of their time working is now spent building out the library. Videos are licensed for under $20 for individual use and $350 for site-wide use, like on a company intranet. Commercial licensing, for use on public commercial websites, is the next option the company will be offering.

Of course the video content is available free to anyone online, but Common Craft says that many companies feel far more comfortable paying for official permission to use high quality, unbranded versions. There's certainly no DRM involved. "People want to do the right thing if they know the rules," Lee LeFever says. "Our challenge is to educate people about how we expect our videos to be used. We're lucky to have fans that feel good about supporting us with their purchases. Given limited resources, we would rather spend time educating people on the right thing to do than trying to make the wrong things impossible."

Fortunately, all the social media work the company has done has put them in a place of great prominence regarding the issues they tackle. People love their videos, so they get a lot of links and have excellent search engine ranking.

When the Common Craft Store opened in April, the first video sold within two hours. Last month, video licenses were bought by individuals and organizations in nine countries around the world. The LeFevers report that their customers include Fortune 500 tech, chemical and services companies, school districts and Universities, government agencies, individual consultants and educators.

The store isn't operating in the black yet, but it is covering their business expenses and "a nice chunk of our living expenses." We hope Common Craft can go all the way and support themselves fully with this work. An ad-free business model, developed by two independent creatives, is very inspiring.

Though the videos seem simple, each one takes days to prepare. The hardest part of making them, Lee LeFever says, is really nailing down clear, effective explanations of these concepts. It's a powerful skill set that Lee and Sachi bring to an interesting new market.

We love the fact that there are enough people willing to pay for this kind of content that Common Craft has decided to make it their sole business strategy. We've written here about the most awesome freelance producers of custom screen casts we know but when the LeFevers told us they'd left those ranks we were very curious to hear the details about what they are doing next.

We think their story can inspire anyone who dreams of making a living doing good work and exploring new ways to do business on a changing Internet.

As Josh Lowensohn notes, the app also can't access the extensive written content from the Howcast Wiki Guides.

If you don't know what you want to watch, the app will show a random video if you shake the phone, though this seems like more of a gimmick than a useful feature.

The iPhone application feels a bit limited when compared to the Howcast web site, but given that most of the tutorials on Howcast are shorter than five minutes and that the production values of the videos is very high, using the service while sitting on a train or bus might just give you a chance to learn how to forage for wild edible plants or how to clean your iPod earbuds.

Making a guide or tutorial with Whizle is supposed to be a piece of cake. In our tests of the service we found it to be dead simple. In creating a Whizle, we were given steps for creating a title, mission statement, and steps with descriptions. The service provides both a WYSIWYG editor for formatting text and a more interactive application for creating a whizle. We found the interactive app to be more appealing and easier to use. If you don't need all the bells and whistles the WYSIWYG editor will do just fine. Adding and removing steps for our tutorial was simple. We were also able to add Youtube videos and Flickr photos to help visualize our guide. All in all, the service did exactly what it said it would without any fuss.

Who is Whizle For?

We don't recommend using Whizle for any hardcore tutorials such as a design tutorials. Formatting images is not one of Whizle's specialties. We'd really like to recommend the service to bloggers, marketers, and those in PR looking to create simple guides for clients. Unfortunately, there isn't an option to embed any of the whizles you create. Your creations stay on the Whizle site where viewers are allowed to comment and edit your whizle if you allow them to. The service could also use a little more work in the design department. It's dead simple interface was a bit of a turn-off for us. However this is all preferential. Overall, Whizle is functional enough for beginners, but anyone looking for a more advanced tool will have to keep searching.

LeFever is the founder of Common Craft and his story is an inspiring one. He's gone from social media consulting to co-producing the wildly popular "...In Plain English" video series. Common Craft's videos have been translated into scores of other languages and landed the company big jobs making custom videos for companies like Google, LinkedIn and MeetUp. Now Lee and his wife Sachi LeFever are making another major work transition. They've stopped producing custom videos for clients and have found an interesting new business model.

Common Craft started out as a consultancy focused on creating and teaching organizations about online communities. Lee LeFever left his day job and opened up shop in 2003. He blogged prolifically and worked with a number of large clients in the earliest days of social media.

One of his most notable projects was working with consultant Nancy White on the very successful community Share Your Story, a March of Dimes site where parents with children in the neonatal ICU could find support. Share Your Story is still one of the most successful use cases of niche social networking online.

By 2007 the LeFevers began trying something that many social media consultants and trainers try - they began making videos explaining certain tools and trends emerging online. They tried using white boards and other methods but nothing really stood out - until Sachi LeFever thought to put the white board on the ground, cut out some simple cartoon figures and use a stop motion method of animation.

