I've been blogging about politics. However, I do not believe that politics is the answer. Politics is a nasty art in which politically ambitious people divide people to concentrate power. This division ends up destroying society.
I believe that the best path forward is for people to create business. I've found that small independent businesses provide more to our society than other institution.
I am not as greedy as I look. My thoughts aren't simply about how I could create a business so that I could get ahead of everyone else. My thoughts fall more along the lines of how can we structure things so that there is a huge number of profitable independent businesses.
When the Internet rolled along in the 1990s, I saw an opportunity for our society to create millions of small independent businesses. The Internet was headed in that direction until it became dominated by Google and Facebook ... two of the most evil companies to ever appear on this planet.
So, back in 1999, I saw that small businesses were building web sites like crazy. These small businesses suffered one big problem. No-one was linking to their sites. So, I figured that the best way to help small business was to link to their sites.
Commerce, in the small business world, tends to be local. So I decided that the area to focus on was local communities; So I started creating local directories. The sites had directories, forums and calenders written in PHP 2 and then 3. I used the brand Community Color for the project.
I decided I wanted to build community sites. But I happen to be community challenged.
I live in Salt Lake City. Utah is dominated by an extremely fierce culture war. People who do not belong to the state religion are treated like dirt.
So, I decided to leave Salt Lake. I headed North. I helped a group of people set up a business building community directories. I divested of all of these except one site for Missoula. I was thinking of moving to Montana but realized that there was not enough money in web development to afford an apartment.
The thought of living through Missoula in a car frightened me.
The 2002 Olympics were one the horizon; So I moved back to Utah .
To build up traffic I would go to local meetups and any open networking event I could find.
The basic message I had was that for web sites in the community to thrive, the community needs to develop some central directories.
I did not want to charge for listings. So, my business plan was to join the affiliate programs of local merchants.
I should also mention that I have the radical idea that everybody who lives in a town is part of the community regardless of his religion. A person who lives in Provo is still a member of the Utah Valley Community even if the person isn't LDS.
Of course what I discovered was a solid and impenetrable wall of animosity.
I used to go to all the local meetups and community events that I could find. I would do a write up on the event.
I would talk about my fluffy ideals about how people in communities should support the small businesses in the community. I would then find myself thrown out on my ear.
The people in Missoula were really kind when I spoke about the need for community focused resources on the net. The people in Utah are just down out mean.
BTW, I was born in Denver and spent a huge amount of my youth in the mountains of Wyoming.
Anyway this is why I have a collection of community web sites for communities that think I should be ridden out on a rail.
I am obstinate. I still believe that people should be considered part of the community where they live even if they are not members of the tyrannical group that controls the area.
I built the directories in PHP3 and haven't finished porting all the code to PHP 7. I am angry at PHP 7. That would be a good post.
