A few days ago I wrote about a new project I’m working on which is going to be Gluten free guides for your city. I got to thinking though, and although I’m pretty quick at developing web sites, it still does take a little time to do. So, in the meantime, I’ve come up with a stop-gap solution and created a series of “Gluten Free in [x]” Facebook pages. I built three of them already for (San Diego, CA, Seattle, WA, and Boston, MA.

Those pages are done, and have Discussion forums on them which include Restaurants, Grocery Stores, and Recipes for each city. Please feel free to add your favorite places in your city. I’ll be using that information when we add the cities to Gluten Free Guides once it’s up and running.

The other cities I have pages for already, but there’s not much content in there yet. But, if you want to… feel free to go to one and start us off in the right direction. I’ll be there soon to put up the same format there. Here’s the list of cities…

• Boston
• Chicago
• Colorado Springs
• Dallas
• Denver
• Duluth
• Eugene
• Houston
• Los Angeles
• Minneapolis – St. Paul
• New York
• Philadelphia
• Phoenix
• Portland
• San Antonio
• San Diego
• San Francisco
• Seattle
• Reston
• Richardson

And please share and tweet these page urls out to your friends who are gluten intolerant or celiacs. We could use the support and we’d love to see their feedback on what is useful.

Thanks.

Gluten Free Guides (.org), a guide to local gluten free restaurants, menus, grocery stores, and foods.

This is the newest project I’ve started recently.

The story behind it is that my wife found out about a year ago that she was gluten intolerant. Some people have what’s called Celiac disease, which is not just being gluten intolerant, but actually deathly allergic.

If you don’t know already, gluten is a byproduct of wheat. The theory is that the problem is that our food has been engineered so many times over that the byproduct (gluten) has now become too large to digest. So now, there’s a massive amount of weird symptoms for those who are gluten intolerant – many times the person doesn’t even know they’re gluten intolerant at all, so we just go along our daily lives not even thinking about it.

In my wife’s case, she had a direct correlation between gluten and what we thought was IBS. 15 minutes after eating anything with gluten in it, she’d have a stomach ache so bad she’d double over for the next hour.

So, after living with it for 25 years, she finally figured out what it was by process of elimination and a ton of experimentation. Now, she’s not deathly allergic to it like a celiac would be, but it’s enough of an allergy and consequence of eating it that it makes a pretty compelling motivational factor to avoid it. She figured all this out about a year ago (we think not coincidentally the same time she became pregnant).

Since that time, she’s become a wealth of knowledge to her friends who are just figuring out now that they are gluten intolerant also, or at least have the symptoms.

I thought it was time we started sharing this information a bit easier than by word of mouth. Thus, the Gluten Free Guides was born… well, almost. It’s being built as we speak, so if you follow the link today you’ll not find anything of value… but this is where you come in.

How you can help:

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably got some knowledge of gluten intolerance or celiac disease. And if that’s the case, you can be a huge resource to your community too! We don’t pretend to know everything about gluten. We know some of the restaurants who have gluten free menus, grocery stores which have good (and terrible) gluten free foods, and some gluten free recipes you can make at home. But we don’t know them all – even for just San Diego.

So, we’re starting a website that will allow us (and you) to add, review, and discuss all these things. We plan on starting with San Diego, but if you’re in another city, let us know and once it’s ready we’ll open it up to you in your city too (tell us in the comments which city you’re in).

That all being said, we want your ideas too. What would make your day in regards to gluten free city guides? What would make you come back and use it all the time? What information would you think would be invaluable? Tell us everything. We want it to be the best possible guide possible – and applicable to our every day lives.

Come on… give us your best shot.

Thanks!

1. The management paradox

The first issue I’m calling the management paradox. When we start a project, however big or small, we’re excited about the possibilities, the way it’s going to solve a problem and better our or other’s lives. It’s exciting.

What we don’t think of is what happens if it gets popular. Do we open source it? Do we let others contribute to make it better? Do we try to monetize it and make it our new company or job?

There’s a level of minutia that we don’t have to think about when we start projects until a tribe adopts it. Once that happens, we have a new problem – management.

2. Focus vs Spaghetti

This one seems rather easy to digest, but I’m going to mention it anyway. There are benefits to being unfocused at times. Creativity flows and dot connecting becomes easy. We start seeing relationships between things we hadn’t seen in the past. We start coming up with new ideas. It’s a great time.

But it has it’s problems too.