The Common Craft Show was thus born. April 2007 saw the company's first video in their now famous style, called RSS in Plain English. Though Common Craft's production skills have improved dramatically as they've produced video after video - RSS in Plain English remains the best introduction to RSS on the web.

One month later, Common Craft published a video called Wikis in Plain English.

Two months after this five year old consultancy began producing the simple introductory videos, the LeFevers decided they wanted to dedicate 100% of their time to the series and they stopped doing online community consulting.

Over the next year, Common Craft produced videos for clients, for general interest and for fun on a wide variety of topics. From California School Financing, to the company PR Web, to Zombies in Plain English (not to be confused with the PR Web client video) - the breadth was really impressive.

Hold the Show!

The Common Craft show was a huge success. Inquiries from clients were coming fast and furious, the company saw between five and ten inquiries for custom videos every day. Why have Lee and Sachi decided to stop making custom videos then? We asked them and this is what they told us.

"This was a perfect fit for us - we could work from home, make a good living and work on fun projects with interesting companies and people. And it's been a blast. But soon we started to look at the possibilities. A few things were clear:

1. Custom videos do not scale. We would have to hire people to grow the company and we don't want to hire. We are a two person company.


2. Custom videos are usually promotional. We are more comfortable with education than promotion. Another realization is that promotion is fad-driven and education isn't as much. We see a longer lifespan for our videos in education.


3. Our goal is independence - we want to work for our own goals on our own schedule and maintain a lifestyle that supports us."

What Now?

What is Common Craft going to do instead of making themselves available for hire making custom videos? Lee says that for the past year they've been getting requests three or four times a week for permission to re-use their Plain English videos. The solution they decided on was licensing them for corporate and eductional use.

Common Craft now sells licenses for high-quality, downloadable versions of their explanatory videos. All of their time working is now spent building out the library. Videos are licensed for under $20 for individual use and $350 for site-wide use, like on a company intranet. Commercial licensing, for use on public commercial websites, is the next option the company will be offering.

Of course the video content is available free to anyone online, but Common Craft says that many companies feel far more comfortable paying for official permission to use high quality, unbranded versions. There's certainly no DRM involved. "People want to do the right thing if they know the rules," Lee LeFever says. "Our challenge is to educate people about how we expect our videos to be used. We're lucky to have fans that feel good about supporting us with their purchases. Given limited resources, we would rather spend time educating people on the right thing to do than trying to make the wrong things impossible."

Fortunately, all the social media work the company has done has put them in a place of great prominence regarding the issues they tackle. People love their videos, so they get a lot of links and have excellent search engine ranking.

When the Common Craft Store opened in April, the first video sold within two hours. Last month, video licenses were bought by individuals and organizations in nine countries around the world. The LeFevers report that their customers include Fortune 500 tech, chemical and services companies, school districts and Universities, government agencies, individual consultants and educators.

The store isn't operating in the black yet, but it is covering their business expenses and "a nice chunk of our living expenses." We hope Common Craft can go all the way and support themselves fully with this work. An ad-free business model, developed by two independent creatives, is very inspiring.

Though the videos seem simple, each one takes days to prepare. The hardest part of making them, Lee LeFever says, is really nailing down clear, effective explanations of these concepts. It's a powerful skill set that Lee and Sachi bring to an interesting new market.

We love the fact that there are enough people willing to pay for this kind of content that Common Craft has decided to make it their sole business strategy. We've written here about the most awesome freelance producers of custom screen casts we know but when the LeFevers told us they'd left those ranks we were very curious to hear the details about what they are doing next.

We think their story can inspire anyone who dreams of making a living doing good work and exploring new ways to do business on a changing internet.

Enter Agglom, a simple little service built by Italian developer Enrico Foschi. It's a Firefox plug-in that will make sharing a list of links far easier than it's been before.

Agglom is a remarkably easy way to create a "slide show" of live links that you can share with other people. See the screencast demo we recorded below.
For those who prefer to read, there's a text description after the video.

After downloading the plug-in, you can click on the Agglom button at any time. It captures all the URLs from each tab in your browser. After making some admin decisions, including public/private or password protection, you receive one link that you can share with anyone else. They can then follow through the slide show along with you, access it later, get any changes made to it by RSS, leave comments and suggest additional links.

It's simple but looks quite useful.

Presentation Is Powerful

Earlier this month we wrote about five lightweight apps that are useful for web consultants and trainers. If we had known about Agglom then (we just discovered it today via Marjolein Hoekstra's blog CleverClogs) it would have made a great fit there as well.

