Steven Spalding is the creator of How to Split An Atom, a Must Read technology oriented blog we spotlighted on our Blog Finder Series. We had the pleasure of interviewing Steve. Here’s what he told us.
How did you come up with the name for your blog?
Well, I wish I could tell you a more entertaining story — wait I can, so it starts something like this. I was sitting around, talking to my brother about what the best Web 2.0 name that could possibly exist would be. We decided that dropping vowels was overdone, and using dots was a little hard on the eyes. What we came up with was a phrase. I mean, How To Split An Atom — that’s a compelling concept in and of itself. I’m pretty sure my brother came up with it mostly as a joke, but I was stuck on the name from the moment I heard it.
Explain the GTD culture.
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.
What do you plan to communicate through the blog & to what to reader are you speaking?
I hope that everyone in the world eventually starts reading by blog, but specifically I am speaking to the extremely tech savvy and those who want to be extremely tech savvy. I try to make my blog as easy to digest as I can. I’ve never learned anything from bloggers who are information rich but communication narrow. I wanted How To Split An Atom to be a place you could go to catch up on the tech news of the day and leave it feeling that you have actually learned something valuable (or at least leave entertained), regardless of your current level of tech expertise.
What is your educational background?
I am an Electrical Engineer that is currently pursuing a Masters degree at the University of Florida. In short, I am boring and mildly masochistic.
Are you planning an entrepreneurial career? In what area?
Yes, I hope to eventually start a technology incubator dealing primarily in web technologies and converging the web with consumer electronics. If your iPod eventually tells you what you should have for dinner, I want to be the one who helped to build it.
What caused you to start blogging?
I love to write, and I have been looking for an outlet for years now. My absolutely miserable career as a short story author has shown me that I tend to work best when I can write consistently and have a large amount of immediate feedback. Blogging has served me well in this regards. It has given me the ability to editorialize on interesting events in a niche (technology) that I adore.
How do you find topics for your blog?
I draw from all kinds of sources, mainstream blogs like TechCrunch and LifeHacker; personal experience and my imagination. Blogging has given me the ability to fill in those holes that I have found in the writing of other mainstream bloggers. I hope that eventually people pick up my work and start filling in the holes that I have left behind.
What tools help you in your blogging—whether researching, writing, posting, dissemination, etc?
I am extremely old fashioned when it comes to blogging. I do most of my writing in Wordpad, then I copy and paste it into Wordpress and use Firefox and my brain to do the final editing. As for dissemination I am a “social media optimizer” for the most part, I promote my articles through sites like Digg and Reddit, and go in search of links from blog carnivals and the like. Promotion is really the hardest part of blogging, I would like to think there is a much easier way to get your content read but if there is, I have yet to find it.
I see you monetize your blog—which methods have been successful?
I use AdSense and Kontera. They have been fairly successful. You really need to tweek your layout to use those ad networks to their full potential.
What blogs do you read and what makes them interesting, useful or unique?
In no particular order I read: TechCrunch, Techmeme, Away With Words, Layercake and a dozen other sites through feeds. I like any site that either provides me with entertainment (Away With Words and Layercake) or good story ideas (TechCrunch and Teachmeme).
What is your favorite search engine besides Google & why?
They make other search engines?
How can search be improved, or has Google already figured it all out?
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 are your favorite social networking sites — business and/or pleasure?
MyBlogLog and LinkedIn. I adore Facebook conceptually, but I have given it up for the sake of my sanity. MyBlogLog allows me to see the happy, loving faces of my readership — which I find to be infinitely valuable in closing the loop between blogger and reader. LinkedIn, which I only check about once a month, is a great rolodex.
You have a vision of Web 3.0. What do you see?
I have quite a few visions of Web 3.0, more than you probably want me to explain in this interview. What I will do is provide the pedantic definition that I have been preaching for a while now.
Where Web 2.0 is the social web, Web 3.0 will be the semantic web defined more specifically as:
Highly specialized information silos, moderated by a cult of personality, validated by the community, and put into context with the inclusion of meta-data through widgets. I’ve written more than my share of posts on the subject, and they are pretty decent reading for anyone interested in the new Web.
Tell us about what you’re doing at Grooveshark.
I am currently acting as a consultant for Grooveshark’s online marketing department. I help them increase the scope of their blog coverage, drive traffic and generate compelling content. I also participate in the generation of viral content and advertising. Finally, I do a bit of white hat SEO for them.
For those who are not currently aware, Grooveshark is a DRM-Free peer to peer music distribution network that I dare say represents the future of what music downloading will be.
What can you tell us about Orangeply?
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 also a blog promotion tool and social network for bloggers to share their juiciest tips from industry events and conferences.
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.
Tell us what sparked the need for it.
Online reputation is becoming a huge market and “people search” is following close behind it. People want to know the latest dish on Paris Hilton as well as being able to understand what their own online presence looks like. We want to be to information dissemination what Google is for information aggregation. Basically, we want to present the web in tasty slices, if you will.
When will the site be launched?
There is a dual launch date. The community blog that is Orangeply should be up and running in the next week or so. There you will be able to submit rumors about just about anything. They will be moderated for good taste, and the community will then be allowed to vote on which ones are best.
The real meat of Orangeply, the social network, will be available…soon. We are currently in talks with strategic partners and hope to have development complete sometime before August. I refuse to put a firm date on it, because it could be finished two weeks from now as well if everything went perfectly.
Who else is involved with the Orangeply project?
I am currently working with Colin Hostert, and we are talking to a company out of Orlando, Florida about a possible strategic partnership.
Will you seek VC funding?
Absolutely, we are looking for Venture Capitalists who have a strong interest in Social Networking and Social Based Media. Our current capital requirements are fairly low, and we are always interested in hearing from investors with a passion for helping build disruptive technologies.
How do you plan on marketing Orangeply?
We hope to draw an initial contributor base from the blogging community. For example, we are currently looking for bloggers who will be attending Supernova on the 20th who would be willing to live blog any rumors that they may come across to the Orangeply blog. I have always felt that when it comes to social networks, Facebook did it right. They managed to build a community from scratch first by limiting the contributors to a controllable group and then expanding outwards from there. By tapping bloggers that we trust as our initial contributor base we hope to generate rich, compelling rumors and information about a wide array of topics. That way, when the social networking features are launched later this year we will have a high standard already set that will hopefully carry forward.
What great marketing books would you recommend to readers?
If I were to recommend two books on “marketing” they would be Charle Stross’ Accelerando and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. These books are both fiction, science fiction to be exact. That should tell you a lot right there.
What marketing blogs do you read?
I read Courtney Tuttles blog and John Chow on occasion.
What was the last good book you read?
The last great book that I read was Toast by Charles Stross. He is a wonderful science fiction author that doesn’t get enough credit. I generally hate “hard” Sci-Fi, but he manages to present it in a way that is infinitely more readable than almost any other author of his genre.
What was the last good movie you saw?
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.
What are your music tastes & what are you listening to now?
I am going to go with the old standby, I like everything. On my Sansa I am playing Regina Spektor, Jim Morrison, The Fiery Furnaces, The Decemberists and Johnny Cash — in no particular order.
Since I should ask one real estate question: Where do college/grad students students search for real estate?
I would say that they use local news sources and personal recommendations for most of their housing needs.
Thanks Steven. Good luck with Orangeply and all your other projects.
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Interview, Steven Spalding, Orangeply, How to Splti an Atom