Building solution that comes to mind is fun. But doing something for 10 hours rather than 10,000 hours makes us a jack of all trades and a master of none. Our ability to push through the dip and get our projects some attention. Throwing spaghetti against the wall is definitely fun. Seeing if something sticks is fun. But if it does stick, it would be a good idea to be prepared to open the doors for others to see your masterpiece.

Conclusion

So I’m still all for projects. But, I’m also for measuring to indicate if you’ve hit success, and when you do, picking it up and running like mad. Just be forewarned about the pitfalls of projects too.

Split test your projects, take the ones that are working and focus on making them better.

This kind of thing didn’t surprise me, coming from Ted. He’s one of the most vigilant awesomeness advocates I know. But, one thing I realized during that conversation…. if he could get the stack of front-end engineers together with the purpose of producing awesome stuff, there would be almost nothing stopping them except for one thing. The same kryptonite which stops all great developers – marketing.

Competition, Collaboration, Complaining

Marketing is the bane of a developer’s existence. It’s the thing we ignore, but we need.

Marketing is similar to tourism. The locals hate tourists, yet they depend on them for their survival in the modern age. It’s a love/hate relationship. Development is no different. We need marketing, but we hate it too. It’s so fake. So contrived. So finicky. Why can’t the quality stuff just get to the top of the list and get popular simply because it’s awesome? It’s sad really.

But, it’s needed. And, there are plenty of people out there who love to market. They just don’t like developers.

Why do developers have to be so agitating, so controlling, so vigilant and annoying to work with? If marketers could just have an idea and get someone to build it without complaining, the world would be a much better place, right? I mean, marketers know the market. It’s what they do. They know what people want, so the developers should just listen to them.

Ah, conflict. Gotta love it.

So, here’s the point… I live in both worlds. I see both points. I understand both pains because I’ve been both. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to shine the spotlight on little projects that developers are creating which are awesome. On the other side, I’m going to highlight some marketers who are pushing some great stuff.

In doing so, I hope to make some connections, smooth out the rough edges, and bring two communities together. There’s nothing we can’t accomplish if we actually get along. My vision is to see developers with great ideas and great talent build awesome stuff, and have a great local marketer pick that up and make it huge. On the other side, I want to see marketers with amazing ideas get their stuff built by some crazy awesome developers. Everyone would benefit from this.

It should be noted that I skipped one major aspect of the community, and that is designers. I didn’t do that on purpose in this article, and I do recognize how different each skill is. I do think design is a major aspect of adoption, usability, etc. Thus designers play a critical role in the awesomeness quotient of a project as well. We’ll add designers to the batter when we get the first two ingredients playing nicely and that’s when the world will explode and finally realize that San Diego has some major powerhouses in all three specializations.

Tiny Geo-Coder

Thanks to Emily Chang at eHub and Jackson West at LifeHacker.com, the Tiny Geocoder became an overnight smash hit.

With 8 hours of submitting my site to eHub it had been picked up and written about. Not long after, LiveHacker picked up the story and wrote a short article on the tiny, fast service that gives you latitude and longitude in exchange for a human-readable location. Less than 24 hours later there were over 30,000 new mentions across the internet. Today, there are over 70,000 links and mentions and over 200k queries.

With that kind of popularity comes a massive amount of suggestions, business deals, and more. I’m definitely a fan of that. So, of course I had to oblige and add in reverse geocoding too (thanks to many of your suggestions).

And of course, I couldn’t just leave it at that. Cody Marx Baily a.k.a. superphly contacted me and we partnered up to create…

…. drum roll please ….

TinyGPS.org

TinyGPS.org. Think of it as a shortening service for locations. Sure, you could type the address and make people map it. Or, you could just send them a URL like http://tinygps.org/15. With that, you’ll get links to the weather (Weather Underground), where to find beer nearby (Beer Mapping), events in the area (Upcoming.org), good restaurants (Yelp), news about the general vicinity (Google News), and even social media posts by others who are in the area (Brightkite).

We’re going to keep adding services, and might even embed a few into the page itself instead of linking off. But, for now, it’s a great way to share a ton of relevant things around a location without a massively large URL.

So, I’m very happy to have such a successful product make it “big”. It’s been fun watching the stats roll in and see how people are using it. I hope this trend continues with some of the other fun projects I am working on.

Thanks for making it fun to build things! This beer’s for you!

We are pleased to announce the release of CrisisWire.com.

CrisisWire is a self-aggregating website that pulls information on any disaster around the US and displays it on one page. It gets information into the hands of the people that need it most.

