This is not new by any means, but I like to watch it time and again as a personal inspiration.

Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

The Problem

“Communities” seems to be the buzzword of the year as we see more and more “social networks” and large scale online communities begin to dominate the marketplace. We’ve watched as Facebook went from local university community, to national college-based community, to world-wide software giant-in-the-making, but who is really benefiting from these communities?

Isn’t it the point of a community that with each new participant the power of the community as a whole grows? Why does it seem more and more that the only one’s benefiting from the growth of these communities are the business people reaping the ad-revenue behind them? It’s because that is exactly what is happening. The online web communities we have come to know and love are becoming less and less useful to us and more and more useful to the people who run them.

When Bigger isn’t Better

We need to move away from our infatuation with these over-inflated communities and towards a respect for smaller more specialized communities. When your talking about large scale communities like Facebook, the potential benefits for local communities are dwarfed.  How much do you actually care about Facebook when your using it? I bet you barely even give it a second’s thought, you’re just looking to see what you’re friends have been up to. We as web developers need to begin developing communities for smaller localized groups that actually care about the community as a whole.

If we begin to develop smaller communities with a larger focus on physical presence we can develop communities of people who actually care about the group as a whole and actually want to put forth effort to improve it. (I’m avoiding examples here on purpose, I want you the reader to apply these thoughts as you see fit but I have presented many examples in past blog posts).

We’ve seen this trend many times before. Take corporate America for example: Big companies are full of people who work for money and care/know little about the larger entity they are a part of, while small companies are full of people who work passionately day and night for the growth of the company itself. Our obsession with big in the past few centuries has left us with less and less people who actually care about what they are apart of.

Large communities in turn are not able to offer the sort of specialization or quality of service that a more direct and localized community can offer. There is still an important role these large communities will play in our future, however, it will be the large communities that are built on a network of smaller more specialized and localized communities that prosper. Facebook’s social cause and donation applications have shown us how the massive size of a community can be harnessed for powerful positive influence on our society, but without the smaller focus of localized communities the larger community is nothing but bloated hype.

A system that could properly integrate smaller communities with one another to develop larger more powerful communities could be one of the most influential pieces in the puzzle we call our future.

Technology has become the catalyst for the world civilizations undergoing a slow but vast revolution in thought, ideals, and practice. We are moving from a proprietorized world where money defines the amount of information we have access to, towards a democratized realm in which information is as free as the people who use it.

As technology takes over more and more of our life it is important for us to take full advantage of the benefits it can provide. Not only as individuals, but as a society as a whole. Wikipedia is the perfect example of people taking advantage of the power of technology for the benefit of society as a whole. Each individual contributor is taking part in something bigger than themselves, an organic growing collection of information for us by us.

Proprietary Information - Print-Based Dictionaries, Encyclopedia, Newspapers, etc

• All written by a collection of authors chosen by a select group of “qualified” individuals

• Information was limited to the knowledge of a handful of “experts” and mass distributed to millions

Organic Community Based Information - Wikipedia, Digg, etc

• The power of information is taken from the handful of “experts” and placed in the hands of millions

• Regulation comes in the form of a community, constantly updating and adding input while checking and balancing the information provided by others

• There is a direct correlation between the number of users and the quality of information, the more people using the more viewpoints, perspectives, and ideals are incorporated

• Effectively takes the power of information from the “experts” and “qualified” individuals to the people

All of this is nothing new. Long before the likes of Wikipedia and Digg open-source advocates preached the power of collaboration and freedom of knowledge. But it is not until we saw widely accepted implementations of this sort of collaboration did the possibilities become evident.

Why can’t we apply the same techniques and ideals of open source ideology and organic community based information stores and apply it to the education system. I have been outspoken on my bitterness towards the education system in America and its growing obsoletion as any of my colleagues or friends will tell you. Over and over again I finish my lecture on my beliefs, and I’m met with both faces of intrigue and confusion, but the resulting question is almost always the same — How can we do it better?

My inability to answer this question confidently often nullifies my argument in the eyes of the listener and leaves me in a state of deep thought pondering the very question. I have come up with several theories and ideas, but they were often incomplete and/or impractical.

Recently my partner introduced me to a new project in which we will apply the ideals of Digg/Wikipedia and organic information growth to education. After a brief period of meditation this morning my thoughts and emotions on the projects fell into place in the form of a vision for the future of our education system.

Combine the social integration of Facebook with the informational collaboration of Wikipedia and the community style regulation of Digg and you get our new concept (for development purposes I’ll call Project Ed). I will write more in regards to the specifics in the near future but for now I’ll keep it general for the purpose of conceptualization.

The initial goal of Project Ed is to supplement the educational system by offering a set of collaborative tools integrated with a social network to enhance your educational experience. Our underlying greater vision is to replace the educational system (at the risk of sounding too Dr. Evil, or Bill Gates, I say this loosely with a tinge of humor).

