There are certain places that people expect text to be rote, boring, and dry. When you come in with some humanity instead, it really stands out. Example: Sönke Johnsen’s “Advice For Potential Graduate Students,” a wonderful piece of writing that is given to lab applicants. An excerpt:

In many ways you will turn into your advisor. Advisors teach very little, but instead provide a role model. Consciously and unconsciously, you will imitate your advisor. You may find this hard to believe now, but fifteen years from now, when you find yourself lining up the tools in your lab cabinets just like your advisor did, you’ll see. My student Alison once said that choosing an advisor is like choosing a spouse after one date. Find out all you can on this date.

Finally, have your fun now. Five years is a long time when you are 23 years old. By the end of graduate school, you will be older, slower, and possibly married and/or a parent. So if you always wanted to walk across Nepal, do it now. Also, do not go to a high-powered lab that you hate assuming that this will promise you long-term happiness. Deferred gratification has its limits. Do something that you have passion for, work in a lab you like, in a place you like, before life starts throwing its many curve balls. Your career will mostly take care of itself, but you can’t get your youth back.

If, after reading this, you want to apply to this lab, we would love to hear from you.

I assume the text accompanying most lab applications is pretty cut and dry. By injecting a real person’s voice in here, the whole tone of the interaction changes.

It’s a good lesson for anyone writing copy for an instruction manual, SLA, or another place that typically features “robot text.” Look for a spot to inject some humanity. Even if it’s just a sidebar or an introduction, it can make a real difference. And it’s another way little guys can stand apart from big corporations that have no choice but to sound stiff.

It’s so easy to say yes. Yes to yet another feature, yes to an overly optimistic deadline, yes a mediocre design, yes, yes, yes. We all want to be loved.

But the love won’t keep you warm for long when you’ve taken on yet another obligation that you don’t whole-heartedly believe in. You very quickly become trapped in a pit of guilt when the stack of things you’ve said yes to loom so high that you can’t even see the things you really should be doing.

That’s not a good way to live or work. Which is why you have to start getting into the habit of saying no. No to things that just don’t fit, no to things that just aren’t the most important right now, and no to many things that simply don’t cut it.

It’s incredibly rare that I’ve actually regretted saying no, but I dread my yes’s all the time.

Use the power of no to get your priorities straight. Take the brief discomfort of confrontation up front and avoid the long regret down the line.

I love good tea. You should too.

Tea is full of history, flavor, and mood. It’s a fascinating beverage. There are hundreds of variations, but all white, green, black, oolong, and pu-erh come from a single tree: The camellia sinensis.

Then you can get into the science of it. All the different flavors and aromas (around 600 have been identified) come from a mashup of six chemical compounds: color pigments, amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, caffeine, and polyphenols. Different combinations, different flavors. How cool is that?

Through the cultivated combination of climate, sunlight (full or shaded), time, damage (oxidation), and fixing technique (steam, dry heat, etc), you end up with an incredible world of choice, style, flavor, and color.

Even the brewing water temperature has a huge impact on flavor. Getting the water temperature right has more to do with enjoying tea than almost anything else. It’s why most people don’t like green tea — too-hot water scalds the tea and turns it bitter.

If you’re interested in reading more about the history, the science, the flavor profiles of popular variations, and the tasting notes of one of the true experts of tea, check out The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea book. The hardcover is beautiful, but it also comes on the Kindle.

It’s the best balanced book I’ve found on the subject. I hope it helps you appreciate tea in a whole new way.

From the outside, it often seems like certain companies or products just blow up unannounced and become huge overnight. In reality, it rarely works like that. It certainly didn’t for us.

When we launched Basecamp five years ago, I think we had less than 2,000 people subscribed to our RSS feed. Add a few thousand more who were just checking the site manually and it’s probably reasonable to guess that our initial audience was below 5,000 people.

By today’s standards, that’s tiny! And that audience had even taken a few years to build. But it was what we had and it was plenty to launch a very successful suite of products.

