Gareth and Francis have been tearing up and down western America. They stopped over with me in San Francisco, and now Gareth is beautifully evoking how Vegas always fails to meet expectations but the Grand Canyon blows them away.

We’re just one of several money-making projects that will progress from idea to deployment in the course of this weekend at DHX. It’s got to be simple. It’s got to be popular. And it’s got to make us more cash than any other competitor in the next month. And we need you! How would you like to take a chance this Saturday and Sunday? Imagine that you could work like hell for two days, and then never again have to work on something you didn’t enjoy. Ever. It’s a gamble. But then, that’s exactly what our project idea is about!

I’m talking to you, Irish web 2.0 community. We need someone to focus on the backend of this thing, someone who’s comfortable working out data storage schemes, working out how to parse emails and things, working with APIs. You can work in any framework that the competition rules allow. There’s no problem with you working remotely. We’ll be on California time but that might work out for the best. We can take shifts at sleeping.

Cue big lottery finger. IT COULD BE YOU! Send me an email: eurekaman at gmail.

Update: We flaked out. Sleeping under a desk is not good for morale. Release will be delayed a couple of weeks. Full marks to Matthias, though, for his MacGyver-style office camping creativity.

Yes, that’s an actual slide, taken out of context, from one of the company’s presentations. It was web 2.0 very much from a business person’s perspective (not surprising given that it was an EI event). “What exactly is this web 2.0 thing?” “What features and technologies do we need to adopt to get some of this web 2.0 money?” or “How can I tell that a company is web 2.0 so I can decide whether to invest?” Web 2.0 used as a noun or an adjective.

Here’s my take. From a developer’s perspective web 2.0 should be a verb, if anything. Ask “How can I web 2.0 my business?” Say “Our product is web 2.0ing”. It means you’re pushing things forward, doing things right this time, right by the web, right for the people. And you’re not quite sure what the final desination of your web 2.0ing will be (Hint: there is no final destination). You’re just trying to be valuable to somebody. Web 2.0 is not any one group of technologies or features. It is whatever makes sense and makes value for the people you affect. Web 2.0 is a vague, yet meaningful term that describes a movement, a journey. The reason there is no clear definition is that we’re not sure where we’re headed yet.

The most interesting things will happen without knowing exactly how they’re going to make money. Web 2.0ing should convey a sense of relinquishing control. Relinquishing control of people’s data, sure. Relinquishing control of taxonomy maybe. But most importantly, relinquishing control of your business plan. Admit that it’s difficult to predict who will use your software and how they will use it. Release it and be ready to adapt.

What is my problem? I don’t really have one. I’m not bashing Enterprise Ireland or the companies who presented at the event. They put on an interesting and valuable show. I have masses to learn about the business side of things and I’ll take every opportunity i can get. In one sense Web 2.0 is about the money. It’s a resurgence of venture capital interest in web companies. It’s not a case of they’re wrong, I’m right, or even that we disagree. I’m not trying to own the term, only give a different perspective (one that may be equally, if not more bullshitty, sorry). However slight a distinction it is though, it makes a difference to the audience at your conference and the ensuing discussion. Thursday’s event did contrast to the unconferences I’ve been at where the feeling really was “let’s push things forward”. I’d like to recreate that here in Ireland.

So we’ve had the Web 2.0 conference. How about a Web 2.0ing conference? I caught a whiff of it during Adam Green’s roundtable. There are hackers out there interested in pushing things forward. I want a regular get-together focusing on them (us). If you’re in teh Valley this summer look me up. And if another TechCamp happens in September I won’t miss it this time.

This niggle stemmed partly from reading Pay it Forward. It’s about a real world-hack that feeds off the same power as email chain letters. Someone does a very good deed for you and instead of paying them back you promise to pay it forward to 3 others. Kindness proliferates exponentially. Of course it works in the novel, but I think the internet has lowered the bar for making things like this happen in real life. Things happen faster on the net. It’s easy to experiment. And there is a steady supply of bored surfers to experiment with. If only we’re open to the possibilities maybe we can come up with something to shake things up. I recommend Pay it Forward as web 2.0 reading material. Plus it’ll make you feel all warm and bubbly inside.

