I normally limit my posts about MakeFive to the MakeFive blog. That being said, I think we’re on to something sort of cool, and as such I thought it was worth a posting here too.

When we first came-up with the notion of a widget for MakeFive, I had a hard time with it. I reasoned that if you wanted a list on your website or blog, you’d probably just type it up for yourself.

Well, I was an idiot. (Let me tell you why.)

A standard list on your blog remains pretty-much static. The only way that someone can interact with it is to comment. That’s fine enough, but perhaps not as interesting as it could be.

The MakeFive list-widget doesn’t just copy your list to your website. It allows you to create a list once and share it both on your blog and with all of MakeFive’s visitors. This is nice because it extends the reach of your content, bringing you a new audience, and tapping the tools that already exist on MakeFive. So, your users can engage with your list, voting for themselves and even adding selections that you may have overlooked. Here’s an example of a list I created:

See more: Best type families

Ultimately, it’s just a better list. Additionally, if you find a topic on MakeFive that you like, and you want to include it on your site, the list-widget makes it easy to do so. Just copy and paste that tiny bit of code into your blog, and the widget takes care of the rest. Plus, it updates your widget as the list changes, allowing you to highlight up-to-date voting results, right on your own blog. Just like this:

See more: Best Movie Posters of 2008

It all comes back to tapping into a larger community and giving your readers a new way to interact with your content. (And it’s easy to do, which is always nice when you’re busy anyway.)

The design of the widget is relatively style-agnostic and doesn’t push MakeFive’s brand elements, except for a link allowing others to use the widget also. We don’t want to make your list look like something that’s selling our site. We just want to extend the use of the data. Good, right?

For more information, check it out here. And why not start the day with a top five list on your blog? C’mon… we’d love it if you tried it out!

When I first found Y Combinator’s Hacker News I thought it was a piece of crap: awful design, a sea of text, and seemingly arcane functions. Day by day though, I found myself coming back to it; it’s now one of the sites I frequent most.

In a way, I feel that sites like it might represent the downfall of Digg. They’re both running on the same general principle: crowd-sourced links and voting. You like something; you give it the thumbs-up and visa-versa.

The problem with Digg though is that it’s getting really messy, and lots of good content goes unnoticed, while power-users push inordinate amounts of traffic to a lucky few. The fact is–this model needs to be “siloed” into verticals, in order to get the right stories to interested people. One big site like Digg just isn’t going to do it any longer.

Last week it struck us that we’d love to find a site that did what Hacker News does, but for those of us in the design, advertising and marketing world. There are plenty of sites for this community, but I find it hard to wade through all of the information effectively. As such, all of us at smashLAB got down to work to put something together (quickly). Special thanks on this one go to Devin and Shinya, who dealt with all of Drupal’s annoying quirks and made it actually work!  :-)

The end-result is undrln. It’s built to be simple and fast. Drop by when you need a quick-fix, or just subscribe to the RSS feed and check-in when you’re stuck on the bus.

Of course, we’d welcome you to become a part of this little community if you’re so inclined. Feel free to submit blog articles, news stories, and anything else you find relevant. Additionally, please hit those “thumbs up/down” buttons. By voicing your opinion, you can shape the nature of stories that appear on the site. We’re really interested in building a resource that features good, compelling links and discussion.

Well, that’s it for now. If you’re unhappy with this gift, just let us know. (We’ll send you turkey leftovers in January as an apology.)

I remember my first year after college. I scrounged my pennies to buy a rocking 66mhz Pentium 1. It was awesome. It made that lovely “glee-da-da glee-da-da-glee” sound as I went “on the internet”. I built a pretty bad website (at the time the coolest thing we’d ever seen) with my friend Kevin Bell. We slowly figured out how to get a background image to work, what file formats were, and what the difference was between raster and vector graphics. (For a long time I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t “make the bloody lines smooth!” in Paint Shop Pro.)

At the time I was painting in the studio and it was really cold outside. For most of January the temperature didn’t rise above -30 Celsius. This made the space rather uncomfortable. It was a big workshop that my dad had built. Although it was partially insulated, it took a long time to warm-up. I felt sort of “hardcore”, painting out there with two sets of gloves on to keep warm. After a while though, I grew tired of my fingers being swollen and rigid.

