Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
    I am also call’d No-more, Too-late, Farewell;

~Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “A Superscription“

We have made the difficult decision to wind down SearchViz.

When I say this was a difficult decision, I mean it. It’s especially difficult because it’s the synthesis of a personal decision and a business decision. Demand for our services was as vigorous as ever, far more so than when we opened our doors. But our demands on each other, two partners in a small agency trying to mature into a boutique, concierge vendor that actually helped to make the Web better, were equally intense and ultimately unsustainable.

It is my great disappointment that you never heard Helen‘s voice through her typed words on these pages. You certainly saw them in the original art she produced for each of my posts and in the design she created for our site as a whole, somehow creating an elegant visual brand out of one of the worst names (SearchViz was a domain name I had bought years ago when I realized how dominant SEO was going to become; apparently I never said it aloud) in the history of business. She could have had an entire blog about markup or stylesheet disasters, or how to build a better mousetrap with Drupal, or a series of posts on why something that might look good to the casual observer was an accessibility train wreck under the hood. Or pretty much anything else that came up in our near-daily banter. So any of you who took the time to look at our site but weren’t a customer probably never met Helen. And that’s a shame.

We serendipitously become colleagues at SouthComm, working on a great team that started to unravel when our group leader resigned, and she ultimately responded to my pleading to walk away from a steady paycheck to do something audacious in a down economy. From where we sat, one would not have known there was a down economy. From day one, we had enough business and qualified leads to keep the lights on and then some. Frustratingly, we left far too many leads hanging because of our over-deliberative approach to adding capacity and preferring to offer high quality service to existing customers, even when it gnawed at our margins.

In our just over two years, though, we (mostly Helen) did some great work that deserves a little more attention, and there won’t be too many opportunities for additional celebration, so we might as well do it here:

• built Ashley Judd‘s first ever official website
• created a website for bestselling author Adam Ross who, with our help, catapulted into the top of the SERPs ahead of that CSI guy
• reinvented the online presence, front-end and back-end, for BookPage, where you should go discover your next great book
• enhanced a great collaborative project now maintained at Perkins School for the Blind called WonderBaby
• launched a completely redesigned and rebuilt Who2, one of the Web’s longest-lived sites with a blog that is and will continue to be worth your time

We worked on a number of other great projects with a group of customers that I think will be as difficult to reprise as our team at SouthComm where Helen and I met. To our customers, many of whom were with us from start to finish, I can only say thank you. It is our hope that our work created mutual and lasting value.

In parting, I will confide that Helen is the only person I would let build a website for me. I’ve never met anyone who understood the complex relationship between visual design and the Web—everything from end-user interfaces to editorial workflow to the semantic underpinnings derived from the raw markup to layered PSDs—better than she. She is also a Drupal expert. And has many other hidden talents besides. She likes to make things, and if you ever have the opportunity to have her make something for you, you should avail yourself of it. I can only hope that she doesn’t wind up too busy with whatever she does next to be available to work on my next crazy idea. If she is, then my next crazy idea will probably stall indefinitely.

For a while, anyway, you can still contact us through the website. But in the spirit of SearchViz, if you’d like to find us individually, we recommend that you just look for us.

Looking back on the early days, we never did make too much headway making it to the top of the SERPs for [nashville seo]. We got too busy with other things. And now we’ll head off to keep ourselves busy with even otherer things.

A few years ago, when debating pricing for a web project that involved a mix of design and development, I wound up on the losing end of the discussion when the account executive concluded, “It’s just a website.” I’ve also been in countless discussions with managers (none of whom have any true technical experience) where they set the expectations for a project (both theirs and mine) by asserting, “That should be easy.” And I’ve also been at the end of the assembly line of idea factories, where the non-technical people hold a brainstorming session and enthusiastically present me with all of them because they’re all good.

One thing that has long appealed to me about information technology and software development is that it is possible to do just about anything. It is possible to implement all those good ideas. The hitch to that as an applied technologist is that it makes it very easy to say “yes” to the question, “Can we do that?” But that doesn’t have any bearing on the answer to, “Should we do that?” or the similarly troublesome, “We need that by next week.”

I’d like to take a little bit of time to explore appropriate expectations for web and software development for non-practitioners who will be responsible for managing them. First and foremost, it’s okay and probably best to accept that web projects are difficult to build and difficult to manage.

