Justin Ramedia

This isn’t a popular blog in terms of traffic. I use it to get my thoughts about design out into the world in the hopes that someone else can benefit, but I’ve come across something that I don’t fully understand. Spam.

I thought I had a good grasp on email spam. Of course you can trick a small percentage of people to click through to a malicious site or download mal-ware. Apparently it’s very lucrative. I understand that and the majority of email clients do a good job of filtering out the bad stuff. What I don’t understand is blog spam. I get over 150 spam comments a day. They are usually gibberish with random links to anything from Viagra to acai berry vitamins. A little insight: my blog gets less than 20 visitors a day. 20 visitors. The fact that I get so little traffic, but deal with so many spam comments confuses me. How is that valuable to a spammer? Their links get marked as spam almost immediately and no one is looking at them anyway. I finally had to turn off auto-approving comments because every single comment I got was more crap.

If someone knows why this practice is valuable to a spammer, could you please leave a real comment below? I need to figure this out.

Dinosaur Lunchbox is a software / design company that Ryan Fuller and I created so that we could build things that we enjoyed. We were sick of  having 20 fun ideas a day and never doing anything with them so now when we have one, we add it to the queue.

Our latest idea is now alive on the internet and if you like art, you should check out this site. Unknown Pixel is an online art gallery where people buy pixels to uncover the artwork. Each pixel purchased acts like a raffle ticket and when the artwork is revealed, we pick a winner randomly. The winner gets the displayed artwork framed and a note from the artist.

We thought it would give amazing exposure to artists, allow people the chance to own a piece of original art for just a dollar, and provide some fun to all involved. The owners of the pixels will have their names and (sometimes more importantly) their links on our site forever, so people will always know that they supported the arts in one way or another.

I’d love to hear what you think about it so head over to unknownpixel.com and look around. If you enjoy it, buy a pixel. I’m donating 10% of all proceeds to various charities so if you do buy a pixel and have a worthy cause, email me and I’ll be sure to add it to my list. I look forward to hearing what you think!

I’ve learned a lot over the years from Jason Fried. He’s sort of my mentor, although I’ve never met him. He’s one of the first successful people that I immediately associated with. He’s a Designer who loves simplicity (me too). He cares more about making his products work than pleasing everyone and anyone. He also doesn’t act like a “businessman.” He acts like a successful person. He has office hours where you can call him and chat about business or whatever. He treats his employees like great employees deserve to be treated and he just gets it when it comes to running things they way they should be run. His employees are some of the best compensated in the world. When you start at 37Signals (which takes more than a good interview), you get a company credit card. Without a limit. Seriously… Use it for whatever you want. He doesn’t act like a parent. He treats his employees like important people. He values them for the work they do. Other than that, he stays out of the way.

The reason for all this Fried-fervor is a side project that I’ve been working on with a friend called InvoiceStorm (site prototype). It’s an application for freelancers like me, as well as small and medium businesses.

We didn’t quit our day-jobs to do this project. We could have and maybe would have been done already, but we kept it a “side-project” as Jason (and others) have recommended. That way there was never any pressure on us to pay the bills or succeed at the cost of a quality product. At every turn I think, “wow, this is sort of how 37Signals was started.” It’s been driving me to find more and more time to devote to my new baby and it’s slowly becoming my main project. When it launches, I’ll likely have to slow down or stop my freelancing and devote more serious time to it – The goal being a full-time job working on the sites & software that I’ve created with amazingly talented people.

Does your project have that kind of importance to you? Do you feel excited for the chance to work on something that matters? If not, maybe it’s time.