As such, I’d often find a reason to go back inside, fire up the rocking 66 Pentium 1 (hereafter to be referenced as “rock66pent1″), hear that state-of-the-art 56k modem sound, double-click the Eudora Light icon, and see if someone had responded to my request to take a look at my paintings online. Some days I’d have the pleasant surprise of ten whole emails waiting for me. I can’t tell you how cool this seemed. These were people from all over the world, who sent me “email”. Holy crap… email… for me! I felt so special!

I often thought about how much fun it would be to get email all day. That would be awesome! (Wait a minute…)

I still like getting email. Actually, it remains my preferred method of communication. Phones seem intrusive and I worry that I’m just barging in on someone. I’m far 2 old 4 txting, which I loathe given the teen-centric language structure and its sheer annoyance factor. (Unless U want to join me at the mall 2nite. That would B like 4real!) Skype still pisses me off for the lag and “Can you hear me?” part. And heaven forbid you’re on MSN. I appreciate MSN and chat applications about as much as I like having my hand stuck in a meat grinder. (This actually happened to me last Sunday. True story.)

Email is instant, and I can deal with the messages as I choose. Too busy right now? No sweat–deal with it later. Worried about saying something in a less than diplomatic fashion? Fine–email it and pick my words carefully. Want to get in touch with someone I haven’t met yet? Cool–send a friendly email and let them respond if they wish.

The problem, however, is one of volume.

I get a lot of email. In fact, I get so much that I’ve developed a bit of a system for dealing with it. I respond instantly to anything I can, and file the email if it’s correspondence that I might need to look at again in the future. If it requires some kind of action, I create a task of it, and assign it for when I’ll be able to address it properly. The only times I don’t respond quickly are when I’m really not sure how to deal with something, or am out of the office. This all sounds pretty straight forward, but it took a long time to get in the habit. Now that I am though, I get a lot more done. This all relates to how few times I handle messages.

In the past, I’d skim the message. Put off responding. Go to the next one. Skim that. Put off responding. Think about the message. Put off responding. Do some other things. Put off responding. Get some new mail. Put off responding. Read the new mail and re-read the original message. Put off responding… You get the idea. I spent so much time “re-processing” that message that by the time I finally responded I could have done it four or five times over.

Now, I tend to keep my inbox clean. In fact, there’s rarely a message in it for more than a few moments, and most of the time this works really well. It leaves me to concentrate on the task at hand, and I think people like the fact that I respond to their emails in a timely fashion.

So I finally got this whole “email thing” sorted out, and all hell broke loose. You know what I’m talking about: Facebook mail, wall posts, inline chat-sessions, Twitter, FriendFeed, blog articles… And I mean “auggh!” How the hell am I supposed to add all of this in? You know how I feel, don’t you? And of course, I’m not even talking about the perpetual requirement to deal with spam email messages and comments. (I tell you, if I ever find someone who actually does that for a living, I’m going to rip out their eyeballs. Really… It will be fun! You can join me!)

I spend the first couple of hours of every day, just dealing with this ever increasing pile of communication, and sometimes I don’t know if I’m getting more out of it than I did before we added all of these new tools. Don’t get me wrong–I love staying in touch with people, but I wonder if the whole thing has sort of run away on us.

The past few weeks have left me asking which communication methods I could cut. I find it strange how resistant I am to reducing the number of methods of communicating. Worse yet, I worry that I’ve been seduced by a rather self-involved need to inundate others with my personal broadcasts. Do you really care that I’m going out for dinner with my son, or if I took a big poop this morning? But, alas, I digress.

In the interests of brevity (after an overly long post) I introduce my new personal manifesto for digital communication:
- Email replies in one sentence whenever possible
- Less worry about blog posts (a few typos are not a big deal)
- Periods of “radio silence” from services Facebook
- Practice restraint (Twitter does not have to be checked every fifteen minutes)
- Consider killing one of my blogs

Well, gotta go. My rock66pent1 is going all “glee-da-da glee-da-da-glee”.

