Being pregnant has all kinds of advantages. People keep telling you how beautiful you look. They do it over and over. Very sweet of them, but it is just not true. I've seen myself before, and I've definitely looked better.
— Caterina Fake
Etsy is fundamentally a creative community. On eBay, or Amazon for that matter, practically anyone can sell practically anything. On Etsy, you can only sell handmade goods, vintage goods over 20 years old, and craft supplies for making.
Sometimes you climb the mountain, and you fall and fail. Maybe there is a different path that will take you up. Sometimes a different mountain.
I was an eccentric teenager in suburban New Jersey, in a town mostly interested in sports, popularity, and clothes. A fan of Jorge Luis Borges, I found a group of Borges scholars from Aarhus, Denmark - perfect strangers - whom I connected to online and immediately became enthralled by the idea of virtual communities.
The computers people have are no longer on their desks but in their hands, and that is probably the transformative feature of the technology. These computers are with you, in the world.
'Game Never Ending' came out of an earlier game called 'NeoPets,' a children's game that adults also played. It was a series of mini-games where you accrue points and can acquire objects - houses and all kinds of stuff.
I can't tell you how many times I've booked an air ticket only to get to the airport and find out they killed my ticket because it goes into the system, and the program tosses a ticket that says 'fake' on it. Twice I've gone to the counter for a KLM flight through Northwest and have been rejected.
I'm an accidental business person. I just love the medium. I love the Internet.
I spent many years in college studying English literature. I was on the verge of attending grad school to get a Ph.D. in Renaissance poetry - my lost careers were being a writer, artist, or academic. Do I regret spending all that time poring over Shakespeare when I could have been getting a jump start on the competition? Not at all.
Rob Kalin, Etsy's founder, never finished college. Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey - the founders of Twitter - are not college graduates. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, is another dropout. And, of course, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
The things I'm good at are building communities, participatory media, places where people contribute things of their own making.
I've never understood cheating, probably because I never cared much about my grades. I instinctively knew that the grades didn't measure anything meaningful - usually just my ability to quickly memorize information I'd just as quickly forget.
I'm happy we're about to start inviting people into the thing we've been working on!! It's called Pinwheel, and it's a way to find and leave notes all around the world.
If we are not given the chance to forget, we are also not given the chance to recover our memories, to alter them with time, perspective, and wisdom. Forgetting, we can be ourselves beyond what the past has told us we are; we can evolve. That is the possibility we want from the future.
It makes me happy to meet other poetry fans. Especially when they recommend poets I'm not familiar with.
After reading about the Al Ain Oasis by ECWC, I became curious about cultivating dates, and browsed about the web a bit, learning.
I'm sure there was some amazing art at the Frieze Art Fair, but I wasn't able to find it. However, found some friends there, which was even better. And the boat to and from was lovely.
I love participatory media, collective knowledge systems, user-generated content and the like, and spent much of my life and career participating in them and making them.
Etsy radically simplified and amended their policies. Sellers of handmade goods can now hire as much help as they need to run their shops. They can apply to sell designs they produce with the help of outside businesses.
The Well taught us how to create a civilized space for debate, speak in our own voices, use our real names, mediate flame wars, and boot trolls. Brand's mantra was, 'You own your own words,' meaning you have the right to say your piece but must also take responsibility for what you say.
My life project is humanizing technology: making technology more real and bringing it back into human interactions.
When we were making Flickr, we called it the 'Eyes of the World.' The idea was that everybody, everywhere, is looking. It was this sense of being able to penetrate worlds that you had never been able to access before - of global, universal travel.
My background isn't in social software; it's in online community, social networks, personal publishing, blogging, self-expression on the Web. I got on the Internet in the 1980s, and the magic moment for me arose from my being a literature geek, especially Dante and Shakespeare.
Eliminate activities that require you to be around people you cannot stand. Don't do things for people who should be doing them themselves... and don't waste time chasing trophies.
