I recently got an email that I enjoyed a lot promoting this seminar: Dealing with Difficult People (“Techniques for handling difficult people with tact and skill”).

Never again fall victim to those who love to make life miserable for the rest of us. This training gives you concrete techniques for dealing with difficult people in the workplace and at home. It provides specific strategies for getting adversaries to cooperate … bullies to back off … wallflowers to open up … chronic complainers to quiet down.

Check out the site. I like the list of undesirables and how they single out both “Yes” people (“They agree to any commitment, yet rarely deliver. You can’t trust them to follow through.”)...and then “No” people (“They are quick to point out why something won’t work. Worse, they’re inflexible.”) What about those awful “Maybe” people!?

And I’m fascinated by the portion of the day titled “Be less of a target for difficult people.” Man, this sounds like David Brent territory.

The ironic part is that the attendees of this seminar are probably the most difficult people imaginable: those who are convinced that everyone else is the problem.

It’s not the technology, it’s the experience. It’s simple sharing. It’s easy embedding. It’s reliable viewing. It’s “when I share a YouTube video with someone I know they’re going to be able to see it no matter which browser, computer, or OS they have.” That’s what makes YouTube YouTube.

But you won’t hear that from AOL or Microsoft — two companies that were considered YouTube suitors before Google swept in and closed the deal.

What you’ll hear from them are lines like this:

“The AOL guys would’ve loved to have got YouTube. We looked but decided AOL has not only better technology but it’s also in-house,” said Dick Parsons, CEO of Time Warner, which owns AOL.” (source)

“Microsoft evaluated acquiring this type of technology several months ago, and decided to build our own offering, focused on driving better customer and advertiser experiences through integration with Microsoft assets and services that reach an estimated global audience of 465 million consumers,” said spokeswoman Whitney Burk in a statement. “We are excited about the potential we are seeing in the beta of Soapbox on MSN and believe building our own solution is a more cost-effective way to compete in this new space.” (source)

Both AOL and Microsoft take the “we have better tech in-house” stand. That’s why YouTube wasn’t attractive.

It wasn’t that YouTube was overvalued or YouTube has significant legal battles ahead that AOL and Microsoft didn’t want to absorb. It was that YouTube’s technology wasn’t up to snuff.

Never mind that YouTube was streaming millions of videos a day and never seemed to be down. Never mind that YouTube is the leading video viewing/sharing site by a wide margin. Never mind that the public likes YouTube. Never mind that YouTube movies are embedded with Flash which everyone already has. Never mind that nearly every email I’ve gotten from anyone in the past year saying “hey, check out this video” lead to a YouTube video. Never mind that my parents actually know what YouTube is but have never heard of AOLs “technology” or Microsoft’s Soapbox. Never mind any of that. Just mind the technology.

Can AOL and Microsoft beat YouTube down the road? Anything is possible, but they’re making it awful hard on themselves if they think technology is what’s going to win this race. Technology rarely wins the race — experience and execution does. YouTube nailed that. Time will tell if they nailed a few coffins at the same time.

Here are a few of the most recent job postings on the Job Board.

Kansas State University is looking for an Web Developer for Special Projects in Manhattan, KS.

Mentel Inc. is looking for a Senior LAMP developer in Montreal, Canada.

Wesabe is looking for a Web Developer (Programming) in Berkeley, CA.

StyleFeeder is looking for an Marketing/Business Development Executive in Cambridge, MA

Avenue A|Razorfish is looking for a Associate Creative Director in Chicago, IL.

Behavior Design is looking for a Ruby on Rails Developer in NYC.

The Robot Co-op is looking for a System Administrator in Seattle, WA.

[Fireside Chats are round table discussions conducted using Campfire.]

Guests
Dan Cederholm
Jason Santa Maria
Ryan Sims
Greg Storey

Topic: Design
This was a long one so we’re splitting it up into three parts. In part one, the guests chat about what they’re working on, Korean design, Web 2.0 hype, and whether RSS is killing creativity.

Got an ergonomic keyboard that you recommend? Link it up.

Today we launch the new(ish) Signal vs. Noise. Well, it’s not all that new on your end, but it’s all new on our end.

We’ve been using Movable Type since the early days. But thousands of posts and tens of thousands of comments later, it’s just gotten a little too slow for us. If you’ve tried to post a comment anytime in the past year you’ve noticed it may take up to a minute or more for that comment to be saved. That really took the fun out of commenting.

So we went off and built our own little blog engine that could. It’s not a product we’re going to sell or share, it’s just something we put together for our own use. Now SvN is blazing fast again. Eventually it will allow us to do a few more things around here we’ve been thinking about doing but didn’t have the software to do it. And in the spirit of our camping product names, internally we call this software Blog Cabin.

We decided not to copy over all the old posts to the new system. It was messy and there were weird formatting issues that just weren’t worth dealing with. You can still get to the old posts, and you can of course search for them in the sidebar as well. They’re all still there in static HTML.

So here we go. We hope you enjoy the speed of the new system. And as time goes on we hope you like some of the new things you’ll see around here.

eBay Shane Pinnell writes: “As with most sites, eBay requires a valid e-mail address, but what eBay does a little differently is that when you reach the page that says ‘Please check your e-mail for verification’ they actually provide a button that opens up your email, assuming that is that you use a web based e-mail client like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc…Very nice!”

Berkshire Hathaway Scott Meade writes: “A company like Berkshire Hathaway clearly does not have to rely on its website to attract investors and instead spends their energy on tasks providing true ROI. Not fun, exciting, enticing or interesting. Is efficient (e.g. no wasted words, full of content, empty of noise).”

Apple Angela Welchel writes “Apple’s system preference pane for Universal Access: takes into account the probability that users needing assistance seeing information on the screen would most likely appreciate larger, bolder text on that pref panel. Considerate.”

Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

New from Coudal: The Sixteen Straight Tee. It’s a shirt (+ marker/pin) that lets you check off Bears’ victories: “Show your faith while we run the table. The Sixteen Straight Tee is created and printed in Chicago for Chicago.”

Clever. See, Chicago is a football crazy city. And the Bears have a really good team this year. And the team’s schedule over the next few weeks is stocked with patsies plus a bye week (the next time they play a team with a winning record is November 26). Mad local PR seems like a good bet.