This morning I received an email from a designer who I’ve been in contact with digitally. We are connected on Facebook and have shared the occasional back and forth through it. In his email he noted that he’s just started out on his own and is finding himself discouraged by how challenging this path is. He commented that I’m someone he admires, and that my feedback would be helpful.

Obviously, such emails are flattering. It’s really nice to hear that others feel that we’re doing good work and take the time to let us know. At the same time, I feel at odds in imparting any kind of advice on this topic. The truth is: I’m not a good enough business-person to be any kind of an example–far from it.

smashLAB has now operated for just over eight years. It has been a good run so far. We’ve grown a great deal over that time, and I think we’re all the better for it. The downside is that we have no money. Seriously, we’re running on fumes. We love what we do, and we work hard at it, but we’re really awful at making money from our efforts.

I suppose we really could have cashed-in on Design Can Change. We could have packaged smashLAB up as a “green design” studio and used DCC to lead traffic to us. We just couldn’t do that sort of thing though–it just seemed unethical. So, instead, we send traffic to members, but haven’t really seen any work as a result of this project.

We’ve also been too picky. Some clients have come to us with cash in hand, but we’ve felt uncomfortable about what they were doing. When our radar has given us the “weird” vibe, we’ve chosen to skip such people and wait for the next ones to come along. Sometimes this has even meant parting ways with clients who just didn’t seem like good people. This has (thankfully) only happened a couple of times, but it has hurt us financially.

We could certainly hire a sales person to build our business, but I’ve always been a little reluctant to do so. It seems that whenever that conversation starts, something important about what we’re doing gets lost. All of a sudden, we’re just chasing a dollar, instead of concentrating on the work. Plus, added overhead seems to bring with it the need to rush jobs through and focus on bottom-line, instead of quality.

We run on a trickle of gas (often fumes). Doing so, however, has allowed us to do things we like, and operate with principles.

We have earned a strong reputation. We’ve been told amazing things by our existing clients. Eric at illumivision recently recounted to us that their international sales are up around 225% as a result of our efforts. Mark at the Sustainable Endowments Institute met with us for beer a couple of weeks back and applauded how effective their Green Report Card site is.

It seems that every quarter, some larger operation offers to buy us; additionally, we get a lot of offers to work for the “big guys”. We keep responding with a polite “thanks, but no thanks” though. It’s not as though such offers aren’t compelling, but as I noted, we’re not good at the money thing. Or perhaps it just isn’t as interesting to us as the work. (It sure would be nice to buy a condo though.)

The challenge, in my mind, is that the “smart play” in the short-term financial sense often compromises one’s long-term opportunities. It was safer for me to stay in my union-job than it was to start smashLAB with my friend Eric Shelkie. That safety, however, would have come at a high cost.

I could have never experienced as much in that role as I have by taking the risk we did. Likewise, we could add a sales-person, start to “turn-around” projects as quickly as possible, and find more creative ways to bill our clients. None of that, however, seems particularly appealing. In fact, I tend to think that doing so is what might lead one to a mid-life crisis a few years down the road.

So, instead, we just plug away, and I can tell you that at times it’s far from pretty. Along the way though, we get to work on some really neat stuff! As broke as we may be, it feels good and I think this is particularly important. And who knows? With the numbers we’re starting to see on MakeFive, we might actually make some money off of this thing some day!

I write this in part because I’m guessing that there are a lot of us out there in a similar spot: good at what we do, and truly passionate about it, but perhaps not the best on “cashing in”. The sad part is that it’s seen as a weakness to admit this. To many, the notion of acknowledging that they aren’t seeing the success they had hoped for seems out-of-the-question. Well, I can fairly say that we had much higher expectations for our “comfort of living” when we started out, eight years ago.

I ended my response to the designer who contacted me, suggesting that he just work more. I noted that this is important as it keeps you active in your destiny, and distracts you from the hurdles you might be facing. Plus, even though the remuneration is often disproportionate with the effort one puts in, this is certainly a pleasurable kind of work to do.

As I reflect more on his question, a few core things continue to roll about in my mind: do good stuff, stay humble, operate on the cheap. I don’t know if any of these will pay-off, but it’s the only way I really know how to work.

