Web Development Live

In February of 2007, a friend telephoned Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and a board member of Facebook, and asked if he wanted to meet with a young man with an idea that sounded preposterous on its face.

Always game for something new, Andreessen headed out to the San Francisco airport late one night to hear the guy out. A junior member of a large powerful organization with a thin, but impressive résumé, he was about to take on far more powerful forces in a battle for leadership.

He wondered if the power of social networking, with its tremendous communication capabilities and aggressive database development, might help him beat the overwhelming odds facing him.

“It was like a guy in a garage who was thinking of taking on the biggest names in the business,” Andreessen recalled. “What he was doing shouldn’t have been possible, but we see a lot of that out here and then something clicks. He was clearly supersmart and very entrepreneurial, a person who saw the world and the status quo as malleable.”

As a result, when he arrives at the White House, Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to believe that he will use the network not just to campaign, but to govern. His e-mail to supporters on Tuesday night included the line, “We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.”

The Bush campaign arrived at the White House with a conviction that it would continue a conservative revolution with the help of Karl Rove’s voter lists, phone banks and direct mail. But those tools were crude and expensive compared with what the Obama camp is bringing to the Oval Office.

“I think it is very significant that he was the first post-boomer candidate for president,” Andreessen said. “Other politicians I have met with are always impressed by the Web and surprised by what it could do, but their interest sort of ended in how much money you could raise. He was the first politician I dealt with who understood that the technology was a given and that it could be used in new ways.”

The juxtaposition of a networked, open-source campaign and a historically imperial office will have profound implications and raise significant questions. Special-interest groups and lobbyists will now contend with an environment of transparency and a president that owes them nothing. The news media will now be contending with an administration that can take its case directly to its base without even booking time on the networks.

More profoundly, while many people think that Obama is a gift to the Democratic Party, he could actually hasten its demise. Political parties supply brand, ground troops, money and relationships, all things that Obama already owns.

“Thomas Jefferson used newspapers to win the presidency, FDR used radio to change the way he governed, JFK was the first president to understand television, and Howard Dean saw the value of the Web for raising money,” said Ranjit Mathoda, a lawyer and money manager who blogs at Mathoda.com. “But Senator Barack Obama understood that you could use the Web to lower the cost of building a political brand, create a sense of connection and engagement, and dispense with the command-and-control method of governing to allow people to self-organize to do the work.”

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The GFDA’s old Web site was criticized for containing out-of-date information.

Enhancements to the Web site include improved navigation as well as new features such as facts and data, success stories, investor relations, the business development center, real estate information, news and events notices, and drop-down boxes providing direct access to web pages, according to a GFDA press release.

Taoti Web Design & Marketing, which is based in Washington, D.C., did the Web design.

GFDA staff will continually update the Web site and plans to add additional photos and links.

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Daly Communications is proud to celebrate its fifth year in business by donating its services to Prevention Network. Prevention Network is a not-for-profit agency that has been educating, training, and providing prevention services and education pertaining to substance use, abuse, and addictions to the Central New York community since 1949. Daly Communications plans to donate a complete website redesign of Prevention Network’s current site as well as site optimization to help them become more visible on the web among the local community and help increase donations for the cause.

Daly Communications was established in September of 2003 by Dave Daly as a technical writing firm. The company has expanded its service offering over the past five years to include web development and design, IT services, and marketing communications and has experienced substantial growth each year since its inception. “The majority of our customers are Central New York businesses and we wanted to give back to the community,” says Dave Daly, President of Daly Communications Group. “Prevention Network has done a great deal of good for CNY and donating our services to help them is the perfect way to celebrate our 5th year milestone.”

“What a wonderful gift this is to the agency and benefit to CNY,” says Brad Finn, Executive Director of Prevention Network. Work on the new site will begin in the next few weeks and should be unveiled by 2009. If you’d like to make a donation to Prevention Network or learn more about what they’ve done for the community, go to www.preventionnetwork.info.

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While most teenagers in their final year of school focus on study, Ludwig is busy running conferences for New Zealand’s biggest website development companies.

He has just designed the websites for Flat Bush’s two newest schools in Mission Heights and has several other jobs in the pipeline.

He says his paid work from web designs beats working part-time at McDonald’s or Muffin Break.

But Ludwig says he’s careful not to get too carried away, keeping university high on his list. “My plan at the moment is to get into Auckland University of Technology for a bachelor of web design, but I’ve kept my options open.

“There’s always the lawyer, doctor or accountant role I could pursue,” laughs the young academic.

Ludwig is solely responsible for setting up the Auckland-based Barcamp conferences with the leaders of web companies, sealing sponsorship from both Microsoft and Telecom.

The last conference Ludwig ran attracted about 120 people from the web development sector, eager to hear what the bright student had to say.

“I was lucky enough to grow up in the new ways of web development, so I already think the way a lot of other people have to retrain themselves to understand,” says Ludwig.

He designed his first website when he was 10 and has been working with software ever since. “My dad handed me a book about web design and I pretty much taught myself everything I needed to know,” says Ludwig.

His childhood dream of becoming a software engineer has moved toward web design, but he says understanding software is a huge plus.

“Computers will be everything, everywhere. At the moment the United Sates is rolling out Wi-Fi through radio waves connecting you to the internet. Once you experience that it’s hard to think of a time where you’re not connected all the time.”

Referring to a high profile computer hacking case in New Zealand earlier in the year, Ludwig says people need to understand the difference between hackers and “crackers”. “A hacker is someone that will hack into a nation’s security and say, ‘hey you need to work on this’. They don’t have malicious intentions that a cracker does,” says Ludwig.

He says it’s a small minority that has the time to dedicate to decoding software systems. If he did have the time, he’d much prefer to be designing his own websites.

“I’ve always been creative so web design is the perfect combination between arts and computers,” he says.

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Barack Obama should set drastic targets to force the US to switch to renewable energy in an effort to slow down climate change, according to the former vice president Al Gore. Gore said that one of Obama’s first acts as US president should be to demand a move to 100% renewable energy within 10 years.

“We can do that,” he said during the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last Friday. “The declaration from President [John F] Kennedy that we would land a man on the moon and bring him back safely was thought by many to be impossible.”

During his presidential campaign, Obama promised to invest $150bn (￡96bn) in renewables over 10 years as part of the plan to increase US energy security amid fear of oil shortages, while also cutting carbon emissions. Many hope to see those policies enacted with a far-reaching climate-change bill that would bring the US back into the global environment fold.

Gore’s call for action, made at the summit, one of the hi-tech industry’s leading events, included his view that the internet had a vital role to play in the mission for energy; but he stressed that people needed to start using the web for social good.

Gore has got close links to the industry through his work as a board member at Apple, as an adviser to Google, and as a prominent investor in a number of hi-tech companies.

Making an analogy between the march of the internet and the early development of electricity, Gore suggested the web should find a real purpose beyond making money and sharing information.

Gore’s perspective and the similar views of his allies formed the biggest call at the summit for hi-tech development, saying technology should be used to tackle the problem of climate change.

At the summit, delegates heard about how a range of developments, in green technology, hi-tech monitoring systems and alternative energy sources, was now attracting growing interest from investors.

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