I would imagine that 1% of web developers are the sort that have a rich grasp of everything that drives a website, from operating system to database to programming language to interface. Maybe 5% are the sort that can hack great code for years on end just for you. Chances are that you don’t have one working for you, and chances are that the agency building your website doesn’t either. This will complicate things slightly, but it won’t make them impossible.

Let’s remind ourselves of what a website is: it’s a collection of documents and elements (like Ajax modules and so forth) that, when requested by a browser (whether Web, mobile, or other), deliver markup (often some variant of HTML) that can be rendered in a predictable way.

Honestly, despite starting my life in the industry almost 15 years ago working for an internet service provider (ISP), I’ve never maintained a personal website. Actually, while in college, as a result of working as a consultant for the computer science lab, I wound up with some web space that I used for a simple personal site that vanished when I graduated. And that site was a collection of static HTML documents that I edited manually (probably with vi).

At it’s most basic, a web page looks like this:


<html>
  <head>
    <title>Hello, World!</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Hello, world!</p>
  </body>
</html>


Easy, right?! It’s just a website!

(Here’s an aside. We maintain this blog in WordPress, which, for a robust blogging platform, still makes it surprisingly difficult to include examples of markup because of the aggressive desire for its editor to render everything. So I had to include a bunch of individual HTML entities to get the above example to show up correctly.)

Sure, it’s just a website. But it doesn’t have any images or links, it’s just one page, and I haven’t thought about how I’m going to manage it. I don’t know what the domain name is or where I’m going to host it. I don’t know whether it’s going to be a static HTML document or the output of a dynamic document (e.g., PHP). I haven’t thought about whether referencing the document reveals whether it is static or anything else about its implementation (e.g., does it live at /hello-world.html, /hello-world.php, or /hello-world with the help of server rules?). I don’t have an update schedule or anything else. And every website is different.

Let’s survey the common types of website that exist out there (and if you think I’m omitting anything or oversimplifying, please feel free to elaborate in the comments):

• brochure: A mostly static site with relatively few (< 100) pages designed to present a person, place, thing, or idea with a focus on basic text and image content with occasional opportunities for rich media.
• blog: A content-oriented site typically presented with posts in reverse chronological order and often providing visibility into most popular posts, tags/labels, and other ways of considering the content.
• content: A rich content site like a news, government, or academic site that is constantly producing new content, often not in a simple, steady stream like a blog.
• e-commerce: A site wherein any content is a pre-cursor to a financial transaction of some kind, whether a donation or a purchase.

Our site, for instance, is basically a brochure paired with a blog. I expect that someday there might be e-commerce considerations. Depending on what happens, there could be a content site in there somewhere.

All of the above types likely include some variety of form, which is the essence of interactivity built into the primitive Web. A contact form, an order form, a comment form, a rich text editor (which might need to be submitted to publish a news story, for instance). And forms invite the first of our series of complicated decisions: What happens to the output of the form?

Form submissions could be emailed. They could be emailed to a single email address or to multiple email addresses. They could be stored in a database. They could trigger a server-side action of some kind. They can do any and all of the above.

And Web interactivity involves all kinds of corner cases. Let’s say we’re considering a limited inventory retail operation. And let’s say it involves an online shopping cart. And let’s say I, a potential customer come along and, perhaps unknowingly, put the last item in my shopping cart. And then I remember that I have to run an errand before the place I need to get to closes for the day, and I leave. Maybe I even leave my browser window open. And then you come along. And you were looking for the item I just put in my shopping cart. Has the merchant considered how his or her site will behave in this scenario? After all, it’s just a website.

And all this is to say nothing of security considerations. After testing performance for a while, Google recently decided to make secure communication the default for Gmail. Not just for authenticating but for the entire session. For transmitting each message body. Google is judicious about its use of secure connections across its services. I’ve often wondered why secure connections aren’t the default for all web-based authentication from financial services to FTP.

Let’s get into the basics of what it takes to build a website:

Domain Name, Registrars, and DNS

The first thing you really need for a website is your domain name. Until Yahoo! shut down GeoCities, you could go there to get a free site. You can try Google Sites, but it’s not quite the same. And if you’re just doing a blog and you don’t care about owning this basic asset, you can do something like Blogger or WordPress, which will give you something like justawebsite.blogspot.com or justawebsite.wordpress.com. How do you do this? Well, geez. We’re just trying to pick a domain name, and we’ve opened a can of worms. Because a domain name gets us tied up in the Domain Name System (DNS). So first we need a registrar, and then we need to make sure that we can configure DNS appropriately to work with our web hosting environment (see next item).

