Perhaps Starbucks enlisted me at too early an age with Grande Caramel Macchiatos and its many variations. How could I even compare leaf-flavored hot water to a caramel chocolaty caffeinated shake that my mom somehow allowed me to drink before school?

In the last year, though, I’ve voyaged out to discover what the big deal was, why my dad, who remembers nobody’s name remembers Earl Grey’s when he’s sick, why my roommate always makes a cup of chamomile before bed, why the English dedicate a whole time in their day to the brew.

Enter: Sarah Rose. Author of the new release For All The Tea in China.

It’s kind of strange how things work out. One day a weird girl is weirdly wondering about why people don’t find tea that weird, the next, she’s interviewing the author of a book about the history of tea!

Rose’s For All the Tea in China is a nonfiction book that reads like a fictional page-turner. As you travel with Robert Fortune on his journey through China to steal the recipe for the beloved beverage, you realize that putting some dried leafy stuff in hot water is a perfected, ancient art. There was a time when tea made the world go round. It influenced foreign policy, and it catapulted men into adventures into the unknown. You could say that tea is drink that launched a thousand ships…or one man, Robert Fortune, with the tenacity of a thousand ships to bring tea under British power.

I got to interview Sarah Rose, a native of Chicago, about For All the Tea in China. Here’s what she had to say:

1. How many cups of tea did you drink while writing “For All The Tea in China?” Or, oh no. Are you a coffee drinker?

For about 2 years in the middle of the book, I couldn’t touch the stuff. I would look at a cup of tea and shudder. I got over it. Now I love tea again. (and no, I’m not a coffee drinker)

2. I follow you now on Twitter. You Tweet a good amount of clever and fun 140 or less characters. As a writer and published author, why did you join Twitter? Does Twitter and other forms of new media “do” anything for the modern writer?

I joined for mercenary reasons, I thought Twitter might be a good avenue to promote FOR ALL THE TEA IN CHINA. There is a pretty active tea community on Twitter. But once I got on, I was hooked. Twitter is a running diary of randomness, a way of keeping up with the world, with tea, and with friends.

3. You recently Tweeted: “Am excited possible new gig will include mag content for iPad – cool new world for #writers” What is your “new gig,” and what do you see the iPad and similar technology has in store for writers.

Since it’s still in the realm of the possible – not the confirmed – I can’t say more yet. But it’s just so easy to buy things on the iPad, I think there’s real hope for the written word there. Not as much because of the multimedia capacity – though that’s awesome – but because it’s the easiest way in the world to spend very little money quickly. And I’d really like to see magazines and books survive so I’ll hope for magic.

4. As a Chicago-based blog, and being a Chicago native myself, I have to ask: Does being a Chicagoan influence your writing or your inspiration?

Being a Chicagoan influences everything I do. First of all, it is the greatest city on the planet. I feel overwhelmingly lucky to have grown up in a place that boasts a deep pool of talent with very little bullshit. It’s a good place to become good at things, no one is watching you fail. No one cares. Then you move to the East Coast and everyone thinks you’re so talented and normal.

5. For All the Tea in China narrates mostly the adventures of Robert Fortune and his escapades to bring Chinese tea to the English masses. Do you see Fortune as a hero or a thief? You explored China, too. While writing your book did you ever feel a kinship to Fortune? Like you were both searching for something in China?

Fortune and I were in a struggle with each other. I would sit down at my computer thinking, ok, Bob, you and me, we’re in this together, can we please make a page work today? His Victorian arrogance frustrated me, but I also couldn’t help but admire his pluck, his swashbuckling improvisation. He spent three years in China, a stranger in a strange land, in the name of science and commerce. My first experiences in China were much less glamorous – I was a backpacker right out of college and Hong Kong is where I went broke, so I got a job and stayed. Returning for the book, I had a mission: to find what was left of pre-nationalist, pre-communist China, to see if there was anything old left in the most rapidly modernizing place on earth.

Was he a thief? In modern eyes, most certainly yes. At the time there was no sense that botanical products could obtain any kind of intellectual property protection whatsoever. There was no intellectual property. But he knew what he was doing was illegal, that the laws of China expressly forbid his presence there.

6. You say writing For All the Tea in China took five “grueling” years. Why so grueling? And for the sake of our tech buffs out there, what word processing did you use?

