The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benedictions.

-William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality

Two years ago

Wow. Two years ago we launched this pingVision site. Actually, as I write this, it was about two years and nineteen or so hours ago. I had been working with Drupal for several months at that point, helping people when I could and eventually parlaying that activity into some freelance work.

pingVision was the beginning of a formalization of that -- a shingle for a business partnership with my friend and colleague, Katherine Lawrence, as we contemplated a business plan incorporating Drupal web development, DVD authoring and other interactive media notions not yet ready for public discussion, into a coherent plan for world domination ... or at least a means to make a decent living.

Happy birthday, pingVision!

A year ago last week

We forged pingVision into a limited liability company a year ago last Wednesday. Alas, we had no birthday cake on hand -- too busy -- so we at the office just enjoyed memories of the seven-layer fudge cake we had for Drupal's fifth birthday the previous week.

Since that time a year ago,

"Tell me a story."

It's one of the oldest requests. We asked it as children, and our children ask it of us, and we ask it of one another. "Tell me a story."

We marvel at "King Kong." We're enthralled at seeing the "Lord of the Rings." We're mesmerized at the sweep of "Star Wars." "Sky Captain," "Final Fantasy," and "Sin City" head into new realms. And who will forget, "Who Shot Roger Rabbit?"

Yet, at some point, all these projects were screenplays, or at least treatments. There was a story.

I was reminded of this as I listened to the commentaries of Jodie Foster and Robert Zemeckis each give their running account in the background as I watched "Contact" on DVD.

For Foster - the star - it was mainly about the story. For Zemeckis, it was more complicated, or as the top-level guy, Zemeckis had a wider range of responsibilities, but I could not help but notice how devoted he was to the technical aspects of the film. Perhaps he let Foster take care of the story and rather than be redundant, he gave his spin on what magic was done during the production.

There is no question that Drupal is growing, largely through word of mouth. Yet, go to the computer section at a well-stocked book store, and still there is precious little on the shelves about Drupal.

But breakthroughs, both large and small, are like that.

When calculus was first introduced, there were no text books on what Newton and Leibniz had discovered. The knowledge was largely word of mouth and it took one of the Bernoullis to put together a first pass book about calculus. It would be hundreds of more years before Thomas' Calculus would flood every modern scientific school of higher learning.

Part of what we are seeing is a moving target.

I once heard a graduate student put it this way,

The text books are at least a couple years behind the latest advances.

Michael Wolff has written a piece on Steve Jobs for the April 2006 issue of "Vanity Fair."

This impressionistic piece is good. Wolff writes of Jobs

... it turns out that Jobs is not marginal, or eccentric, or even fanciful at all. His is the at-one-with-the-American-consumer golden gut.

Calling Jobs the "ultimate media guy," who has outdone Bill Gates at every turn, Wolff declares Jobs the real winner.

The reader wonders if the claim is valid - at least I wondered. Isn't Microsoft far and away more commercially successful than Mac?

Well, Wolff has that covered.

... one day in the near recent past everybody woke up and found out that while all the geniuses were blathering on about content this and content that, the media culture had, in fact, come to be dominated by machines. It's Steve's gadget-centric world which we just live in.

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world

Maybe it's just me, but there seems to be a growth in Web 1.0. This amid the pundits claim that Web 2.0 is the wave of the future.

Statistics from a Nielsen story titled Sponsored Link Advertising (PDF format) could be interpreted as a bellwether.

At pingVision, we get a stream of inquiries - proposed web development projects we are asked to consult on or develop. The projects seem to break into the two "visions" as it were - Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

It stands to reason that the older, more entrenched technology will be what the latest set of adoptors want to "get on the web."