The web is changing so fast and there's so much information available that providing accessible ways clearly show people what you're talking about is the best way to help friends, family and co-workers wrap their minds around the powerful new tools now available.

Agglom is simple - that's good. It also looks quite useful. That's a sweetspot for applications these days. Can you imagine using it? We can.

While all of that remains true today, the ubiquity of the internet, the ease of publishing and the rise of online advertising has lead to the emergence of new kinds of websites: productivity, how-to and advice/Q&A sites that broadcast, scale and monetize that kind of information.

Productivity Sites

This post was inspired by a list I found on the very top of Del.icio.us Popular last week, titled The Top 100 Productivity and LIfehack Blogs. Posted to a site called CollegeDegree.com, it clearly took some work by someone to put together and will probably bring in a steady flow of traffic for some time.

Making Productivity Productive

Ironically, the list isn't very conducive to productive use once you've found it. Imagine all the time you could waste exploring all those sites! None the less, hundreds of people bookmarked the list and probably intended to come back to it later. It served the publisher well, but how well do such lists really serve readers?

The first thing I think of when I see a list like this is: how much more useful would this be in a Custom Search Engine? A whole lot more useful.

It's in that spirit that we offer you the first of three CSE in this post: the Productivity and Lifehack Multi-site Search. (Note that if you are reading this post in a feed reader, you won't be able to see the embedded search boxes below. You can click through to see the full post.)

I've bookmarked that engine's page and will refer back to it whenever I find myself struggling with a productivity problem that I think someone else has probably solved before.

Curious about how Google Custom Search Engines work? See our previous coverage, Google Custom Search: Setting The Bar For Vertical Search Engines.

How-to Sites

Sometimes we make lists of our own here at RWW. The most successful (and fun) so far has been Josh Catone's Big List of Sites to That Teach You How to do Stuff, a collection of the best How-to and Tutorial sites around the web. Readers loved that list and many contributed more high-quality suggestions in comments. Many of the sites are filled with video tutorials, including on some really obscure topics.

Shortly after we published that list, I threw the URLs in the post and comments into a Google Custom Search Engine. It's proven really useful to me, so here it is for you to use as well.
How-to Site Search.

The How-to of the How-to

Making custom search engines is pretty easy once you've got a list of good sites on a topic. If you've got a list that someone else has already posted somewhere, just run that page through a service like the link extractor from Webmaster-toolkit.com. Then you can copy and paste the relevant links into the very easy-to-use Google Custom Search Engine creation service.

I make these all the time, the hardest part is to compile the list in the first place. The easiest way to make use of this tool is to keep your eyes peeled for lists that other people have already created. That's what I did for the Semantic Web search engine in the RWW toolkit for top issues of 2008, for example. If you're a link-baiting blogger, though, why not offer your readers the added value of putting your lists into a CSE?

When I make one of these CSEs for publication, I try to give it a title and a description that refers back to our brand and URL too.

Advice Sites

Once you've got work (productivity) and weekends (how-to) taken care of, what's left? Love, of course! What better place online to answer your questions about live, love and other non-technical matters than advice and Q&A sites?

If you're looking for a linkbaity list on almost anything, you'll probably find one at Mashable. You'll probably find it through Google, on Mashable, actually. Link list posts have served that site very well, they're undoubtedly one of the biggest contributing factors to Mashable's position as the 8th most linked-to blog on the web and recipipient of millions and millions of monthly pageviews.

I found Mashable's list of advice sites on their list of list posts (sheesh!) and ran that puppy through the Link Extractor.

Take out the internal links, check out the comments to see which links there are good and paste that list into a Google CSE. What have you got? An Advice and Q&A Site Search Engine.

Some Advice

Some lists of sites will make for a better search engine that others. Blogs are particularly good because there's lots of content and Google indexes almost all of it. Company sites aren't as good and application sites aren't much good at all to query. I ask myself whether I can see myself or others querying whatever collection I'm thinking about assembling; it's easy enough to set up that you may as well give it a try, I've set up some search engines that I use regularly, others that I never use anymore.

Obviously this is just one of many ways to add value to a list. Other things we've done here include filtering the feeds in a list through AideRSS to create a "greatest hits" feed for top sources on a topic, we've displayed recent items from or search results regarding the resources in a list using FeedDigest and we've put together Google Presentation slideshows describing how we assembled collections of resources so that other people can repeat the same process.

The point is that linkbait style lists are often not as useful as they might seem. Readers are growing increasingly cynical. They are much better served if you can put just a little extra time into offering them tangible value and demonstrating meaningful investment of energy on your part.

For more on this subject, check out Del.icio.us Popular for the tag Linkbait and ask how you might be able to raise the bar on resource aggregation in the blogosphere.