Don Wilson thoughts and ideals of an internet magnate

I’ve always liked to browse several videos/pictures/texts for a given subject that I’m currently interested in. For example, if I’ve got my attention centered on Hillary Clinton, I’d like to see any pictures of her, videos, speech texts, etc. Where would I go to be able to gather and consume this information quickly? No where that I can think of.

That is where one of my ideas will come into place. I like to think of it as the Mahalo of related content. Mahalo is a service that allows editors to provide accurate results for top search queries. Having said that, I would like to build a service that lets editors gather content, congregate all of the information together, and present it in a reasonable manner. Categorize them into individual pages (Speeches) under a parent category (Hillary Clinton) and provide the ability to link parent pages into group (Politicians). This type of categorization will give the user the ability to roam around the site and learn about the things that are of interest.

Just a thought.

Just a reminder to myself, Yahoo will be holding their financial earnings report tomorrow (4pm CST) and should return interesting results.

Yep.

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I’ve been spending the entire weekend trying to determine what I should use with the site shell I just built.

What is a “site shell”? Basically it’s a shell of a website that presents the content with a structured set of menu bars and set width with room to expand. It helps the user stay in tune with controlling the website and allowing the programmer to provide anything they want into the “content” area.

Anyway, I’ve been struggling to figure out what exactly I want to use it on. I have the ability to tie together multiple ideas together, such as social news, dating, and other ideas, but it’ll feel too forced and won’t flow the way a normal friend network should.

What I’m going to do while I’m building ideas for the general basis of the site is focus on user management. Provide visitors with profile editing, about me sections, etc. Possibly start a groups section, inbox, and other general sections.

All you really need to create something that will take down a beast is a talented entrepreneur, a smart guy or two on your team, and enough horsepower to keep your stake in the competition alive.

What I’m talking about, specifically, is taking a competitor, someone the size of Facebook or IMDB, down to their knees by providing more privacy and more ability to interact with their friends in innovative ways. When I mean a smart guy or two, or more specifically in my case, are people who know how to control highly dynamic and efficient database manageability, as well as another server optomization guy. With the skills that I have as a PHP developer and service builder, a team like that could easily, given the space for rapid growth early on (server bandwidth, processing power, storage), one could take on a giant like Facebook within months.

The only problem that is in my way at this moment is the lack of ability to devote my entire attention to such a project, as I’m focusing on building up income again. I wonder, however, if I were born into a family with tremendous wealth, would I have the ability, nay the desire to go after something like this? I wouldn’t think so, and for that I am the most thankful. I am able to prove myself when some cannot. Since I’ve been given the ability to do such a thing, I believe I’m going to chase it as hard as possible.

In the mean time, for inspiration on my goal, I’ve been reading an eBook that I purchased a few days ago, called Inside Facebook. The story is about the first senior engineer to land into the then tiny Thefacebook, watch it prosper to over many, many millions of pageviews a day, who he runs into in the process, and suggestions for things to take into account when starting your own startup. Very inspirational for someone in my shoes. I would’ve died to work there when he did and to watch something explode wildly with popularity. I haven’t gotten to the part as to why he eventually left within little over a year, if that even is in the book. I’m about 25 pages in and I’m already throughly enjoying it. I’d recommend it to anyone looking to start any kind of large goal such as Facebook or the like, or if you’d just like to hear what it’s like to work in the starting stages of a prosperous company.

Anyway, back to my original statement regarding taking them down within a few months. I absolutely know something like that couldn’t realistically happen within a few months, but that’s always been in the back of my mind. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that I have most of the skills available to take on such a challenge and at least present a viable candidate to take on a big guy.

I’m considering using my skills as a spidering/scraping expert to take it into more of a maintstream approach and offer my skills to my scripting company, Blast Scripts.

BlastScripts has been an inside company from the get go of DevBlast, my umbrella company. BlastScripts will eventually be a script depot for me to upload programs and other libraries of PHP code and others to purchase and/or download them for free, keep track of updates, etc.

Anyway, back to the idea of consultation of scraping. I’ve always been an avid scraper. There is nothing that I enjoy more than scraping a site of it’s contents. The process is always different, entertaining, and enjoyable. There is always something new around the corner to work against. The regular expressions that I have to come up with off the top of my head prove to work flawlessly (most of the time) and that is a reward in my thinking.

The only thing holding me back from providing such a service is the legality of such a service. Is it legal to provide a program that completely defaces a website and steals most/all of their content? Is content something that is copyright in general? I have no qualms with providing my clients with the ability toscrape any given site, but whether or not scraping is prohibited is beyond my stretch of legal knowhow.

I’ve got several sites already live and public, more so than I have before and it feels great. I have several venues to exploit and it’s my job to figure out a way to interlink them and profit even further.

I recently purchased a few books on C#, C++ and C# with .Net to build windows applications, something that I’ve always wanted to pursue but never put forth the effort/energy to learn. The possibilities are endless with the knowledge that I could obtain with the books that I’ve purchased, and I’ve got to keep that in the back of my mind when I come along the normal speed bumps that come in the road to knowledge.

Other than that, I’m going to continue pushing content sites  as that seems to be my skillset in this point of the game. Simply pushing large amounts of content will eventually work, won’t it? I’m hoping so.

I’m always happy to get client work, at least when I’m in need of money. However, naturally when I make money, I have an immediate need of said earned cash and it just ruins the good energy of making money.

I hate that everything in my life is about numbers and the bottom line, but when things get tough, that’s how I do it I guess. At least I worry about my future instead of my peers, those who work at remedial jobs and earn $350 a week doing nothing productive. At least I can know enough about myself that I can go out and make a living off the things that I’ve learned on my own (without schooling) and keep on the grind until I’m comfortable again. And, in that, I feel very safe about my well being. Now, if I were put into a situation where others relied on my ability to provide for them, I’m not sure if I could rely on that (at a security sake), which is why I’m trying to build up my assets and plan for the overall future.

I’ve got to keep pushing and pushing. With enough force, everything breaks. This drought will subside and I’ll be back in business.  Thankfully I’ve got a thousand ideas to pursue and all of them lead to my ability to take over each entire niche with my skills and background.

The skills that me and my friends have - you can’t teach that in school or a university - and that is something that I hold very important to me.

I spent about 30 minutes tonight filling out an application to YComb’s Summer 2008 Startup challenge. I don’t really care to discuss what I submitted as my project for their approval, but I think I wrote a fairly convincing set of ideas and my distaste for the lack of quality in today’s web offerings.

I doubt it’ll result to anything but I’m glad to have written something heartfelt and know that I really feel strongly towards making the online real estate (read: web space) better for the future.

Tag it Funny is going to be a social bookmarking and sharing site that will go into private beta later this month or very early January. You’ll be able to share YouTube videos, pictures, links, stories/jokes/texts for now. You’ll be able to label it “Awesome” and comment on it. Once your submission has become popular enough it’ll make the frontpage, which will continue its growth.

I’m overjoyed how well the whole development is going. There is a lot of AJAX-type stuff, flashy things, cool services, etc. I can’t wait to open up the beta =)