Vision

Ten years ago I worked at a company called The Networking Institute. They had a vision of using computers to help groups of people communicate. Obviously, the Internet is the technology to allow millions to participate.

Perhaps the two key technologies were computer conferencing and automation.

By computer conferencing, we meant "asynchronous, many-to-many, threaded discussions." It represents a fundamentally new tool for groups of people to communicate. In a sense, it is far more revolutionary than "chat" software or email.

Automation is the key process to dealing with information. Once you create an "asset" -- some chunk of content, can you format in different ways and use it in different places without messing with it by hand? This is important, because in the information age, we deal not with one asset at a time, but with dozens, hundreds, or thousands. The multimedia developers understand the importance of this, whereas the graphic designers usually still want to tweak every item by hand.

I have been building publishing automation tools for ten years.

I wrote my own computer conferencing software for the web.

The Internet and the web are so new, we have no idea how the world will change because of it. There will surely be many frustrations along the way, but it's going to be a lot of fun.