While you’re at it, and to bring you back down to Earth so to speak, read the Gumption Memo. You could hardly find a more easily digestible yet outlook-altering 50 pages. It’s a specs document for solving world problems by Brian Skinner, an open source coder who I hope to be collaborating with over the next while. One of Brian’s positions is that national governments, driven by tribalism, are squandering their enormous power to cure some of the world’s ills. Here too I think we have something on our side. The Internet melts country boundaries. Online, you are primarily a citizen of the net and only secondarily of the country that hosts your physical self. When you act in the interest of your netbrethren it is for a vast, yet connected nation, the likes of which the world has never managed to host before. The rest of the world will be joining our virtual nation shortly. It would be great to have something cool ready for them when they get here, apart from somewhere they can upload photos or find hot chicks.

I think one lead is the power of social software to create and distribute value at a micro-level. I’m talking firstly about value in information. Flickr (or any social tagging site) invites its users to spend a small amount of their time adding metadata to their (and other’s) stuff using a simple textbox. Crucially, this effort is mostly directly for the benefit of the user themselves. They create a valuable information scaffold around their data to help find things in future. But the software skims some of this value off and, by the power of aggregation, reuses it for the good of the community. A global information scaffold emerges to benefit anyone who needs it. Everybody wins, to some extent. The game of information exchange is not zero-sum

Now information is one thing. Of course, there are other currencies, like money for instance, that do tend to be involved in zero-sum games. But money and information do not live in unconnected realms. People readily exchange money for information every day. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is getting towards what I’m talking about. It pays people just for having the abilities of a normal human (and having access to the net). It connects. A bundle of capillaries channeling droplets of value around the net. Yes, from a developer point of view, when you start handling money as well as information things get a bit more complicated. That’s something else that needs to be worked on.

Like me, you don’t have to have one altruistic synapse in your cranium to tackle something like this. Do it for the for the fame and adoration. Do it because you might make the world a nicer place for yourself to inhabit. Do it to learn Ruby on Rails. Do it because it’s better than making another social bookmarking site, right? Channel some of that web 2.0 energy and direct it towards World 2.0. Think global, and then act global too. There’s even the possibility of investors out there for budding world-hackers.

So idea-people, that’s the niggle. I’m suggesting to you that these days changing the world, far from being a lifetime’s work, may simply constitute a weekend of inspired coding. Pass it on. I’m sure you’ll come up with something.

Update: Forgot to mention the Recovery 2.0 project.

And there should be more than one person: “Y Combinator has a rule against investing in startups with only one founder.” I’m inclined to believe him. Unfortunately my main project at the moment is a solo one. It would be great to meet up with more dev geeks now that I’m back in Ireland. I’d love to get some Dev House style meetups going. Any interest out there? Mail me.

After a long holiday, bookended by barcamps, normal service will resume soon.  (PS: I tried to post this using Flock but it doesn’t seem to be working quite right with blogs.ie…)

Tags: barcamp, flock

Someday I’ll tell my grandkids: “I was there when it all began…”

Tags: barcamp, techcamp, ireland, irishblogs

So, my advice to myself (and anyone else you this applies to) is to publish, talk to people, blog and generally vent hot air. If you are so confident in your talent for generating ideas and you want somebody to employ you on the strength of this talent then you can’t expect them to take your word for it. Put your ideas out there. They are worth more to you as advertisements or previews of what you can do than they promise hope of single-handed exploitation. You want a patron who recognises your brain’s capacity to generate new ideas as a more valuable commodity than any individual idea. It’s hard to get someone to pay you to start having ideas from nothing, but someone may pay you to stop telling everybody else your ideas.

With that sentiment in mind, roll on BarCamp!

Tags: ideas, barcamp

Last night was my first SuperHappyDevHouse. It was the first time since college that I experienced such a gathering of people, expressing a shared love of coding and tech ideas, and it felt great. Personally, I found it rather too SuperHappy to get a lot of Dev done – so many interesting or just entertaining things going on that it’s quite hard to concentrate on your own stuff. I worked on my idea for giving arbitrary (i.e. including REST) XML webservices a semantics. I showed a few freinds and they were diligently positive but the idea felt in too much of a hand-wavy state to show to others – a missed opportunity, I know. Mark Lentczner’s demo of Wheat was a highlight of the night for me. Let’s hope it catches on.

All in all, a success. What better motivation to code until dawn than to be surrounded by a chorus of SuperHappyDevelopers? I’ll be back next time. With attitude. Maybe.

Tags: superhappydevhouse