Grueling isn’t the half of it. Five abusive years. Five miserable years. Five years of degradation, abject poverty, frustration, humiliation. Publishing is a ridiculous business. No one with self esteem should ever write a book.

For the tech buffs, I used word 2002, I think. Someday I’ll need a fancier version, but see poverty above.

7. I heard through the grapevine, aka Twitter, that you recorded your voice for the For All the Tea in China audio book. What was that experience like? Have you listened to the final product? Have you used any other new methods to market your book?

I did record the audio! We just won some fancy awards for it – from Library Journal and AudioFile (Phile?). It was probably the very last time I’ll ever read For All the Tea in China, so it was kind of touching. And it was isolating, I was alone in a booth every day for a week. Just me and the product of all this labor. But I’m so happy I got the chance to do it – I actually had to audition to read my own book.

I would do anything to sell this book. A writer needs readers. If I thought it would help to bake cookies for every single person who sent me a bookstore receipt proving they bought the thing, I would. It has always been my hope that tea shops would pick it up, what the industry calls “non-traditional retail sales”. Michael Harney, of Harney and Sons, sells it. But it’s too disappointing to walk into tea shops in every city asking for it and only finding “Three Cups of Tea”

8. I understand your research came from mostly Fortune’s journals. What other methods did you use for your incredible research? What role did the Internet play in your research?

I made several trips to the British Library in London, where the remainders of the East India Company documents are kept. It’s a wonderful place and I had a mad crush on the brain of their China expert. The Company documents provided a good check on Fortune’s personal memoirs, I could confirm where he was when and what he was doing. I also spent a lot of time flying home to the Regenstein Library – my mother still lived in Chicago then. It’s the greatest open stack library on the planet, a tremendous resource, the entire world should bow down before the Regenstein and kiss what used to be Stagg field. (beware the radiation)

The internet was more helpful in the last years than it was in the beginning. When I began this project, I stood in the basement of Regenstein xeroxing all of Fortune’s books because they were only for sale for $145 by some rare academic press that made its money gouging libraries. Now everything is available on Google Books – I can download Fortune to my eReader. Oh, brave new world.

9. I left your book with a much deeper respect for botany and tea. The time and science that goes into each. What would you say was the most important thing you took with you after writing this book?

I, too, fell for the botanists in a big way. I’ve come to think of them in the same way I think of the guys at Xerox Parc in the 70s, the geeks who paved the way to a technological revolution. Nothing was ever the same again.

And personally, I have developed a healthy wariness of book writing. When I proposed this book, I was young and green, hopeful and optimistic. Now I am old and wizened and feel every mile, every disappointment . So really the most important thing I’ve learned is how truly special books are as a form. For two or three nights, or over the course of an airplane ride, some stranger engages with a project from my pen. I command their attention. They imagine my thoughts and follow my story. And people actually like it! I get letters. There is no magazine story that powerful – well, none that I’m likely to write, anyway. I’m still not certain writing books is worth all the pain – but the reward is profound.

10. What do you see for yourself in the future?

Someday I’ll write another book. I’m still feeling pretty bruised. Every time I talk about a new project, it ends up sounding like I’m describing weight lifting.

So for the moment I’ve had a great year travel writing for various magazines. It’s even more financially ruinous than writing books, but the immediate perks are better.

I need to earn a living. So I’ve been thinking about getting a real job. You know, one of those plentiful, rewarding, glamorous writing jobs.

For All the Tea in China can be found in a bookstore near you, or online.

(http://www.amazon.com/All-Tea-China-England-Favorite/dp/1400165377)

Or download a copy to your Kindl.

Follow Sarah Rose on Twitter: @TheSarahRose

Q: How did you get started with the podcast?

A: It started in May 2009. I was working in documentary film and video production and getting into green blogging. I started to question where my food came from and I attacked those questions by starting OrganicNation.tv. Using video and social media tools came naturally to me as a way to share what I learned with the public.

Q: So is that the best medium for the message?

A: Definitely. The videos and the blog work well together because we provide links and resources for our viewers to explore subjects in more depth.

Q: Current TV also started with online videos and a blogging community and you’ve done some things with them. How did that come about?

A: I started submitting to them a few years ago. They’re great because they showed that there is a place for our kind of online videos to be viewed by a large number of people and have built a community around that.

Q: Switching gears a bit to social media, what do you do on a daily basis to build your fan base?

