Steve Albini is a rock producer most widely known for having produced Nirvana’s “In Utero.” The website for his studio, Electrical Audio, goes into impressive detail on the intricacies of the recording process.

This page on the Alcatraz room explains the benefits of a “dead” space and how to make one. There are diagrams, construction details, a 360 image, and more. It’s a great example of promoting by educating.

Clicking “membrane absorber” takes you to an even more in-depth page with hand-drawn diagrams:

Micheal Pettibone writes:

In Getting Real, there is an entire chapter dedicated to the subject of “Meetings are Toxic”.

It seems like you guys use Campfire extensively throughout the day as a replacement for the typical corporate (physical) meeting.

What I’m curious to know is how using Campfire all day is different from that of a typical corporate meeting. They both (chat or a physical meeting) seem to be a type of a “meeting”, which distracts you from your normal daily work load.

Also, as 37signals grows with employees – do you find that using chat (Campfire) becomes ever more difficult/distracting because the number of conversations between various co-workers multiplies?

Campfire differs from a traditional meeting in significant ways:

1. You can pay attention to something other than the meeting without offending or distracting anyone else.

2. You can leave the room and come back later and read everything you’ve missed. You can even search for specific terms in the transcript.

3. Typing forces people to be more economical in what they communicate. There’s a lot less extraneous chatter in a Campfire chat than there is in a typical meeting.

4. You can have a sidebar discussion without interrupting the flow of others. Create a separate room and chat about something you want to keep private or that doesn’t concern the whole team.

5. You don’t have to be there. Want to focus 100% on the task at hand? Just log out of Campfire and get to work.

As for the second part of the question: With our growth, the chat room has gotten somewhat busier. In order to prevent distraction, we have more sidebar conversations in different rooms.

We’ve also tried to cut down on inessential banter. At the same time, we don’t want to put a muzzle on the normal “water cooler” conversations that our remote team only gets via Campfire. It’s a balancing act.

In this video from the Charlie Rose Show, Chuck Jones, the genius behind many of the best Warner Bros. cartoons, shows how he draws Wile E. Coyote. A little later in the same video, he talks about what he learned in art school: how to have a fancy signature. (Neat thing about Google Video: You can link directly to interesting parts of a video with times like 1:24:30 or 0:55.)

And here’s “High Note,” a great Jones short.

Handmade 2.0 is a long article that talks about artist-entrepreneurs who open up virtual shops on Etsy and eslewhere. The author explores what makes Etsy seem different from so many current efforts to “build community” online. There are some lessons here for anyone trying to build an ecosystem around a product, store, or whatever:

The company does not, for instance, demand exclusivity. Indeed it seems to want its sellers to market themselves aggressively on their own sites, in stores, at fairs…Etsy constantly holds entrepreneurial workshops (how to build your “global microbrand”), pointing to “best practices” among Etsy sellers, offering shop critiques, advising how to “write a killer press release.” Its magazine-videocast, The Storque, often feels like a D.I.Y. business school. In addition, [Etsy’s Robert] Kalin has hired about a half-dozen of the best Etsy sellers to work directly for the company, in jobs meant to spread their skills to as many sellers as possible. Some help run Etsy Labs, a community-centric program held at the company’s headquarters, teaching craft skills.

On some level the Etsy idea is not really techno-progressive at all. It’s nostalgic. The company is host to a book club, which Kalin participates in, and when I visited, the most recent reading assignment was “The Wal-Mart Effect,” a book that assesses the societywide impact of that mass retailer’s success. Kalin seems flabbergasted that anyone would shop at Wal-Mart to save 12 cents on a peach instead of supporting a local farmer. Buying something from the person who made it is “the opposite of what Wal-Mart is right now: just this massively impersonal experience,” he told me earlier. “When you get an item from Etsy, there’s this whole history behind it. There’s a person behind it.”

The photos in Mark Richards’ Core Memory Project reveal technology’s evolution through the computer collection at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. Some examples from the CMP site:

Q: What’s the easiest way to charge money for software?
A: Build software that helps people make (or save) money.