I’m not sure how I’m going to mess-up my kids, but I suspect I will anyway. It seems that each generation is intent on not repeating the mistakes of the one prior; nevertheless, they seem to either do so, or invent whole new ones. Either way, we can be pretty certain that no matter how we parent, our kids are likely to need some degree of therapy as a result of our blunders.

Oscar’s now two, and we’re expecting our second child in January. Along the way, we’ve received a fair amount of well-intentioned advice on how to raise our kids, as well as a few books. I thank people for these kind suggestions, but generally don’t take too much of it to heart. I’m somewhat uncomfortable about this notion of “parenting” as some kind of a project. I want to be there for my kids, and help them do what they want to do. I don’t, however, want my kids on a “plan”. I’d like for them to make a few mistakes and try out some things that I might not have had the courage to do. So long as they are safe, I’m rather flexible on the rest.

The one thing that I’ve said for a while (we’ll see if it sticks when the day comes) is that it would be hypocritical for me to behave in one way and expect my kids to act differently. A simple example of this is my propensity for peppering discussions with expletives. Anyone who has spent time with me has likely grown accustomed to my use of “fuck” in most any imaginable manner. In fact, I’ve even managed to create whole new words in which “fuck” is inserted smack-dab in the middle of an existing word. (This takes some deal of skill I might add.)

Many have different thoughts surrounding profanity. Mine is that the taboos surrounding it are largely silly. Certainly, one might sound like a bit of a dullard by overusing such words, but the same might be like said of like using like, like too many times. Like, wouldn’t you like, totally agree?

I have this thought that the only responsible and accurate suggestions I can lend to Oscar and “yet unnamed child” are ones that I live by: “Use whichever words you’d like–it makes little difference to me so long as they aren’t hurtful. That being said, some people don’t like certain words, as silly as this may seem. So, it’s your responsibility to use them carefully and deal with any resulting consequences. If you’re sent to the principal’s office for shouting expletives, you’ll have to deal with that on your own.”

Of course, this is just one silly little example, but I find myself thinking about this sort of thing more these days. Recently I found a wonderful essay by Paul Graham called “Lies We Tell Kids“. I encourage you to read it; I think he presents a number of thoughts on the topic rather nicely.

When I was twenty-two, I met a girl. We dated for a brief while, and although the relationship came to an end rather quickly, something did stick. She was a vegetarian, and in order to impress her, I stopped eating meat. In retrospect, however, I realize that my real reason for doing so had more to do with long-standing feelings I’d had surrounding the consumption of animals. I’d never felt good about it, but that time served as a good opportunity to make a change.

I grew up with a relatively standard diet, with the addition of some rye breads (which resulted in kids thinking I was pretty weird) and such, given my Finnish heritage. We always ate well, but I often felt a little strange about eating meat. This was in part from my inability to kill an animal. Take fishing: although I loved sitting in the boat, eating potato chips, talking with my mom, dad and brother, I found the whole “clubbing the fish over the head” thing rather awful. I never could do it, and that left me wondering how I could actually eat an animal.

The thing is–I didn’t feel comfortable asking my parents if I could avoid eating meat. So, this “trying to impress a girlfriend” story seemed to make my leaning towards vegetarianism more acceptable. (I later found that my parents were very supportive of the notion and have as a result largely dropped meat from their diet.)

The community made my choice more difficult though. I was living in Prince George, and in the mid-nineties people were often perplexed by my choice. This resulted in endless jokes about how people loved their steaks “bloody”, and how much I was missing out on. It also brought with it some challenges, as few restaurants served anything without meat. (Aside from some “really big” salads. Right… That’s what vegetarians want… just “king size” that lettuce and all will be fine.)

I’d often explain to people that it wasn’t as though I didn’t like meat (steaks do taste pretty good), but that this choice meant something to me. For eight years I remained a relatively strict vegetarian. One day, however, I stopped. I reasoned, “the worms get me at the end; I’m taking a few cows down along the way.” (I know, it sounds stupid… I think that in actuality I just didn’t want to feel so limited any longer.)