A: I make sure I am always updating with the latest content whether it’s something I’ve created or something from someone else. I try to be generous with the community and support others’ work. Hopefully they return the favor.

Q: What is your number one rule of building a social media fan base?

A: Listen first. Look at your competitors and get the landscape of the community. Find influential users on a social media platform (like Twitter) and pay attention to how they use the tool to communicate. That’s actually more than one. (laughs) One thing people don’t realize is that you can’t assume people are going to know about your new page, social media profile or video. You have to get the word out via your website, newsletter and other ways. For example, sometimes I’ll post a link to a company’s Facebook page on their Twitter feed just to make sure everyone knows the brand is on that platform as well.

Q: What new social media tools are you using?

A: I really love Vimeo. Hootsuite is another good one. Squarespace.com is good too. We built OrganicNation.tv on that one.

Q: Social Media can be a very unpredictable medium, sometimes things come together and sometimes they don’t. When you need to change something that’s not working, what do you do?

A: Giveaways and contests are a great way to spark conversation. I found that people follow you just for the chance you might give them something. Sometimes I post something controversial just to get people talking.

Q: What has surprised you most about your followers?

A: I didn’t realize this many people where interested in farming. We get people in city who really want to know where their food comes from and I’ve also been surprised by how many social-media savvy farmers there are online! I’m glad we have a very well rounded and well read audience.

Q: Do you change things based on your follower’s comments?

A: Definitely. We did an entire series of blog posts called “Dirty Dozen” (www.organicnation.tv/blog/category/dirty-dozen) based on what people wanted to know about the benefits of certain organic foods and products over their conventional counterparts. We encourage our viewers to post articles and share information.

Q: What do you do to encourage fan generated content?

A: I ask my readers lots of questions and I try to respond to all of them. I know I hate it when I ask a brand questions on a platform like Twitter and no one responds. It shows that they really don’t care about their fans. And sometimes it’s harder than others. I worked on a social media campaign for a women’s fashion line and it was easy to get teenage girls to talk about their dresses. But something like a joint pain supplement was harder to get people to talk about.

Q: So how did you manage that?

A: In the case of doing social media strategy for the joint pain supplement, I just made sure to keep the message positive and fun, at least as fun as possible (laughs) but as long as you keep the page active and answer questions the people will come.

Q: Do you feel it’s hard to keep people’s attention online and cut through the static of everything else vying for people’s attention?

A: Of course. I want to continue making videos and you do have to get views to do that. We want to make sure we are entertaining but we maintain our integrity. We’re happy with an average of 1000-2000 views per video. It’s really all about finding your niche market.

Q: Is it hard to keep up with a constantly changing market like social media?

A: Not really. I think people are too fixated on the tools – it’s all about the community you’ve built. I’m invested in the content, not just the tools. In the end, platforms like Twitter and Facebook are a way to connect with people and communicate a message. OrganicNation.tv has achieved lots of success with Twitter, but if something else came along that worked better I would spend more time there.

Q: What kind of gadgets do you work with?

A: I love my Android G1. I take it on the road with me when we go filming and post pictures and updates. I have to take breaks from it so I don’t get overworked but it’s great.

Q: You mentioned going on the road and filming recently, anything else you have coming up that you want to talk about?

A: The road trip is awesome. This May, we’re taking OrganicNation.tv on a Southwest tour through Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. We’ll be test driving a Ford Fusion Hybrid during the trip and we’re thrilled to be sponsored by Motel 6. It’s going to be fun. And of course at NobleTree Media, we’re working with a lot of great brands to grow their message online.

Q: What is your 3-year plan for OrganicNation.tv? Where do you hope to see it growing and evolving?

A: Right now we’re focused on continuing to cover the latest issues and innovations around sustainable food in each region of the U.S. So far we’re filmed on the East and West coasts, the Midwest and soon the Southwest. We still want to cover the Great Plains, the Southeast and Hawaii. We also want to develop a interactive mapping tool so that people can geo-tag photos and videos of the sustainable food movement around the country. Our goal is to create a visual landscape of the exciting things that are happening and give people both a local and national context for it.

http://www.organicnation.tv/

http://www.twitter.com/DorotheeRoyal

http://www.twitter.com/OrganicNation

http://www.treehugger.com/galleries/2010/04/best-of-green-food-and-health.php?page=26

I’m not a dog person (you can blame my parents for never getting me one), so I instinctively took a step back for every one I took forward as the retriever leapt toward me with thick drool flinging from its mouth.