It wasn’t enough to make us blow up overnight, though. To get today’s levels we’ve relied on the compound interest of attention. Every year a steady stream of new readers and customers have joined the flock while still keeping the bulk from the year before.

That’s why it annoys me dearly when our advice is discounted with “that only works for you because you’ve got this massive success to roll from”. That “massive” success was built convert by convert. Nobody handed it to us. We’re sharing exactly how we got there and hoping that our experiences and discoveries will help get you to where you want to be as well.

So stop thinking that you can’t get there because you don’t have a huge audience already. Start building that audience today. Start getting people interested in what you have to say. Then in a few years time you’ll get to chuckle about your overnight success as well.

An article at CNNMoney.com:

Those ads move too. Same article after Readability bookmarklet cleans it up:

The problem: If workarounds that ignore ads take off, how will good content get funded? Then again, there’s got to be a better way than the headache-inducing status quo. It seems doubtful that visual punishment of your customers is a sustainable business model.

A few weeks ago Jamie posted a screenshot of a concept we were exploring to help someone choose the right 37signals product. It looked like this:

The idea was a series of tightly arranged conversation bubbles pointing to one of four different product icons (one for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire). Each bubble would contain a use case. “Keep track of all the hours spent during the project” would point to Basecamp, for example.

It wasn’t a final design, it was just an exploration. We liked the spirit and friendliness and essence of it, but the execution was messy. We learned that we liked the bubbles. That’s what quick explorations are for.

v2

Last week we wrapped up another exploration using the bubbles. We’re not going with this direction, but we thought it would be interesting to share the progress. Here’s what we came up with.

Instead of random bubbles tightly packed, we went with a major bubble per product and then 2 secondary bubbles on either side. The major bubble was the big picture idea of the product and the secondary bubbles were key uses or features we wanted to communicate. Note: This is not final copy — it’s good enough copy for the exploration.

We liked this, but we still felt it was a little messy and lacked focus. A lot of imagery and shapes to communicate a few things per product.

But, this design lead us to what we think is the right design. We’re keeping the bubbles but reworking them again. We hope to have the new 37signals home page redesign live within a week.

Thanks for everyone’s feedback thus far. We hope you like the behind the scenes “Design in Progress” posts.

The software and web industry can learn a lot from the lumber industry, the oil business, and corn and soybean farmers. They take waste and turn it into hefty profits.

The lumber industry sells what used to be waste — sawdust, chips, and shredded wood — for a pretty profit. Today you’ll find these by-products in synthetic fireplace logs, concrete, ice strengtheners, mulch, particle board, fuel, livestock and pet bedding, winter road traction, weed killing and more.

Ultra refined petroleum finds its way into plastics, cosmetics, food, rubber, synthetic fiber, insecticides, fertilizers, heart valves, toothpaste, detergents, waxes… The list goes on.

Corn and soybeans are refined and processed into just about anything these days. By noon you’ve probably consumed a few pounds of corn energy without even knowing it. It’s hidden in your food in the form of HFCS, xanthin gum, dextrin, maltodextrin, MSG, or ethanol in your gas tank.

By-products

Everything listed above is a by-product. Lumber was originally cut for boards for building. Oil was originally drilled for fuel. Corn and soybeans were originally farmed for food. But today these industries have figured out how to use the waste to make even more products. They’re squeezing, pressurizing, refining, heating, cooling, and otherwise processing leftovers into money.

We’re lucky and not so lucky

In some ways, we’re lucky to be software people. We have easy jobs. We think, we type, we move the mouse around. We make stuff by putting pixels in the right place and words in the right order. Yeah, that’s pretty much what we do.

But that also makes it tough to spot our by-products. A lumber company sees their waste. They can’t ignore their sawdust. But we don’t see ours. Or we don’t even think that software development produces any by-products. That’s myopic.

When you make something you make something else

When you make something you make something else. Just like they say you can not not communicate, you can not not make something else. Everything has a by-product. Observant and creative entrepreneurs spot these by-products and see opportunities.