I didn’t eat much meat after that, but on the odd occasion I’d have a steak or a burger, and of course sushi. My wife has been a vegetarian for over twenty-five years now, as such, we do tend to eat a largely vegetarian diet. Fish still shows up regularly, but red meats and poultry are increasingly rare for me.

Lately though, I’ve felt worse about eating animals. Part of this relates to the abysmal conditions that many of them live in. (I recently learned that factory farmed animals are often fed euthanized pets.) Additionally, the environmental impact of consuming animal products is simply becoming too alarming to ignore. Put simply, there are too many people on this planet, and it simply isn’t responsible to eat meat as we have in the past.

About a month ago Amea, Oscar and I had a lovely dinner at an El Salvadorian restaurant on Commercial Drive. We had a couple of pupusas (which you have to try if you haven’t already) and their grilled shrimp special. It was really good. It’s was also supposed to mark the last time I’d eat meat. For the past month, however, it has been a daily struggle to avoid it. I’ve certainly reduced my intake even further, but it’s proving to be harder than I had expected.

I heard an interesting statistic recently that vegetarians live longer than non-vegetarians. I’d be interested to know how much we’d curb climate change by all going vegetarian as well.

If this topic interests you at all, I’d encourage you to rent Go Further. I recently watched it and quite enjoyed it.   :-)

As of today, there are 1,516 topics on MakeFive. I expect that within a year, that number will be ten times as high. The fact is that lists are just addictive. They aren’t like my long rambles–you actually have to force yourself to “edit” in creating one. Some of the big users on MakeFive like aaronmalys, DoefromTO, and webdesign, have made note of just how addictive they find it. In fact, Mark even devoted a topic to it called, “Signs you are a Makefive Addict“.

So, here are my favorite top-five lists to date. (I expect this to change with time as so many neat ones are added daily.)

Best random acts of kindness
This one is just so lovely and something I had never anticipated. Just a set of great things you can do for others. It quickly started a bit of a discussion on what people have experienced, and in my mind, might even lead to some people acting on what’s noted.

What to do with a lottery win
Okay, full disclosure here: my brother started this one, so perhaps I’m biased; nevertheless, I like how this topic both resulted in some silliness as well as thoughtful responses. Very cool.

Greatest Movies You’ve Never Seen
I love good movies but am typically at a loss by the time that trying to think of what to download/rent. As such, this list was a gem to find. In fact, I think this may be the way that I’ll find movies from now on–just consult MakeFive.

What you’d do if you were 17 again and knew what you knew now
Need I say more? Don’t all of us have something to share here?

Features that you’d like to see on MakeFive
This one is mine, but I still love it. We’re using MakeFive as a method of determining what users want out of the site. It was the fastest and best ways that we’ve employed to collect real user feedback fast.

Bill Green and the fellows from Plaid dropped by the smashLAB office last summer on their annual road-trip. It was really fun to meet the fellows, and I’m amazed by how fun they made our office seem, given how incredibly boring we are. Thanks guys!

A few years ago I wrote a post called “9 to 5 = average“. It was largely inspired by a couple of people who we had been working with. In some respects it was a bolder post than I intended and in retrospect, I probably should have toned it down a notch. I have to say that it resulted in a bit of a “shit-storm” that I found pretty tough.

Beyond being told that I was an asshole repeatedly, I received some rather venomous hate-mail as a result of the post. At the time I avoided saying much about this as I worried that doing so would weaken the discussion. Some time has passed though, and I suppose it’s fair to open it up now.

The fact is that some people were just plain mean. It was one thing for people to disagree with me (which was fine), but I was surprised and offended by those who would send anonymous messages that were harsh personal attacks. I ultimately decided that these comments weren’t fit to be approved, but I had to wonder if such things would ever have been said if I met these people face-to-face.

It was a weird time, and some of those comments really stung. Truthfully, I lost a few nights sleep over the whole thing. It’s the strangest thing to have an anonymous stranger come out and tell you that you are a bad parent, a walking cliché, and a handful of other things, even when they don’t know you at all. Sure, it shouldn’t matter much–this is just the nature of the web. That being said I really did feel the impact of those messages. (It takes a little while to harden oneself to those sorts of attacks.)