“Hot Glass?”  the Hell’s Angel asked me.

“Uh…yeah!” I answered.

The Angel opened the door, the retriever jumped through and I followed the gruesome twosome into the warehouse.

Through a dim concrete hallway and past a chalkboard with scribblings of classes offered, the space opened up like the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin (Not familiar with this?  Think claustrophobic sand avalanche turns glorious high-ceilinged work space.  An English-speaking Arabian tiger may or may not be involved.  God, I love Disney.)

This place is an adult’s playground; everything that your parents told you not to do as a kid is happening right here:

Rock music playing too loud. Check

Massive fire in open oven.  Check

Men playing with fire.  Check.

That’s just how glass blowing goes at Chicago Hot Glass.   It’s the Harley Davidson of fine art.  It requires the obvious artistic eye and technical skill.  But it also demands the cajones to brave the burns.

And like the diamond in the rough warehouse we were in (another Aladdin reference.  Now I’m just that girl who’s obsessed with Aladdin), the process of making a refined, smooth, beautiful piece of glasswork is a crude and callous one.  As much as the finished projects may look as if they were begotten in an artist’s loft so white it glows celestial, Chicago Hot Glass is far from heavenly with multiple fires burning and men spinning glass on something reminiscent of a devil’s pitchfork.

After the Hell’s Angel disappeared into his glass-making haven, I met up with John Barbagallo, a similarly bearded man minus the dog. There was no doubt in my mind he didn’t also ride a motorcycle.  He assured me immediately that Chicago Hot Glass was the best place to be—Chicago’s only public glass studio on the brink of expanding for more studio space for lamp and bead making.

I admired his enthusiasm to make the hard sell.

“So how long have you worked here?” I asked John.

He shrugged, looked around the place as if it were Christmas morning and this is what family and home truly meant, “I don’t work here.”

My pen stopped moving, and I looked up.

“Yeah, I took an eight week class and never left.”

Now that’s love.

John then led me past the artist, Joseph Ivacic leading a private lesson and guiding his pupil as he blew through the long pipe to expand the molten-hot glass.

He took to me to a wall with metal shelving barricading an entire back corner and lined with unfinished glass pieces of every color and every shape.  John showed me his work which he explained he’d been working on for a very long time now.

“It looks finished to me!” I praised.

But he assured me that there was much much much more refining to do.  My eye caught an orange vase with a post-it reading “Not For Sale…Yet”.

“There’s a lucky few who manage to pursue a career in this.”

That’s when John passed me on to Pearl Dick, a resident artist at the Habitat Gallery who also teaches classes at Chicago Hot Glass. Pearl is cool looking and could probably also rides a motorcycle.

She shows me her collection of heads she’s been working on since 1997.

She tells me it’s still not done, and as she explains the process of creation, I get the feeling it will never be done. You start with an idea. You try to execute it.  And when something inevitably goes wrong—you get one shot to work with the glass at the perfect temperature—you either become inspired by its flaw, or bust.  Pearl noted that it’s the “happy accidents that propel you forward.”

My inner monologue: kinda like children.

Glass blowing is mind blowing.  I don’t have enough breath to blow up birthday party balloons let alone an orb of molten glass.  But there are people around Chicago who find solace here, who enjoy the risk in the craft, the burns, the inevitable mistakes and the refining, refining and refining.

There is something about taking an ingredient so basic and natural as sand and creating decadent art.  Out of the studio, the best glass pieces find home in lavish apartments, museums and galleries.  As for Chicago Hot Glass’s students, they bring their work home, a trophy from the underworld of art, no doubt, carried home on motorcycles.

Chicago Hot Glass is located at 1250 North Central Park Avenue

Chicago, IL 60651 | (773) 394-3252

Find out more about CHG and classes www.chicagohotglass.com

I believe a big part of being an active member of any community, such as the “people who build websites community”, is to give back and provide people with the opportunity to learn and grow.  On top of giving information and showing how things can be done and built, every now and then you come across work that is a notch above the rest.

Recently, I was browsing a popular design/dev website and came across this playground, built and maintained by Zurb, out of San Fransisco.  The playground has many innovative ways to use HTML5 and CSS3 and  combined with some javascript they have come up with some very awesome stuff!  Please check out these examples and take note!

