Is this thing on..?
All-right boys and girls, here is my first post. Perhaps I should explain my goal, why I decided to start this blog and so on. Well I once owned a storefront business for a few years and I really liked that experience. I always told myself that I would do that again. The thing is I don’t really want to open a storefront business again because it’s a LOT of work. You can’t really work “when you feel like it”, you really have to be there all the time. Besides, if YOU don’t do it, then who’s going to? And that’s what I did in the past. I worked a lot, 365 days a year or so. It was great because I didn’t have a wife and two kids back then. Now things have changed and I don’t want to work everyday as I used to.
So this bring me to Internet businesses. I started using the Internet back in the early 90’s when I was studying at the university. It was a big improvement from local Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and I felt the “thing” would really catch. It did I guess… I started using Gopher (from Montreal’s McGill university BTW) and Mosaic and saw Netscape coming along a few months or so after. No Google back then…
Then something great came up; I was selected to be a beta tester for high speed cable access (Cogeco). That was around 1995 when most people were surfin’ at 33.6k – I was cruising at over 1 MBps. Talk about “wow”! Things improved when I join an online class sponsored by the education government. I was riding at a full 10 MBps for the duration of the class (3-4 months or so). That was over ten years ago… If my memory is right, my local cable provider was one of the first (if not the first) to offer high speed over cable in North America. That experience really hooked me on the Internet even before the term “Internet Addict” came up. In a way, I was perhaps the first addict :)
Through the years, I realized that I really loved the Internet and was always fascinated by what it has brought us, or what it hasn’t yet… Some technologies were simply amazing. Take ICQ for example. It has had features for more than 10 years that no other IM still has… I could go on and on about those senseless “wars” which only hurt the users in the end.
This brings me to the current days… Web 2.0 is a word that brings happiness and shame at the same time. Things are great now but we can do better… Are pastel graphics and over-sized fonts enough to be called a revolution? I think not. I feel there is something going on but at the same time, I feel like we’re not doing enough…
So what about me? I have some ideas in mind that I want to bring to life. I tried and failed on one of them but I believe this is just the beginning. I have found a community and believe I will succeed on some other ideas. We’ll see but if I fail once more, the Internet archives will forever remember :)
Finally, what about you? Well I want to hear from you, your ideas, your failures. What happened? What went wrong? What went right? Tell me your story, email me.
We’re in it all for the same reason: to make it a better place.