Web Hosting

So you’ve registered your domain name. Now you need to make it so that when someone types in justawebsite.com and it successfully resolves to an IP address that the server at that IP address is listening, probably on port 80, and is ready to serve pages. I’ve mentioned previously that we host with A2 Hosting.

Shared Web Hosting

Most websites just need shared web hosting, which basically means a bunch of other websites about the same size (disk space, traffic) as yours are using shared resources. Which is fine.

I used to host some sites with TextDrive, which became Joyent, which seems no longer to offer easily understood web hosting services (despite TextDrive at one time having been a semi-official Ruby on Rails hosting service).

The two other major web hosts that I’ve seriously considered using in the past are DreamHost and pair Networks. I’ve also recently evaluated Media Temple for WordPress hosting. Yoast seems to like WestHost for WordPress hosting, but that could be helped by their paying him to like it.

Managed Hosting

If, however, you’re doing something where you expect to be doing a lot of development or managing a number of services that require a dedicated server, you probably want a managed hosting solution like Rackspace or Tilted Planet. In these cases, you get access to a server or servers on a network that should be reliably managed, and you can get various packages and levels of management in the event that you don’t want to hire a system administrator (and, unless you’re doing something very innovative, why should you?).

Based on the coming of the cloud and the maturity of managed hosting and dedicated (and virtual servers), I would never encourage any but the most ambitious of enterprises to buy a piece of enterprise hardware. Someone else has already hired several sysadmins better than yours and is making the process of administration more efficient than you ever could.

Content Management Systems

Content management systems (and frameworks) are web software packages that typically give you a rich text editor, some basic formatting rules and templates, and let you run wild adding pages, posts, widgets, and the like.

In recent years, I’ve developed the most familiarity with Drupal and WordPress. Both have some maturity as platforms and both have vibrant developer communities that make support possible if not always reliable (especially as the ecosystem frays around the edges, sometimes even with popular modules and plug-ins). WordPress came to prominence as a blogging platform, but it’s now mature enough to be able to support brochure + blog sites if not outright content sites, although I still think Drupal is a better fit for full-featured content sites.

We’re about to begin work with a bastardized version of Joomla, and a professional acquaintance recently suggested that I take a look at MODx. I’ve spent a long time admiring TextPattern, although I’ve never used it. And I used to want to try Bricolage because it was built by default on PostgreSQL. For some reason, a number of local designers seem to enjoy paying for ExpressionEngine.

We also have done some projects that leverage Sitemason, a locally developed web-based content management system and hosting platform. While still a little more dotcom than Web 2.0 just because of the history of the company (where I worked as we launched into the dotcom implosion) and because of the dynamic nature of open systems (or closed systems that happen to be named Google), Sitemason continues to innovate quietly. In recent years, besides building incredibly innovative JavaScript libraries and a brilliant database abstraction, they also recently moved their entire hosting operation into the cloud, leveraging Amazon’s EC2.

Competing locally with Sitemason is Bondware. I can’t give Bondware awards for administrative interface, but I will say that they’re one of few products I’ve used where the Web and email platforms fit together nicely.

Which brings up a point I haven’t raised yet: the successful integration of a website among all the evolving marketing tools from email to social. There don’t seem to be too many people creating killer apps allowing small and medium-sized businesses to jump in and be truly in control of their inbound marketing. But that’s a topic for another time.

Blogging Platforms

What if you just want to blog? Well, we’ve already mentioned Blogger and WordPress. You could get a little funky and try something like Chyrp, which is pretty but carries the caveat of being a sole developer project.

E-Commerce

The first thing you’ll need if you’re going to build an e-commerce site is a merchant account. Then you’ll need to connect it to a payment gateway. Within the last decade, PayPal purchased Payflow, and CyberSource purchased Authorize.Net. I’m honestly not sure what other major players are even in this space. BancCard, a Nashville-based company, plays nicely with both Authorize.Net and PayPal.

I’ve used both osCommerce and Zen Cart, and I came away unimpressed. I’ve also done custom PayPal integrations, which were fine except that they were custom.

It’s recently been suggested to me that I give FoxyCart some consideration, and it looks like a worthy contender for any upcoming from-scratch e-commerce implementations. Also, somehow it had completely escaped my attention that they’re a Nashville-based company.