The project begins as a supplemental educational community, but just as Wikipedia has shown, the more users we are able to attract the greater the potential of the community. By collecting and organizing information from classes and universities we can kick start the growth of a virtual organic wealth of information geared towards students. Want to learn Calculus but can’t understand your teacher’s broken English, or just plain can’t stand him? Or maybe you really just don’t get it and your 60 year old teacher can’t fathom your perspective to even begin explaining it to you… why not turn to hundreds and thousands of students just like you for help?

Lets take the power away from the teachers and put it in the hands of the students where it belongs. Take the power from the few and give it to the many. I believe this will be an ideal we will see more and more of in the future.

Expect to hear much more about Project Ed in the near future, for now — Peace.

I just finished reading Josh Kopelman’s blog post on the Implicit Web, and it got me thinking. This is probably the third or forth article I’ve read on the subject, and not surprisingly it comes from another VC. It seems the VCs are all hyped up about the possibilities behind using our Digital Footprints to better organize our life on the web.

Josh lays out some pretty nice examples of how we can take advantage of the Implicit Web. He uses the example of creating a profile for your Facebook account. Every thing we do on the web from buying Mother’s day gifts on Amazon to signing up for a social network leaves bits of information about us on the web, or in the clouds. When Facebook asks you what are your favorite movies, books, and music, instead of having to answer the questions Facebook should simply ask Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes what you’re favorite music is.

Now I see exactly why the VCs are getting so excited. Someone who could provide either a way of organizing the data from all of these different locations onto one massive database, or provide a way to properly organize and categorize the data from the other locations could really disrupt the way we currently browse the web. Not only the web, but technology tracks and records our actions everywhere in our life. Every time you use your credit card, the store you used it at and your bank has detailed records of those transactions. Organizing this sort of data for benevolent use could make our lives a lot easier.

Note the word benevolent there. For all of the good that can be done by organizing our digital footprints, twice as much bad can be done. And this is where I really start to get concerned. I still can’t understand Twitter, why do I want people to know what I’m doing all the time? I don’t know how I feel about such vast amounts of information about my personal life being organized into a way in which large companies can access it. Do I really want Facebook knowing what my favorites are, and what I purchase the most?

Along those lines, I think it is going to be absolutely crucial for the companies who step up to take advantage of the implicit web to have proper privacy implementations. The ability for the user to control what companies can and can’t record about themselves will be crucial to the success of said technologies. Without such control, we’re talking some major Big Brother issues.

Why is finding housing soo hard? I think its the same reason I’m no good at clothes shopping, too much variety and I don’t know what the hell I like. I’m trying to find a 2-3 bedroom in either Northern Liberties or along South St. and surprisingly I’ve found a TON of listings in my price range. My number one priority is public transportation since I don’t have a car, which narrows down my search a little bit.

Craigslist search is garbage, it filters just about as well as a fishnet filters water. I’d love to see someone put together a user controlled site for real estate, sort of Digg meets Craiglist meets Trends. It’d be really cool to have listings that you can vote on or vote down, and a comment section to comment on listings. Comments on the quality of the area, trustworthyness of the realators, etc. How about some easy search filters like within a specific number of blocks/miles to public transportation, and a search engine that when I type in South St, I get South St and not the 2500 block of South Broad. Who knows maybe I’ll turn my brainstorm into a reality, or better yet someone will read it and make it happen.

In the meantime, anyone have any recommendations on nice/cheap places to live in or around Center City Philadelphia and close to public transpo??

Chris and I have been working closely with our school’s entrepreneurship center on developing DGA and trying to raise capital. They’ve been a world of help in regards to mentorship and consultation, and one of their first recommendations was that we register for a series of Business Plan competitions that Drexel offers. I think Chris was a bit more into it than me… I couldn’t really see the value, until now. Check out my post on blogDGA to get a little more information about the latest competition.

We haven’t done so well in the first two competitions (Business Concept and Business Plan), but I am confident that this upcoming event will be extremely valuable. The chance to pitch our plan in front of a focused group of relevant industry professionals and have them tear into us is something I’ve been dying for. I’ve practiced by elevator and cab pitch time and time again and have finally gotten to a point where I’m not only overly passionate about my topic, but comfortable conveying our ideas and concepts to a variety of different people. But I haven’t had any real public speaking practice and now’s my chance. I couldn’t ask for a better audience and I plan on taking full advantage of this opportunity.

I’ve always been extremely social and comfortable in any business environment, and the only one I have yet to explore is public speaking. A lot of the people I respect the most in the industry and Philadelphia region regularly give speeches and presentations during relevant conferences and organizations, and its something I have always looked up to. I cannot wait until I am in a position to speak on behalf of a topic to a group of colleagues and peers and actually be able to offer some sort of value to them.

Just wanted to give a quick post regarding Devnuts.com, our new web development company. Devnuts is basically a merger of web development companies between Chris Alfano, Eric Zhivalyuk, and myself. The three of us are close friends and have worked together for just about the last 4 years and have all done business under a variety of our own business entities which got very confusing for us and our clients at times. Thus spawned Devnuts.

