Entries from May 2006 ↓

I thought about calling this blog “Musings On Technoprogressivism“, because that’s probably the political philosophy that most closely matches my own leanings, but in the end I decided to talk about philanthrogeeking instead so I won’t end up getting into arguments about what technoprogressivism actually means. Like most neologisms, there’s some debate^[1]. I used to call myself a utilitarian transhumanist freethinker, but technoprogressive is shorter :-)

I’m very open to discussion on which parts of the general technoprogressive agenda are good, and which are not. I’m inclined to think they’re mostly all good. Or at least all mostly good.

[1] Don’t even get me started on “Web 2.0″.

So, I guess people have been wondering where I’ve been. My circa 1998 homepages are long gone. Webfoundry is off the air. Apposite consulting has been shut down. I haven’t posted to my LJ in over a year.

As some of you may know, I’ve been buried in the Canterbury Innovation Incubator since mid 2004. I caught the innovation bug around the turn of the century, and have been pushing one business plan after another ever since. Sadly I got into the internet startup game just as the investors were leaving, and Christchurch has never been the best place to launch an internet startup (although a few of my friends have managed it). In 2000 I was having some innovative ideas about CMS’s. I came up with a pretty good set of ideas in 2001 that involved DHTML based Instant Messaging and a few other bits of cleverness (a lot harder to implement back in the pre “opensource AJAX library” days). In 2004 I started pushing some ideas concerning large scale machine translation, those were the ideas that got me into the Incubator, but eventually we started to make rapid progress on a little sideproject that looked even more promising to explore, and that is where much of our energies have been focused for over a year now.

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So, what’s all this then? Well, possibly a lot of things. For one reason or another, I haven’t blogged much in the last couple of years, so I’ve got a lot of posts to get off my chest. I’ve also got a new business launching soon, and that will get a certain amount of airtime here once it’s underway, but we’ll also have a dev-blog and biz-blog and that will be where I talk about that the most. This is more of a personal outlet.

The thing I’ll probably post most about here is philanthrogeeking, and philanthrohacking. Musings about what is good, how it might best be achieved, and who’s acheiving it. In general, I think an enormous amount of good can be done by smart people who are actually thinking about how they can maximise the beneficial effects of their time and money, rather than just work off some sort of internal guilt, or generate some positive PR for themeselves or their company.

Currently my philanthrogeeking is mostly in an observational role, with occaisional flights of fancy about what I might be able to achieve when I have more time and money. At the monent 95% of my time and money is going into the startup. I don’t really mind, because I think that as well as being quite profitable, our startup is going to do a lot of good for a lot of people. Mainly, just by making knowledge workers more productive, and their businesses more profitable, but I also think we might actually make the internet just a bit more valuable for everyone, and that makes me very happy.

What else is this blog for? Well I’ll occaisionally talk about software and web-apps that have impressed me or made my life easier. I might talk about productivity techniques like David Allen’s “Getting things Done” - a book that ought to be compulsary reading for every knowledge worker. If you’re really into this sort of thing, Gina Trapani’s lifehacker blog is compulsary reading.

As a geek with a philosophy degree, I might get a bit wordy and esoteric at times, for which I apologize in advance. I may also mix up my English and American spellings, for which I also apologise in advance. Blame it on the blogosphere.