User experience expert – John Yesko, gave the latest presentation and the topic was “Rich User Experience Documentation – Beyond Static Wireframes.”

John got me thinking about documenting websites in slightly different ways than I am used to. While his presentation was extensive, I wanted to focus on just two of his points here.

Point #1 – In the beginning of a project you can not always start predicting what’s going to be on the site right away. This is especially true for sites with rich interactions including screens with many various states. It may be of critical importance to start by defining not only what kind of site it is going to be, but also emphasizing what kind of experience the user will have. I say ‘emphasizing’ because with multiple screen states the users will all have a different experience to some degree. Even with several types of experiences possible, we as designers should still plan to make the overall experience good and set up an appropriate framework. This is where concept mapping can become useful.  According to Dan Brown, Author of Communicating Design, Concept maps/models are: “A diagram that shows the relationship between different abstract concepts. You can apply the concept modeling technique to explain different aspects of a website.” Here is an example John showed the group during his presentation.

Both diagrams are from the early stages of the same website but show differing possibilities of what the user experience could be like based on placing more emphasis on various categories within the site. These types of visual aids can be sketched out quickly to help nail down the kind of site you will be building and the experience you intend to deliver regardless of which screen state they may be viewing.

Point #2 -  Once the concept maps have been done and you have some idea of what the site will be like, you’ll need to begin to detail out the specific screens as wireframes. And how will you present those with the rich interactions you’re planning on providing the user? How do you explain visually what pages will look if they have many possible screen states, animations, widgets, etc…?’ John went on to provide a number of great examples and boiled his message down fairly concisely.

He stated the importance of documenting all possible screen states both visually and with written annotations. But to also be as economical as you can by not just repeating various screens over and over with minor changes to each. One technique John mentioned was using call-outs.  This is where you show one completed page and in the periphery you show portions of the screen in their alternate states. Of course there could be too many states to show in this way, and each screen may require its own technique but the key is to make sure you account for all possibilities so that the visual designers and coders understand the intent of the designers and architects who planned out.

John also covered other topics including  the work flow of  various design team members and how he has seen a change recently. He also talked about how the overall web design process is changing and why documentation is important. The examples shown above are just a few ways one can adapt the the new digital design landscape that is emerging. The entire presentation is available at his website http://www.yesko.com/.

…to the 3rd floor!

Though we’ve only been in our new space here at Lake Street for one year, it’s time to grow and move into a larger studio that accommodates even better our creatives’ and programmers’ needs. Natural light. Ample space. Relaxing amenities. This is the place! Thank to everyone whose talent and dedication makes this exciting new chapter in our agency a reality. Thanks also to all of our valued clients – without you…well, you know. Come and visit us when we open the doors on August 1.

- it seems faster than TinyURL (although as of today I noticed 500,000+ snips, and their total is 28 million so they are getting lots of traffic suddenly too with the popularity of Twitter)
- it has tracking and management of snips
- the browser button is great

1. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
2. Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
3. Don’t send automated queries to Google.
4. Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
5. Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

The positives
First you are protected legally/financially by the corporate shroud once you are a corporation/propriety. Second, you can write off expenses through the corporation in ways that are well documented and easy to follow. Third, you can control your salary to yourself via dividends, which typically allows for better tax treatment. Fourth, many companies’ accounting departments will treat you a little more professionally (my subjective opinion) when invoicing/collecting.

The negatives
Incorporating costs money, although you can minimize this by using a small business accountant to handle everything. Second, your taxes will get more complicated, so you will likely be best served to use the same accountant for taxes. You are responsible for dealing with the IRS on a monthly basis to handle payroll liabilities (if you pay yourself or someone else a salary) – another thing that can be handled by an accountant.  Last, you should set up a bank account for this corporation, and that can lead to some additional fees.

In Summary
I think it’s definitely a good idea in almost all cases, unless you’re handling a very light load of freelance projects. Since you’ll need to budget about $1k-$2k each year for the accountant, and a few hundred or more in business/banking and possibly legal fees, you’ll want to be sure you make at least 10x that amount I would think.

Let me know if you have questions about these types of questions – I love to help people start their own ventures when the time is right.

Steve Krug discusses doing usability testing with 4-6 people about once a month can lead to solving problems typically yield big efficiencies and return on investment. We wholeheartedly agree, Steve!