During a disaster people spend valuable time searching the internet and waiting for the media to report on their city, their neighborhood, their street. While main stream media serves a vital role during disasters, it is impossible to update the population on everything that is happening during a crisis. There usually isn’t enough time or resources. CrisisWire not only uses the traditional media outlets’ valuable information but will also utilize citizen journalists and Google maps to track the disaster. YouTube.com (videos), Flickr.com (photos) and a whole host of other types of published media will also soon be integrated.

Along with the website, CrisisWire will soon utilize text messages to get information to people that have lost their electricity, internet, or been displaced from their home. So no matter where someone is, they can be receiving invaluable information about shelters, road closures and other dangers.

Our hope is that CrisisWire will change the way people respond and learn about disasters.

—————

CrisisWire is currently being used for the southern California Aftershock earthquake drill that began on Novemeber 13, 2008. This drill is helping to teach people how to respond in a disaster and is a perfect example for CrisisWire to use at this time.

To learn more about this vital source of disaster information, please visit CrisisWire.com or contact me directly

We would appreciate your input and feedback greatly.

Please listen for a second.  I’ll try to keep this short, but if you don’t want to read anymore, please do me this one favor.

Click this link, register, and vote for our team and our idea:
http://ideablob.com/ideas/3344-Disaster-Emergency-Info-Now-

Now, for those of you who are a little hesitant, here’s why I want you to click, register and vote.

See, I’ve been a little busy these last few years down here in San Diego.  Of course, I’ve always been busy, but this is different.  A few years ago I started searching for something more than money.  I’ve always been committed to my faith, but I’ve also been a pretty decent business-minded guy too.  Even now I consult other small businesses and non-profits on revenue strategies.  I know how to do that pretty well.

There’s something else I’ve been looking for.  I’ve been looking for a team and an opportunity.  A group of leaders who are self-sacrificing, looking for the betterment of others and willing to do what it takes to give a pure gift.

In 2003, San Diego went through some pretty ferocious fires.  I heard about them and watched a little on CNN while I was at Western in Bellingham.  But, I didn’t pay much attention, as most of didn’t who weren’t in the middle of the crisis.

But, then there were the floods in Centralia and Chehalis two different years that destroyed homes, businesses, and livelihoods.  Now those, we paid attention to.  We were in the middle of them. We had 18 inches in our home and it ruined everything.

Then there was Katrina, Hurricane Ike, the California Firestorm of 2007.  It’s in everyone’s back yard now.  It’s everyone’s problem at some point.

Here’s the problem we’re living with today.

The same problems exist today that have existed for a hundred years.  We still aren’t able to communicate to the people we need to most in times of emergency.

When the phone lines are down, how do you call 911?  When the internet is down, how do you find a map out of your area or the next shelter?  When the radio stations and tv stations are retelling the same stories every 20 minutes, but not talking about your area and whether the fire is over that hill behind your house, how do you find out?

That’s the problem.

But now we’re living in a world of opportunity.

The world is crazy and always has been.  But what’s changed in the last few years is the maturing of one of the worlds I’ve been living and working in for the past 15.  The internet has become a big and awesome place.  We’re now all publishing massive amounts of things.  Text, videos, audio, location-aware devices like GPS is able to all be published.  Real-time.  Like our own TV broadcasts but more than just TV.  It’s all possible today. Not only possible, but actually happening.  And by more than just internet geeks like me.

Some people find all that scary.  Those people are right about the possible threats of publishing so much info about ourselves.  But there’s also a whole world of possibility that we haven’t tapped yet.

So here’s the point.  With all this information being published by people in real-time, we have a chance to fix the problem.  We have the opportunity to make sure the officials and groups who can help us in times of disasters have all the information possible.  Every bit of it.

We need them to know when we’re out of water, food, shelter.  We need them to know when fires cross the roads.

That’s why the team I mentioned earlier exists.

Together, we’re creating the world’s first service which will take all the things that we are publishing and turn it into something useful.

We’re already talking to official public information officers in San Diego and Houston, government officials, traditional media outlets, publicly funded media outlets, citizen journalists and so many more stakeholders.  But this isn’t a company. It’s a project.  This project should have existed years ago, but it doesn’t.

Soon it will.

We’re building it.  For free.

I believe in this team.  I believe they’ve sacrificed time, effort, and skills to help save their fellow neighbors during an emergency.  This is a noble cause.  They deserve this.