The funny part of the whole mess was that that my point came down to something really simple: If you want to be good at something you will probably have to work hard on it; additionally, what you put into something is often proportionate to what you get out. I’m not looking for anyone to give-up their life for a job, but I do think it’s strange when people feel as though an opportunity is owed to them or that they’ll accomplish something great when their heart isn’t into it.

Part of the problem with the article I wrote was that I had imbued it with too many personal frustrations that I was feeling at the time. This was certainly a shortcoming on my behalf, and I’ve become a little more careful in separating such feelings from my essays as a result. (This also tends to make for a more well-formed argument.)

Additionally, I think that part of the misunderstanding about my post came from the fact that companies work very differently depending on their stage/size. Now, if we’re talking about Enron, the whole story would be different. Similarly there are soulless money-grubbing pricks like Conrad Black who do terrible things. It’s not hard to understand why the image of the “corporate tyrant looking to squeeze every penny out of their staff” is so prevalent given some of the deplorable examples of leaders we have.

In reality though, there are a greater number of small companies out there, working to carve-out a living, than there are ruthless Gordon Gekkos. Let’s be realistic–companies like ours aren’t  focused on “lining our pockets with cash”; typically, we just work hard to get jobs, complete them on time, and make sure that everyone gets paid.

There are times when we’ve really struggled to make payroll or cover big bills. That being said, as a matter of principle (and in spite of how small we are) we’ve never made anyone wait for a payment. On a few occasions Eric and I have gone without a cheque for a couple of months, but we’ve always paid our people even when it meant that it we needed to do so with personal funds. (Although few entrepreneurs tend to speak of this, most of them probably know this feeling pretty well.)

The point I’m making is that when you’re working so hard to make sure that everyone is taken care of, it’s really difficult to watch someone slack-off. One fellow who worked for us would screw-up all day, and still be packing his bags to head home early. I’d be at my desk thinking, “Come on man… Just try a little!”

That sort of thing is really hard to stomach, and in retrospect, the only thing I regret is that we took so long to flush the toilet on a couple of those assholes.

Some people thought that we were nuts for posting that article. A couple of friends even asked me if I worried that people would no longer want to work with us, given what I had said in it. The interesting part though, is that I think it has instead worked out to our advantage.

Today we have a great team. I believe that’s in-part due to our forthright nature and work-ethic. At smashLAB we’re working as hard as we can to build great stuff, and I think everyone feels good to be a part of that. What I love about the crew at smashLAB today is that every one of us really cares about what we’re doing. (If we ever do see a little cash float in here it will be awfully nice to share it with these folks.)

Back in 2000, when we started smashLAB, we had a regular assortment of nutty folks who’d come to us with some scheme for a web-based business. Often they weren’t even users of the web, but figured they had the next “Yahoo” (which was successful at the time, remember) floating around in their noggins. They’d then explain to us that they didn’t have any money, but if we developed it, they’d reward us handsomely once their company was a household name. We’d then ask how they planned to make money and they always responded the same way, “Advertising!”

Yet, here we are, eight years later with the same general strategy. D-oh!

What happened? Well, first of all Google AdSense has afforded a degree of standardization to online. It’s not that their system always pays out a great deal, but their approach seems to build a solid platform for making this sort of thing work relatively painlessly. (Of course, there are many other ad networks.) Regardless, my quick search gives me a figure of nearly $45 billion being spent on online advertising.)

The truth, however, is that ads don’t pay-out much online… unless the placement is good and the traffic really “moves the needle”. This is really why MakeFive has such great potential for ad revenue. First off, given the specific nature of MakeFive topics, it’s easy for advertisers to connect with specific groups (our new ad system will allow them to tune this nicely.) Our traffic is still relatively low, but with all of the amount of new content being added we’re seeing a lot of traffic come organically from search engines. This will continue to build the sheer number of pageviews the site sees.

From there, we see the opportunity for “sponsored” sections of the site, allowing particular companies to get involved in specific lists, offering prizes, specific content, rare opportunities, et cetera. Needless to say, it’s a slow build to get there, but I’m pretty excited to see it start to generate a little money. :-)

And that’s the plan Stan.