How To Split An Atom

Get more articles like this and Register for our Forum.

I recently had an opportunity to sit down with Joesph Ferrara of Sellsius Real Estate Blog and talk tech. If you ever wanted to know a little bit more about how the mind behind How To Split An Atom works, this is the place to find out.

Also, if you are in the market for long, rambling self-referential prose — my interview will provide you with that as well. Here are some highlights.

Explain The GTD Culture

It started out with great question for those who are new to Web 2.0. What is Getting Things Done?

Modern life, at least as an entrepreneur, is about running a painful number of projects all at once until you are eventually stopped by fame, fortune or an ulcer. GTD tries to prevent the latter from occurring. I would recommend David Allen’s book if you want to know more about the nuts and bolts of Getting Things Done. You can find it in fine book resellers all over the internet, including my site. As far as Getting Things Done as a culture, I think it’s all about simplifying the complex. Information is so easily available these days that without several additional brains it’s difficult to get anything accomplished. GTD seeks to provide simple tips to get the reigns on information overload.

How Can Search Be Improved

They got a bit more specific, asking what I thought the future of search looked like.

Semantic search. I don’t want to search for a topic and end up with what an algorithm has deemed appropriate. While this does produce quite a few very good results, it’s only a portion of the puzzle. The real magic will be when Google finds a way to incorporate elements of community (like sites like Digg) into determining search relevance. I want to know what “people like me” found most valuable when they searched for Web 2.0, not just what the running average feels is best.

What Is Orangeply?

While my top secret project remains as top secret as any project can be with a link to the homepage in the side-bar, I gave them a little insight into what Orangeply is all about.

Orangeply is what I like to call a reputation management engine and content portal. If Wikipedia is your online biography then Orangeply will be your newspaper. For example, my Orangeply page would contain a profile, all the sites that are currently talking about me, and what other people in the system are saying about my body of work.

Orangeply is what would happen if you married Digg and Wikipedia with a side of Truemors. In short, if you want the latest, greatest and most relevant information about a person or a business, you should go to Orangeply.

The Most Important Question

This is the core of any great interview, it really gets to the root of what interviews are all about, “what was the best movie that I’ve seen recently?”

The Experiment. It’s a German film that recounts the Stanford Experiment, where a group of volunteers were put into a simulated prison, half of them were made guards the other half were made prisoners. Needless to say, things become very “interesting” quite quickly.

Web 2.0 Roundup

I’d like to thank Sellsius for having me, and Joseph for putting up with my long winded answers. Check out the entire interview here.