Please, go to this link.  Register.  Vote for our cause.  We’re in the running right now for a $10,000 prize which will be split between 15 people.  It’s worth about 1/100th of the amount of time they’re putting into it. It’s a drop in the bucket to them, but it would mean so much to validate their work.

http://ideablob.com/ideas/3344-Disaster-Emergency-Info-Now-

Please, take the time for us.  I would really appreciate it.

And feel free to encourage your friends and family as well to do the same if you feel led.

Sincerely,

Nate Ritter

The point is there’s a tribe of people who want change. It’s not a group of people. It’s not a crowd of people. Crowds are faceless and groups are leaderless. We’ve got both faces and leaders. Every one of the individuals who are helping to make CrisisWire a success are leaders. These people knew change was needed and stepped up to the plate.

What is CrisisWire?

Let’s start with the real issue. What’s the problem? Why all the passion?

The problem is that in an emergency people can’t find their way. We’ve been given massive power to publish anything we please. We, the public, used our ability to publish our concerns and troubles during all the natural and unnatural disasters that have taken place over the past few years. But it’s not always helping. That’s one problem.

The other problem is on the other side of this situation. In an emergency, the people who can help don’t know about our problems in the midst of it all.

But, people know that this is a problem. And our group (thanks to Refresh San Diego) has stood up to answer the call.

We’re building a media aggregator of emergency/disaster information from every source possible including tv, radio, blogs, micro-publishing, governmental sources, traditional media, publicly funded media, and more. Published on one page per disaster and then separated into neighborhoods where possible, this application could put the info into the hands of the people who need it most.

Tribe Highlight

Peggy Gartin

One of the crazy-awesome people on our team is Peggy Gartin. She’s the one with the awesome shoes and jokes being muttered under her breath to people sitting next to her in a serious meeting.

Peggy is a fantastic leader. She’s a fanatic about eliminating AIDS and supporting those who live with it. She has a craving to “use [her] superpowers for good”.

Peggy is like many of us. We all have our “zombie fiction” (that thing we geek out about in private). Peggy and her husband collect Simpson action figures and host the Simpsons Collector Sector BBQ every Comic-Con here in San Diego. See, she’s normal too.

She’s also a hard core public news geek too. She ran a corporate intranet for a Fortune 15 company for years. She became a news junkie while doing this to keep up on the goings on. Her thirst for well timed, well written, well read pieces makes her an advocate for the people in these emergencies who are searching anywhere and everywhere for important up to date news on their area and situation. It’s good to have her on our side.

The reason I’m telling you all of this about her is because Peggy is one of the many leaders we have on our CrisisWire project team. This isn’t a company. It’s a project. Projects require leaders. Projects that have more than one person in them require many leaders. Peggy is a perfect example of the kind of leadership mentality we’re blessed to have on this project.

Everyone has a different role to play. Everyone on our team is a leader. And we’re thankful for that. That’s what makes this a tribe. Not a group, not a crowd. A tribe.

Peggy joined CrisisWire to have a hand in creating a good, useful web app that spreads “like wildfire (bad pun fully intended)”.

We’re with her.

CC license, thanks to catalogue on Flickr

The past few years many of us have gotten used to seeing new companies pop up from nowhere. Companies require regulations, organizational charts, business plans, and revenue models. Companies are supposed to show stability by incorporating and having charters.

My world has changed, though. I don’t live in a world where a company is stable.  Neither do you.

Many people are fearing the worst of the current financial crisis – losing their job.  Is the Company really that stable?

A few years ago I heard so many of the Boomers say they were glad to be retiring soon because they’ve lost faith in their Company.  Their friends were getting laid off, being phased out, given packages to quit early.  The Company was showing its true colors.  It exists to make a profit, not to give you stability or hope.  The Boomers aren’t stupid or slow. They understand more than any of us what’s happened. 

Today I work as a freelancer and own my own businesses (not Companies).  I don’t have employees. I have partners and contractors (who run their own businesses).  Why? Because we heard the cry of the Boomers who are getting laid off. We’re not so slow either.  We started our own businesses because we put our trust in other people to exchange their money for our value.  We’re paid to do something that helps our fellow humans.  If we don’t, we don’t get paid.

And “they” said Generation X was lazy. We’ve taken the red pill.

The Project is King

So today we’re an army of freelancers and entrepreneurs.  Tomorrow you might be one too.  We started by calling ourselves bloggers or geeks.  We’ve now graduated to “owners”.  Owners of our own destiny.  Owners of our name, our brand, our work, our time, our resources, and our attention.  And this trend is growing beyond the geeks.