Custom Development

Here’s my position on custom development. It’s not all bad, but it should generally be the province of someone who is actually developing something innovative. If what you want is a 3-page instead of a 2-page pipeline for your online marketplace, you should be leveraging an existing e-commerce solution. If, however, you’ve got something you think is worthy of a patent, like single-click shopping, then develop your own.

We try not to do a lot of custom development. We try to strengthen standards for existing content management solutions by, first, relying on them and then, if necessary, extending them. We generally aren’t in the business of projects; we’re in the business of process.

But if you’re going to do it, even rolling your own involves some amount of choice. I’m only going to cover free and open source platforms, but I know there are plenty of sites out there implemented in any of ColdFusion, ASP, etc. Otherwise, popular choices include PHP, Perl, Ruby, and Python. Of course, Google recently unveiled their own programming language, Go, so who knows.

With every language, it seems, comes a framework—Ruby on Rails or Symfony—which allegedly make development easier.

Maintenance

Wow. You finally did it. You launched justawebsite.com! Now what?

Well, if you’re not using fully managed hosting and instead you’re managing your own LAMP stack, you’ll need to keep up with Linux kernel patches, GNU/Linux distribution patches, Apache (or equivalent patches), database patches, and programming language/framework patches. If you’re leveraging a content management system, you’ll need to keep up with patches for the core system as well as for plug-ins/modules.

Generally, you can track security patches, but if you let your system suffer too much bit rot, APIs might change out from under you, so that a must-have feature becomes beyond reach.

And, of course, you’ll have dev, staging, and live versions of your site for testing with version control as necessary for any custom development.

Maybe we should just stick with hello-world.html…

Other Considerations

Recently, SparkFun had their Free Day on the same day that Google launched the Nexus One. Each site suffered. Chris Anderson wryly tweeted, “Google’s servers can’t keep up with Nexus demand; Free Day brings down Sparkfun. It’s 2010–why do we still have these scaling problems?” It’s a good question. To me, the cloud reached adolescence when Amazon EC2 came out of beta. It will reach adulthood when the elasticity is dynamic and demand-driven rather than reactionary on the part of admins who frantically allocate new instances as traffic swamps a site.

The End

My point in writing all this is to give some guidance to non-technical project managers and executives to remind them that asking for the moon is likely to get you the moon from your web development team, but it is likely to be late and over budget. And I also included a number of the individual technologies I’ve had exposure to, either directly or through my network of IT professionals in the hopes that webdevs everywhere will help me refine this post, which might take on a constantly evolving life outside the scope of the blog depending on response.

When you launch a website, you’re not completing a project; you’re kicking off a process that will live for the life of the site. It involves ensuring that the site itself doesn’t rely on moving parts that can’t be maintained. It involves ensuring that if the site is bound by a temporal dimension that it provides a user experience consistent with the passage of time. It involves ensuring that both the user and search experiences are continuously refreshed in order to be optimized.

Over time, my hope is that SearchViz actually improves the Web slightly. Both by helping create standards-compliant websites with an emphasis on both user and search experience and by working to ease the process of building and managing websites, whether by contributing to free and open source software projects like WordPress and Drupal or by building our own solutions for management of the resources required to operate a site. If you have any suggestions, or you’d like to participate as a customer, let us know.

Obviously, I’ve missed a world of options, but that’s what the comments section is for. Let me know what I’ve overlooked.

That is to say, social media in general is yet another tool in the ever-expanding marketing toolkit. And most companies that have demonstrated notable success with social media are doing so because they have freed members of their staff who have engaging personalities to engage with customers or leads on behalf of their employers; not because of some new corporate strategy that has grokking Twitter at its core. Social media is like Web 2.0-lite. It’s easy, it’s fun, it’s a fad. It doesn’t really require any heavy lifting to get started. But that’s part of the problem. Or can be.

Nashville (really, JTMarCom) also recently hosted Chris Brogan. Given the level of excitement, I leveraged technology and watched from afar (somehow saving myself both the trip and the $40, although passing up my opportunity to get a copy of Trust Agents). And I’ll admit: I’m not exactly sure what I saw. Chris is a guru, which means he spoke in the equivalent of self-help jargon for digital marketers. His performance seemed remarkably similar to a sermon by a charismatic pastor as much as that of someone transferring valuable skills or knowledge.