Spending money on software becomes a lot easier leap for customers to make if they can say, “I make money when I use this software.” Or “When I finish using this software, I get paid.” Or “This software saves me X hours a week.” (Time is money, right?)

People are willing to pay for Basecamp because it’s part of the project management and billing story (and sometimes part of the sales story too, for example: Basetwo Media or Element Fusion). People are willing to pay for Blinksale because it’s part of the invoicing story. People are willing to pay for TextExpander because it saves them X hours/week (in trial mode, the app even highlights the amount of time it saves you every week).

It’s a simple concept. But it can also be a helpful guide for where to focus efforts if you charge for software.

Jason Fried was recently interviewed on John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

We spent a fair amount of time discussing the workings of their newest offering, a CRM app known as Highrise…As is usually the case, 37Signals chose to do some of the primary CRM functions elegantly and leave the others to, well, others. It’s worth a look.

And let’s play some catchup: Here are summaries (posted by others) of a couple of Jason’s 2007 conference presentations…

2007 MIMA Summit Wrap Up mentions red flag words like need, can’t, easy, just, only, etc.

The afternoon Keynote was an eye opening look into a new way of working: silent. The guys at 37signals have found out that talking to each other is a big productivity killer. To help fix this, they have days where no one is allowed to talk. Their example was to think of it like sleeping. If you constantly get interrupted, you never get a good night sleep. Work is the same way. By being silent and only communicating via IM or email, you are more apt to get into the zone and crank out more quality work in a shorter amount of time.

Another tip was to avoid meetings as they can be toxic. Some meetings can be an hour long, but really, the meeting could be 15-20 minutes and have the same outcome. It seems people are more apt to fill the time than have shorter meetings.

I have to say, Jason had some great ideas. I’m not convinced that they’d work out for all companies, but there was one take away that I can start doing today; and that’s avoiding “red flag” words. Words such as need, can’t, easy, just, only and fast are all words that don’t come across well in communication as it means you’re making assumptions.

“We just need this one feature.” “It should be easy to just add one more thing.” “Let’s do it fast and get it done with.”

These types of statements make it appear as if the sender is assuming that the receiver’s job is simple. The receiver may feel insulted or under-appreciated. Avoiding those “red flag” words can help out communication quite a bit. I know I’m going to print them out and do my best to try and avoid them.

Jason Fried: Say No More sums up the Mossberg/Fried interview at The Business Innovation Factory.

1. Obama
2. McCain
3. Paul

That’s the design rankings of candidate sites according to the accumulated ratings of pages tagged “election” at CommandShift3 (the Hot or Not of web sites):

According to CS3’s Amit Gupta, these are cross-site rankings (i.e. most of the battles occurred between an election-tagged site and a site tagged something else) which might eliminate some of the political bias you’d expect.

Keep in mind that, like Hot or Not, these ratings measure the superficial look of the contenders, not any sort of real substance. The most functional sites probably don’t win a lot of sleek home page contests.

New York Magazine
New York Magazine’s Agenda calendar shifts focus depending on which day you mouseover.

WellStyled.com
Check out how the two languages are swappable at WellStyled.com. The sidebar is in Czech but if you click it, it swaps with the English. Even the nav changes too. And it sticks as you move through the different pages.

This is the fifth in a series of posts showing how we use Campfire as our virtual office. All screenshots shown are from real usage and were taken during one week in September.

We use a separate room within Campfire to discuss customer support issues. This helps us keep all these related conversations in one place and keeps the main room (fairly) distraction-free. Again, the ability to quickly share screens is a killer feature here. Let’s take a look…

Turn a customer support query into a site change
Jamis deals with an admin setting problem and Ryan suggests a confirmation dialog change. Jamis plugs it in and Subversion reports the update.

Upload a problem screen submitted by a customer
Sarah Hatter helps out on a lot of support queries these days. Here she uploads a screen sent in by a customer and asks for advice on how to solve the issue. (Skitch is a helpful tool for marking up and sharing screenshots quickly.)