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.

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??

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.

Web Communities

Anyone who spends more than a few hours a week on a computer has been bombarded by the overwhelming presence of community driven web sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The concept is far from new, communities have been developed to bring people together for centuries from 4H to Future Business Leaders of America.

The nature of our culture and society states that we prefer to be surrounded by people of similar beliefs and interests and the Internet has been the single most influential tool in our history for bringing people together in that exact fashion.

Web communities have demonstrated a substantial ability to bring together people of all backgrounds and beliefs. We’ve all seen web communities bring together entire towns during times of despair such as the tragic Virginia Tech shooting. Families have reunited after years without communication all because of a newborn baby picture posted online.

It is exactly this sort of power that makes community software unique from the rest of the breakthrough Internet technologies. It is exactly this sort of power that will be responsible for the future of the Internet as we know it.

Types of Communities

There are hundreds of thousands of communities out there and an infinite amount of variations, but for simplicity sake I will categorize them into 3 main types of communities: Social Networks, Supportive Communities, and Research communities.

Social Networks are perhaps the most familiar communities to the average computer user. MySpace, Facebook, and PureVolume are some of the larger examples out there that serve the purpose of bringing people together. MySpace and Facebook bring people together with the intention of networking and feeding people’s desires to be in contact with their friends. PureVolume also serves a more specific purpose of delivery an environment for musicians to be heard.  In the end these communities are developed from the ground up to be a social experience for its users.

Supportive communities, unlike social networks, are web communities that have been developed around an already existing community. This type of community may be as simple as the forums on which the local Rotary Club chapter frequents to discuss upcoming schedules and events, or as interactive as Amazon.com’s user review system.

Research communities are the least popular of the community types I will discuss, however quite probably the most important. These communities range from tech discussion forums for technical products and services to medical diagnosis and treatment repositories such as WebMD.

Potential

Each of these three communities has a tremendous amount of potential for its respective purposes. The first type of potential output is the most obvious; financial. Social networks especially have shown a considerable amount of potential for advertising revenue, the bread and butter of Web 2.0 if you will. The potential lies in its user base, the more users the more valuable advertising space within the content of that community is.

Google’s proven ad revenue model is a perfect measure of how effective web advertising per audience actually is.  In the case of Google they rely on complex algorithms to determine the most effective displays for specific advertisements. So for example, when a user searches for “soccer cleats” they will find advertisements relative to soccer and or footwear, not advertisements for home improvements.
The beauty in advertising through web communities is that by nature of the network the demographics are predefined. So when a web community for home improvement enthusiasts wants to offer adspace they will be able to provide the perfect demographic for a company like Lowes, and a not so ideal demographic for a company like Disney.

There are far more benefits than just financial from developing web communities. Supportive communities can offer their existing communities a level of interaction and development not previously available. Amazon.com is a picture perfect example of this sort of implementation. Amazon had a proven business model, and the development of a community around that model has been paramount to its success.

Amazon created a community that allows its customers to write personalized product reviews and recommendations. The system gives its customers a whole new level of interactivity making their shopping easier, and their experience smoother. Other retailers can develop and strengthen their customer base through this type of supporting community at very little cost.
Discussing the potential for research based web communities is where things get really exciting. Research communities can provide a level of collaboration and cooperation that would be physically impossible if not for the power of the Internet. Imagine a community exclusive to qualified medical professionals, where they can discuss medical treatments, diagnosis’s, and future research.
The core of the community could be something as simple as a message board based for specific topics but its surrounding features would be crucial. Doctor’s would have their own personalized profiles including education, honors, awards, and degrees and may even go as far as their own personal beliefs and ideals. Personalization at this level serves not only as a verification tool, but also as a means of strengthening the bond the user feels with its community.

This type of bond is the essence of forming the community in the first place. Once a user feels truly a part of the community they are that much more likely to act towards the benefit of the community as a whole. Adding that level of personalization may be what existing research communities need to take it to the next level. The breakthrough medicinal discovery of the next decade could very well be the product of web community collaboration.

Developers

I expect the next few years will lay wake to an explosion of community software and social networks. As these networks continue to develop and grow dilution is going to be an obvious issue. The more communities out there asking for users’ loyalty the less likely any one user is to actually commit to a community. It is that rationale that should fuel community developers to make the process of joining and partaking in a community as simple and painless as possible.

For example users aren’t going to be interested in recreating their personal profiles for each community they wish to join. We’ve already seen companies begin to address this issue such as Google’s Open Social and OpenID.  These services plan to address the issue of standardization across multiple communities for the benefit of its users. Under these new systems a user can have a single profile that can be imported into any community that user wishes to join without the need to recreate his/her profile per community.

Developers need to spend all of their effort designing their communities to offer as much to the user as possible while asking for as little as possible in return. Generally the more commitment a community requires from a user the less likely the user is to commit. Anything from registration forms to community bulletins need to be as short and concise as possible while offering the most to its users. Ryan Singer from 37 Signals gave a conference speech on this exact sort of theory of implementation for web developers, you can check it out here.

Well I think that’s enough for today, I’d hate to write a conclusion because I’m not finished. It’s a blog, so I’m sure I’ll pick up where I left off sometime soon, until then… Thanks for listening!