Chris seems like a nice guy who’s doing quite well for himself. In fact, my guess is he’s the rare social media guru who actually gets it to the point of building real value for businesses and other organizations. But having followed his engagement with the Twittersphere, I’m not sure why I would want to pay him to do anything for my business. I’m not critical of his ideas or approach, which I think are generally positive and which have some overlap with my own approach to social media; I’m critical of the worshipful nature of Nashville’s geek community that someone from on high came and left us without a lot of added value. Maybe someone who attended will let me know that they learned something profound about engaging socially in a business context. But I’ll really be impressed if any attendees of Social Fresh experience a return on their investment. Just as I’ll be impressed if Social Fresh delivers attendees insight into how they might measure such a return. I’d recommend starting with Twitter 101 for Business.

Last year, having just opened the doors to SearchViz, I considered whether I should go to BarCamp Nashville. I reviewed the agenda, looking for learning, networking, or recruiting opportunities. In the end, I selectively went to presentations of a couple of people I knew were doing good work in the SEO space because so much of the agenda looked like marketing grain where I couldn’t separate wheat from chaff. I regret having missed Marcus Whitney’s presentation, which sounds like it was trying to say, “If I knew this was all we’d get, I’d never have helped bring BarCamp to Nashville in the first place!”

Fortunately, Marcus wasn’t just whining; he was actively working to help take Nashville to the next level with Enterprise LAMP. I’ve wound up a little too high up the stack to have been able to justify pushing my entrepreneurial schedule around to have been able to attend, but in my opinion, events like this are the ones Nashville needs to see more of. Events leveraging real-world experience and expertise with lessons for both enterprise and entrepreneurs.

Marcus cut his teeth in technology leadership at Emma and has achieved true success in getting his new web startup, Moontoast, off the ground. And his efforts, I hope, make the process easier for the rest of us who see ourselves as technology entrepreneurs.

I guess I have three primary points:

1. Fly-in gurus who aren’t here to do in-depth skills-building aren’t going to put Nashville’s technology community on the path to sustainable engineering success.
2. Unconferences, where expertise is actually democratized out, don’t give us any indication of who our actual experts are.
3. Social media is most useful if it’s built on a strong foundation of deep technology entrepreneurship that extends into the executive suite.

I write all of this not to pop the Nashville geek community’s balloon of enthusiasm but to help us realize that it might not be a balloon at all but rather a bubble. We’re a healthcare, entertainment, and finance hub among other things, but we’re not really a technology center. And we can’t all be social media experts and expect to be. How many Nashville-area web or software startups can you name that don’t have their basis in music or healthcare?

Here’s my woefully short napkin list:

• Eviesays
• Moontoast
• Raven

Personally, I think Sitemason and Emma are too mature to count as web startups. Please leave others in the comments.

And this is not to discount achievements that are being made in music or healthcare; but it’s to suggest that those sectors, not our technology sector, are driving innovation in the web technology space.

Fortunately, a few of our agencies recognize that the path to success for business in the 21st century will mean having engineering expertise involved. ICG Link developed their 111 suite of tools. Sitening is the team behind Raven, and they have engineered a number of other tools. And here I distinguish between custom developing unsustainable solutions for customers and developing tools that will be maintained across the life of the agency for fun, for internal use, and possibly for external use (the 37signals model). And CentreSource was recently recognized for having Nashville’s best programmer on staff.

I think that the most successful companies for the remainder of the century will be those that are capable of innovating in software. I.e., those that recognize that having development capacity whose expertise is geared toward business interests will thrive. This is true of content companies (where, surprisingly, Gannett, the dinosaur at tennessean.com seems to be outpacing SouthComm, the fresh-faced media startup), retail, services, etc. Just as with print, non-digital companies will never die, but those with more innovative ways to develop new business will not just keep pace; they’ll set the pace.

Managing web projects is an extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming prospect. It’s better conceived of as a development challenge than as a design challenge. And customers are better served by agencies that leverage existing frameworks and APIs than by those that hand off a pile of hodgepodge PHP for an application that starts suffering bit rot as soon as the vendor agreement is concluded.

I think there’s actually a lot of room in the marketplace for an agency that is exclusively geared toward developing sustainable solutions built on solid technology foundations. Leveraging free and open source software (FOSS) would make this about as cost effective as software development gets, and the services that could be bundled with such an agency would both add value to customers and be profitable for vendors. Optaros seems to have built some success with this model.

