blog.whatsgood.com

Recently I’ve been exchanging emails with someone who wants to participate in this project. It followed a similar path as most conversations regarding the domain “whatsgood.com.”

The usual conversation goes something like this:

person: I want your domain. How much?
me: I’m sorry, it’s not really for sale.
person: No, really, how much do you want for it?
me: No, really, it’s not.
person: Everything’s for sale.
me: No, not everything, but if you insist, then let’s make it the price of four years at a world class university.
person: WHAT?!?!?! You’re crazy! It’s not worth that!
me: I know that, and that’ why I told you it’s not for sale.

The conversation with this young man went a little differently. He wanted to join the team and had ideas he wanted us to implement. They were some good ideas, but nothing groundbreaking. Unfortunately, the ideas focused on increasing traffic through appealing to consumers, not community. Then using the increased traffic to bring in national advertisers.

Consumer vs community is a wall we keep hitting. People want the domain or want the website to focus on consumers. That’s not what we’re about. This is a project, not a business. This is about community, not consumers. We aren’t about the commoditization of information or individuals. Eventually, if things go well, we’ll need “advertising”, but we’ll call it sponsorship, and we’ll try to get local businesses on board. We are focusing on local events, why not bring in local businesses to support it?

No matter what someone tells you, the world is not for sale. There is much more to life than making a buck and boosting the bottom line.

This post brought to you by me reading “Economics Is Not Natural Science” by Douglas Rushkoff.

Just been refactoring code, doing some long needed standardization.

If you haven’t noticed, settings and weekly emails are live. They’re currently very bare bones.

So the weekly emails are working and their tests were just finished.

Next step is to move the Settings form into a public place.  Then all you users can get emails from us whenever your favorite places and people have new and upcoming events.  Yea!

Thought I’d share a little bit about how the site’s been developed.  It’s pretty much every morning for the past who-knows-how-long, I’ve been waking up, making coffee, and sitting down to work on this before going to my real job (and it will always be my real job, even if this site becomes a success - I’m a baker ,and that’s how it will always be).  Then I figure out where I left off the day before and try to get a productive hour or two in.

Usually it involves music or NPR radio.  NPR-wise, it’s been Diane Rhem during the election season. Lately it’s been Planet Money (BTW, I have a photo featured on their blog). On the music front, I’m remembering lots of Ted Leo and of late the new Decemberists album. For anyone who knows me, there’s of course been Fugazi, Jim Waive, The Dismemberment Plan, and plenty of other music, too.

Much of this week’s work was scrapped.  After several days of working on a way to save locations and manage them, I realized all of it should go into the Favorites section.  Took a morning to rip out the old code, add the Cities to the Favorites, and along the way, as so often happens, overhaul old code.

Once the site is updated to the latest code, users can add and remove Favorites from a profile, venue, or city page.  (Much thanks to Railscasts for episodes 73 - 75). Next week, I’ll be working on what I think is the last important feature: email updates.