I worked at a Web development shop and other start-ups and eventually started a project called Ludicorp, which built an online game. We soon ran out of money, and Flickr was the last-ditch effort to save the company. It quickly became a very unstoppable juggernaut.
Entrepreneurship works on the apprenticeship model. The best way to learn how to be an entrepreneur is to start a company and seek the advice of a successful entrepreneur in the area in which you are interested. Or work at a startup for a few years to learn the ropes.
Vacations are good, and I come back energized, with the whiff of Hawaiian Tropic in the air and 2,000 messages in my Inbox.
I'm not good at vacationing. I've repeatedly failed at palapas and mai-tais.
Part of why making Pinwheel is so fun, is so exploding with possibility, is that a note, like a photo, can be a container for all kinds of things. It is the perfect social object. Stories, advice, jokes, diatribes, information, memories, facts, advertisements, love letters, grocery lists, and manifestoes can all be put into a note.
In my house, there is an old Chinese cabinet full of little figurines on two shelves. They are for my daughter, to tell stories. We have told hours and hours or stories using these figures. There are all kinds of people, children and adults, and all kinds of animals - elephants, tigers, snakes.
'Free' is the museum show of our times, presaging the whole Wikileaks dustup, and it shows shifting power dynamics and a glimpse of the human in a world of flowing data.
I joined a meetup group called Bay Area Parents for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which I had searched for, as I was going to start a group like it myself.
One of the many wonderful things about homeschooling is that I am constantly learning alongside my daughter.
The wall at Le Philosophe is covered with French philosophers, and supposedly, if you are able to name all of them, they will pay for your meal. I was only able to identify Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Descartes and, I think, Foucault. And, I think, Luce Irigaray.
On Etsy, you can't resell new goods you weren't involved in making, whereas on eBay and Amazon, that is more than welcome - everything from dishwashers to XBoxes, curling irons, espresso machines, and metal detectors.
Etsy helps work be more human - you can stay at home and work alongside your kids - and it makes commerce more personal.
My favorite online communities are characterized by their incredible generosity.
My background is in art. I was a painter and an occasional sculptor, and I really like materials - you know, stuff. Physical objects. The world and the trees and the sunshine and the flowers. And all of that doesn't seem to really exist out in the ether of the Internet.
Every place has a story - or a thousand stories. Findery brings places to life, be they where you stand or where you hope to go.
For a while, I couldn't join Facebook because of my last name. During the registration process, I was asked for my real name, and when I wrote 'Fake,' it rejected me. Finally, a friend working for Facebook took care of me.
If you looked at my resume in the years leading up to Flickr, I worked in a dive shop in landlocked Arkansas; I was a starving artist. I just arrived at the thing I love to do accidentally.
When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a writer and an artist when I grew up. So in college, I was an English major, and then I became a fine artist. But when I arrived in San Francisco in 1995, I figured I could leverage my artistic skills by becoming a Web designer and programmer.
College works on the factory model and is, in many ways, not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student, and out comes a scholar.
I love Hunch, the awesome team, my brilliant cofounders - we're doing great work and building a great company.
In building a social network, the standards and mores of a community are its lifeblood; one does not lightly 'experiment' with these, and LinkedIn is exactly right to defend them.
On Pinwheel, you can find and leave notes all around the world. The notes can be public or private, shared with an individual, a group, or everyone.
When I die and my memories die with me, all that will remain will be thousands of yellowing photographs and 35mm negatives in my filing cabinets.
In 2001, the hard disk on my laptop crashed, and everything on it was lost. I'd been using the computer for two, almost three years, and had all my work on it - email, which was stored locally; photos; fragments of poems; presentations; sketches; ideas; love letters; everything. I lamented the loss to my friends and got lectured on doing backups.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to find kids to hang out with that don't consume a lot of commercial culture.
'Apartamento,' a magazine out of Spain but written in English, is one of my favorite magazines.
