Here's what you'll need:

• Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition - (Free)
• Silverlight SDK - (Free)
• Access to a computer - (Free - $4000)
• Time - (Priceless)

Here's what you do:

Create a VM shell.  This may sound a bit daunting but rest assured most of the functionality you'll need is already present in the tools.  Couple that with the fact that it doesn't have to be all the perfect for people to adopt en masse, but it does require a few must have features:

• Personalization
• Extensibility
• Pizzazz
• Social Awareness
• Pervasiveness
• Privacy

Here's what you'll get:

A change in the whole web/browser paradigm.  That's not to say that you will replace the world wide web, more along the line that you will replace the parts of it the people really want but aren't inherent in the browser model.

You provide the platform and the community will grow and provide the components.  If you allow a user to define themselves, share the content they want to share with the people they want to share it with in a way they want to use it, people will flock to it.

What you need to create is an environment that the user controls not one controlled by a central authority and imposed on the user.  Let the user define themselves and the various ways they want to present themselves to others.  Let the user define how they see and interact with other users.  Let them do this away from prying eyes with a sexy UI that can be adapted for a large variety of platforms.

Why now:

Google has fanned the flame of the browser wars with the release of Chrome.  They didn't intend this to be an offense move but a defensive one.  Google relies almost solely on ad revenue generated by serving up ads on browsers owned by other companies, the most popular of which is owned by a company intent on becoming their biggest competitor.  Google would loose everything almost overnight if M$ decided to just "turn off" ads in IE, M$ would loose almost nothing and users would for the most part be happier (until all the content on the web dried up).  Chrome gives Google the "assured mutual destruction" card by providing them with a retaliatory "if you don't show our ads, we won't give you access to our services"... a move that would divide the base and hurt M$.

While the big guys fight it out on the web there is an opportunity to shift the paradigm in a new direction that a small player can dominate.  Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc... are all attempting to give users what they want but are hamstrung by the platform they are bound to.  Take their base concepts and migrate them to a platform designed, in part, around them and you can write your own check.

TTFN

I'm starting to think about another new project.  I'm considering putting together a site of lists.  The idea is to create a one-stop shop where developers et al can go to get lists on everything from the states in the union to fashion designers.  I want the lists to be somewhat maintained by the community but with an emphasis on being pulled from a reliable source of record.  For example, a list of zip codes in the US would preferably be created and updated from the post office via a link to an officially published list while a list of Paris Hilton sightings would be maintained by the population at large.

Some of the basic requirements are:

• Lists must be highly available & reliable
• Easily created and modified via HTTP
• Accessible via multiple formats (JSON, XML, SOAP, HTML, etc...)
• Highly but loosely relational
• Provide infinitely deep associations

Aside from the accessibility requirements, the real power comes from being able to relate different lists.  So if you have a list of States and a list of Birds you could relate members of the Birds list to the States list in order to identify State Birds.  You should then be able to query the States for a list of State Birds.  Further more someone should be able to ask for a list of fashion designers who have products for sale at Walmarts in states with Republican governors, and providing there is a way to link all of the necessary lists together to get there, they should get accurate results.

On the surface this appears to be a pretty straight forward and simple system to put together, and it kind of is... until you start to consider performance and the ease of maintaining the lists.  The trick will be in coming up with an extremely simple method of creating a list and its relationships.  This is what I'm smashing around in my brain in my spare cycles right now.

The other thing I have to figure out is how to monotize it.  It's not that I want to make money on it, in fact I don't think I'd be interested in ever making a dime off of something like this, but I can't afford to fund it personally and even if I could, a personally funded service would hardly be considered reliable enough for others to use.  It needs to be self-sustaining.  Now there are a number of ways to reduce the costs but nothing that I know of that would maintain the availability and reliability for zero cost.  Right now the only idea I have is something like a usage charge for higher volume users.  That would allow the average person free access and put the burden on the heavy users (yeah bitch, tax the rich!)  Of course that would also then force me to provide certain SLA's for those that pay... oh the complications!

Anyhow, just another one of dozen or so ideas I'm batting around right now.

TTFN

ARRRGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!

This thing has got me going crazy.  It's not so much the refusal of government to recognize that it was their own interference with the free market system that caused the problem in the first place.  It's not that it's going to cost each of the roughly 330 million people in the country an average of $2,125.  It's not that the bill law was written two years ago, contains millions of dollars in unrelated handouts, provides unconstitutional powers to unelected officials with no oversight or consequences for abuse of those powers, avoids all of the carefully laid out checks and balances which attempt to keep our system of government from overstepping their bounds or even its discriminatory propping up of a select few mismanaged institutions.  What really has me out of my mind about this whole debacle is the fact that 90% of Americans were against it and their respective REPRESENTATIVES voted for it!

The whole point behind a Representative Republic is for the the representatives to actually represent the will of their constituents on behalf of the people.  Throw that out the window and what we have left is a Federalist system where the people only have a say in who they want to rule over them and have absolutely no input on how or what.

Fuck that.  Things have gotten out of control.  Our government either has to respect the people they govern or be replaced by one that will. 

Here's some things to think about:

• For every elected office there should be a "Disband" option at the polls.  If the people vote to disband, the office should be eliminated.
• Only property owners should be allowed to vote.  If you don't have any skin in the game then you shouldn't have any say in how it's played.
• Every voter should have to pass a reasonable political competency test.  If you don't know who the current president is you may just be too stupid to suggest who the next one should be.
• Two parties just aren't enough.  Put a low cap on the amount of money that can be spent seeking a government position (no more than the total salary of the job) and allow for dozens or even hundreds of candidates to fight it out.
• Term limits.

The list goes on but I don't.  This is going to bake my noodle for quite some time to come.  I can foresee a whole new system of government emerging from this final straw...  Welcome to the beginning of the Pirate Tech Party!

TTFN

I have a bit of an issue;  one of the new sites I'm working on is going to be released into the wild to fend for itself amongst roughly 3,390,000 other sites.  Needless to say, SEO is going to play a major role in the early success or failure of this site.  As such, I've been bashing sitemaps and the like around in my head for a few days.

This morning I had an idea which I'm sure isn't original but quite frankly I'm feeling too lazy to look for.  The thought is,

• Create a site to allow people to register their own URL. 
• Using Google, find out the current rank of that URL for a particular search phrase, that becomes their starting value (or something like 1M if not there at all). 
• They then go off and attempt to improve the ranking of that URL for the given phrase. 
• Monitor the ranking over a period of time. 
• The winner is the one with the largest improvement. 

I'll give you it's probably not the best game ever, but it could help you to learn a lot about SEO.

TTFN

Where does the time go?  Here's where some of mine has gone in the 68 days since my last post:

• Festival came and went and was a huge success although it doesn't appear that we netted as much as we anticipated.
• Picked up two new contracts
• Changed jobs
• Went to the beach with the family
• Celebrated my oldest child's birthday
• Celebrated my youngest child's birthday
• Went to Idlewild
• Went to Kennywood
• Joined the Tech Council at my kid's school
• Went camping with my oldest son
• Bought a few new domain names

And here is what has been happening around the net during that time:

• Prosper no longer allows lenders from PA
• Amazon announced plans for Windows based EC2 & SQL Server instances
• Jott came out of beta
• BrandDoozie came out of beta
• Many other things that I'm sure I missed ;-}

On my radar for the next 68 days:

• Trip to Disney with the family
• Releasing 1 2 3 4 new sites
• Halloween, Thanksgiving
• More to follow

TTFN