And I think what creates so much space is the digital divide as considered in the marketplace rather than society at large. Finding a trusted technology adviser is possibly even more difficult than finding a trusted technology practitioner. Who could assist with bridging this divide?

The Nashville Technology Council has lumbered for years as the voice of institutional and enterprise technology in the area. Somehow, despite not really being a part of the target audience, neither the Nashville Linux Users Group nor the irrational exuberance of the dotcom-1.0 era (when everyone suddenly realized they were web designers/developers) supplanted it or created an alternative outlet focused on LAMP-oriented entrepreneurs. But now it has a competitor in Digital Nashville, which seems to be speaking to the irrationally exuberant online marketing community. As I consider membership in both organizations for 2010, I’m laboring to understand why both exist, and I’m not sure either has discovered how to speak effectively to Nashville-area engineers and true geeks.

In many ways, this post is an extension of thoughts Luke Kanies left with Milt Capps (N.B. the comments section) as he relocated Reductive Labs and its flagship product Puppet to Portland as he capitalized it. There simply weren’t enough engineer-level geeks in Middle Tennessee to help him get where he wanted to go.

Though the Mac/Windows/Linux/BSD and Emacs/vi debates continue to rage, I’m constantly amazed that there is less agreement over everything from best hosting provider to best cloud solution to best content management system to best source code management system in the web development community. There’s probably neither time nor interest in creating groups around every framework that gets off the ground, but maybe a content management framework group would be useful. And maybe Enterprise LAMP will continue the process of tech-oriented meetups they began last year to keep people focused on deep tech.

As a computer scientist by degree, I am made anxious by reports that people are not pursuing academically rigorous pathways into IT. Yes, Google and search have made troubleshooting a breeze, but reviewing the online documentation for PHP is not the same as having an understanding of how to plan for scalability, how to design a database, how to manage and deploy releases (including how to roll back a release), how to ensure portability (by vendor, by platform, by version), and many other difficult problems (some of which, to be sure are as much project management as software development, but the interplay is significant between the two).

Engineering builds value; marketing lets people know about it. So who am I, at the helm of a young inbound marketing agency, to be spouting off about the value of engineering? Well, as a developer by background who has only ever worked deep in databases, on glue code, or around the periphery of actual software, maybe I write all this with a sense of longing. One of my goals for SearchViz in 2010, in fact, is to have at least one project under development in what I hope becomes a vibrant laboratory for web development. I remain, ultimately, a web developer entrepreneur who hopes to be able to build a true web startup or at least a collection of useful or interesting tools. For now, though, I’m someone who believes strongly in the principles of engineering that apply to success in web design and search engine optimization (SEO). The best web designers are secretly programmers who simply think about programming problems differently. And the principles I’m talking about include analytics (evidence), development (e.g., integration with frameworks, new modules/plug-ins/add-ons), and troubleshooting (debugging). So I need Nashville to have great developers as much as anyone.

For anyone who’s made it this far, I think one of the best essays for anyone interested in Nashville’s success as a technology center is Joel Spolsky’s article, “Finding Great Developers.” (In fact, if you do anything with the software end of technology and you’re not reading Joel on Software, you should be.) I offer it knowing that I could never get hired by Joel. I’m not focused enough on being a great hacker. I developed a curiosity but not a deep passion that could get me to true greatness in the last decade because my curiosity is too expansive. At this point, I’ve ranged the stack from system administrator to database administrator to database programmer to system programmer to web developer to internet strategist and marketer. I wound up a generalist, not a specialist. But we need specialists, and we need to be able to bridge the gaps. And I think if we stay trapped in the realm of gurus and unconferences we risk not recognizing that we don’t have enough great developers in Nashville. Or, if they’re here, we risk not leveraging their expertise to develop the next generation. Here’s another great essay by Paul Graham on how to start a startup.

Bottom line: I support the people who are working on Nashville Geek Breakfast, BarCamp, Social Fresh, Digital Nashville, and the Nashville Technology Council, but I want us all to recognize that we need to find a way to engage, recruit, retain, and reveal the great developers among and around us. We need marketers, and we need to be able to engage non-practitioners, but we also need experts and developers to give us something to market. I look forward to continuing to participate in this effort.

I offer all this as constructive criticism in hopes that the Nashville geek community will find new opportunities for collaboration and sharing of best practices as well as a profound technological curiosity that elevate us beyond having our enthusiasm constrained by events that amount to little more than online marketing self-help.