As the early adopters of technology, we have engaged with, encouraged and contributed to the Project Economy.  We got tired of doing “what’s right for the Company” and struck out on our own.  We embraced the risk, and now we’re happy to move our game piece one step further.  We benefit not only from the stability, but the enjoyment of our work and lives.

CC license, thanks to lenifuzhead on Flickr

The project is like a hobby, but smaller and shorter in time.  It’s a beginning. It’s an idea that we realize we can actually help make a reality.  Some Projects require a team, others are created by one person alone.  Either way, the project is the extension of our beliefs in the need for a better world. You might want a world where less children die of starvation.  Or the person next to you might think a better world is where we can share our location through location-aware cell phones.  The person behind you in the line at the supermarket might think her better world is one where she stands in line for less time.  Our world matters.  It matters to us, and we believe it can be changed.  Soon many many more of us will believe we actually have the power to change it by working on our Project or leading a Tribe.

Instead of creating a company – which takes too much time, effort and money – we just begin.  We embrace the freedom of simplicity and the absent permission-asking culture.

My Projects have been as short as 3 hours or as long as several months.  They have added great value to my life, my skills, my network of friends, and my bank account.  Each of those are important to me to balance, and Projects give me the ability to do so when no Company could.

Eventually, a Project might turn into a Company or a business, and that might be the intention in the long run, but they don’t start that way. They start as a way to make our lives better.

Trust me, the world is changing.  The Project is king.  We are enabled.  We have the ability.  Soon, we’ll understand that we are leaders and we’ll begin to lead.  Soon, the Project will be the jumping off point for worlds changing faster than we ever imagined.

Soon.  How about now?

Image by slworking2 via Flickr

Tis the season for disasters and emergencies.  There always seems to be something going on in the world where people need help. We’ve got a team of people trying to help solve the information drought that comes with localized emergencies.

The backstory

About a year ago many of you know I played a small role in helping people get information about the 2007 wildfires here in San Diego. The response was positive, to say the least. But while I talked about what happened, one question still plagued me (from a BarCamp I spoke at): “What’s the next step?”

The thing is, even though the role I played was comparatively small – 1000 or so people in the midst of 3 million – we recognized the need. Citizen journalism was playing a roll that traditional media couldn’t.  Now, with the popularity of Twitter and other very fast broadcasting/publishing mediums, we have an opportunity to impact the world for good, one person at a time, one post at a time.

Image via Wikipedia

I thought about this issue, advocated “the next step” to other organizations who had funding, manpower and drive.  So far, few have stepped up to the plate.  I even gave a prototype example of what small steps could be taken to prepare for the next emergency with little staff, leveraging the massive amount of information being put out by citizens, traditional media and governments.  I’ve seen few takers. Only a handful of potential services being started that will do this kind of thing.

So, I thought… I’ll build it myself.  I have one month before HeroCamp in Houston. I’ll build it and show it off there.

Enter Refresh SD.

Refresh San Diego is a group of people who are “working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of Internet in the San Diego area.” Phelan Riessen, a local entrepreneur and the organizer of Refresh SD, wanted to solidify the group around a goal. Something that would be fun and potentially bring in extra money for everyone involved.

I attended the brainstorm meeting to figure out which idea we would work on as a team.  I pitched the idea of an aggregated emergency informational system/site and I was surprised to see every person in the meeting raise their hand in agreement that this was the project to work on, even without money being the first objective.

Image via Wikipedia

In the next month a team of 15 volunteers will be working together to produce one of the most comprehensive emergency information aggregation, categorization, and broadcasting systems on the planet.

This team is doing so without funding, in everyone’s spare time, and for the good of humanity as a whole.

….

Now, I’m telling you this story for a few reasons.  (1) I believe this team is doing some of the most important work of our lives and I want you to know about it.  (2) I believe this team should be credited with thanks and admiration from you, the ones who will profit from it.

There are a few other things you can do to be a part of this adventure, too.

1. You can vote up, comment, and give advice about this idea at IdeaBlob. (the team will win $10k, which would be a HUGE “thank you” as well as offset some costs)
2. Comment on this blog with ideas and advice.
3. Help us get the word out about what we’re doing to local and national media.

Please, feel free to share this story.  I’ll be posting more about the project as we go along as well as the link to it when it’s ready for testing.

Thanks!