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The Essential Lee Lefever: The Common Craft website CommonCraft.com Lee and Sachi Lefever's global travel blog TheWorldIsNotFlat.com A multimedia experience focusing on slums ThePlacesWeLive.com Collections of the amazing photos from events around the world Boston.com/bigpicture The economy explained in one podcast npr.org/blogs/money/ A regular live storytelling podcast TheMoth.org/Podcast

If you have five minutes, you have time enough for Lee Lefever. His short videos explaining the often complex online world started popping up in "pass-it-along" office e-mails in 2007, and are now recognizable to anyone who has asked "What is Twitter?" Using a white board, a few markers and cut-out paper dolls, Lefever explains things in plain English to those who still wonder where to put the stamp on an e-mail.

His web consultancy, Common Craft, was born as a straightforward online community consultancy in 2003. Lefever and his wife Sachi put the business on hiatus in November 2005 when they left on a 30-country global jaunt. The whole trip was directed by visitors to the couple's blog (TheWorldIsNotFlat.com), which they regularly updated with video and photos. Blog guests told them where to eat, sleep and visit.

"We'd got a lot of experience taking travel videos, boiling them down to three minutes and putting them on YouTube," Lefever says. "We started wondering if we could integrate the use of video into what we were doing with Common Craft."

After experimenting with the format, the couple settled on a basic animation-with-voiceover, which has a simplistic charm in step with the "plain English" vibe.

The first paper-doll video explained RSS (really simple syndication), and within 24 hours achieved tens of thousands of views and placement on Digg's front page.

Common Craft has since created internal and custom vids for Google, PR Web, Ford and Microsoft. The custom work pays the bills, but Lefever wants the company "to be known as a company that makes educational materials," rather than a promotional marketing firm. So the website is changing to focus more on the publicly available vids that anyone can buy.

Those videos already have lots of buzz. The top three public education vids (for Twitter, RSS and wikis) have accumulated 3.3 million combined views on YouTube. And those don't include the views from Common Craft's own site.