It was sometime in the early 90s and and I was reading The Hacker Crackdown, this was the first time I really became aware of the Internet. I had this idea that the net would be like a complete, instantly accessible library of knowledge and I wanted access.
The reality at the web at the time was a little underwhelming. But I think we’re finally getting to the place I, and many others, imagined.
This morning for example I needed to understand the concept of marginal cost, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and found an excellent description. As I type I’m downloading an Ubuntu linux cd to do some work on a sick Windows pc, it will provide all the functionality of Windows (and more) at zero cost.
Now that’s a fairly typical (if geeky) way to spend a morning, and one I usually wouldn’t think twice about. But, giving it a little more thought, these are two awesome Internet enabled projects that were only imagined by a prescient few not so many years ago. That I can run my PC using a free, open source operating system and look up pretty much anything I can think of in a collaborative, online encyclopedia - there are pretty amazing things and it doesn’t end here.
I think, hope at least, that the next stage is for the use of incredibly powerful tool to become more widespread and really start making a difference, not just to geeks with time and curiosity, but to everyone.

2006 was my first year at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, TX (that’s the nerdy one, not the cooler one) . The encouragement of Neil got me there, and I’m glad it did. I had a great time.
As a first-timer I pretty much just quietly took everything in. This year I’m going to make more of an effort to make some connections, as the attendees are pretty much a who’s who of people doing good stuff on the web.
The added bonus of traveling from a cold Toronto late-winter to a warm Texas spring was pretty nice too.

End of 2006 approaching quick + feeling I’d like to blog more frequently = a look back at the year.

Stunningly original it ain’t, but it may just get me writing a little more.

Looking back on 2006 I’m going to start up with Democamp/Barcamp, the unconference weather system that descended on Toronto in 2006.

There were ups and there were downs, are there not always? But I have a definite feeling that there’s a there there, and that David Crow’s ambition to improve the tech community in Toronto is panning out.

This is very cool, the million dollar blog post at gifter.org is kind of like the million dollar homepage, but with generosity in place of pure, queasy-making self interest.

The million dollar blog post describes itself thus:

If you could make one wish for the world, what would it be?

In fact, we want to know so much, we’re willing to donate $1 to charity for each wish comment posted here.

The idea is that anyone can leave a wish for the world (as a comment on the post), and for each wish $1 will be donated to charity by a sponsor. Anyone can become a sponsor, just by making a donation to the charity of their choice, putting the receipt online and letting gifter.org know.

Sure some sponsors may have already been planning to make donations, others we hope are inspired by witnessing the community express their generosity that they make a donation they hadn’t planned on making.

We aren’t motivated by the money. The goal is to document in a social giving experiment how generous the Internet community can be, when we act collectively and support each others projects.

I really hope they make it to their $1m target, this sort of thing gives me hope that the Internet can be good for more than videos of blowing stuff up. Much more.