The idea first came up when we realized we were each turning down potentially thousands of dollars worth of projects because we didn’t have the time to take them on. It’s really frustrating to have to say no to someone looking for a website because you don’t have the time to work on it. The idea behind Devnuts is to provide us with a centralized company where we manage our projects more efficiently from a higher level, allowing us to take on a much greater volume of projects.

The three of us have 10 or so independent designers and coders who have worked for us in the past and we have brought them all along to Devnuts. Now when a project comes along that we may not personally have time to handle, we can delegate the necessary parts of the projects to our group of contractors. The idea is to provide a stream of constant work for our independent contractors and develop the Devnuts brand as well as each contractors personal portfolio. We are encouraging all of our contractors to use any of their Devnuts work on their personal portfolios, so they aren’t just doing work for a company that reaps all the rewards.

The idea is far from unique, but its something that’s gonna save us a great amount of time and effort, while still providing a steady stream of income for us and our employees. I’ve spent the past few weeks organizing the standards and protocols necessary to make this sort of thing a success and I’m proud to say as of today we are up and operational. We took on our first client as the new entity today, and have 2 incoming clients later in the week.

Lets hope Devnuts can churn out some nice incoming revenue so we can really start griding on some of the more fun projects we’ve got our hands on!

A few days ago I posted a video of Eric Schmidt answering the question “what is Web 3.0?” during a Q&A session at the Seoul Digital Forum. After making a crack at the phrase by calling it a marketing term he went on to discuss Web 3.0 as a “different way of building applications”. He goes into greater detail and his explanation is very concise and elegent, take a look for yourself.

I think that Eric Schmidt hit it right on the head. For years the technogods the likes of Larry Ellison have claimed the desktop is going to go virtual, killing the operating system entirely. This is something we are going to see take place at an extremely fast pace in the very near future. Applications are going to be gradually ported from desktop to web based, as the natural trend through the past year has shown us. I know personally, 3 years ago I was nothing without my desktop, and now I’m almost entirely virtual. Everything important to me is in the cloud, and I can access it on the go, wherever I’m at (with a few small exceptions).

Windows is going to be a thing of the past.  Web based platforms like Facebook have potential to virtually replace operating systems like windows. I’m not sure about you but If you’ve ever heard Mark Zuckerberg talk he sounds a lot like fellow Harvard dropout, Bill Gates. I don’t think that Zuckerberg will every be able to create the same type of dominance Gates was able to because of the infinite nature of the internet. Where Gates made people NEED his product, Zuckerberg will never be able to create that sort of demand. There will always be another startup that can offer an alternative to Facebook, and unlike with Windows the Internet makes it easy for the everyday user to take advantage of these options. This will promote good old fassion capitalistic competition, which will constantly force companies to offer their users a better product. Whoever can provide the most comfortable, convenient, and easy platform for its user will retain the biggest market share.

I think another trend we will see in the next wave of web technology will be a much larger presence of open source technology. Open source frameworks like Asterisk really open the door of possibilities for pioneering major industries such as the future of telephony infrastructure. Open source implementations in major infrastructure industries will eliminate a ton of the problems we currently deal with. The hassles of dealing with the phone company will be a thing of the past with proper open source implementations.

Imagine if MaBell made an effort to progress its technology for the sake of progress, and not financial gain. Maybe we wouldn’t be relying on the same exact telephony infrastructure our grandparents did. Open source communities have shown tremendous potential for advancing technology. I think it will be interesting to watch the progress of Asterisk, it could have some pretty profound impacts on our future.

I think in the immediate future we are going to see some pretty crazy advancements in the way of web-based video capture/conferencing. I remember watching movies 10 years ago where the actors communicated face to face via laptops and it was considered sci-fi and futuristic. Now my 15 year old sister video chats on the norm. iChat has already shown us some pretty amazing implementations of such technology, but I think we can expect a major shift to web based video conferencing software. Check out the Red5 project, it should make some considerable progress in this area. Sebastian Wagner has posted a really  promising piece of software that utilizes the Red5 framework called openmeeting on Google Code. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some Google/Yahoo aquisitions in the way of web-based video capture/conferencing/streaming in the near future.

I can’t sleep, I’ve been up researching/writing all night. I need to put together a solid presentation of my business pitch for DGA. Just brainstorming for now, will put the pen to the paper in the morning after the gym and a clear mind.

I  hit a vain in the entrepreneur/startup community in Philadelphia by stumbling upon Philly Startup Leaders yesterday. It has directed me onto a bunch of other really cool communities/projects in the Philadelphia area. The most interesting consortium being the SocialDevCamp East.

Check it out, it really caught my interest because of the idea of bringing a bit of the tech buzz on the West Coast to the East Coast so I sent it over to my roommate/colleague, Chris and we agreed we’d have to attend. Its in Baltimore, not too bad a commute, except one problem. It was 2 days ago. Horrendous timing, I’m really pissed. I really would like to step up my efforts to attending events like these, I think they are wonderful oppurtunities to network and collaborate with some of the brightest and most ambitious people in Philadelphia.

Ah wash is out of the dryer. Time for bed.

Check this quick video out. I thought it was very interesting.