This should be a regular feature on HN, somewhat akin to "Who's hiring?" and "Who wants to be hired?". Maybe not on a monthly basis, but it would be cool to see periodically on some cadence.
There's a lot I could say on this topic, but TBH, I don't want to go into most of it in detail Right Now for various reasons. The main reason being simply that the side project stuff I might want to call attention to is largely not in the state where I'd want people looking at it right this minute. And the reasons for that, in turn, are manifold...
The good news is, progress is being made, and I should have some projects ready to put "out there" kinda soon'ish. Yay for being vague, I know. But I've learned to be leery of making hard promises on stuff like this. So much shit happens that you can't control. See above about "manifold reasons".
Anyway, we're not making any money yet... in fact, we've been losing money since day one, but thankfully the amount lost is relatively small since our expenses are small. Nothing that I can't just pay out of my $DAYJOB salary.
All of that notwithstanding, if you want a somewhat outdated view of what I've been working on for a while, see:
If things go well, this year will see lots of improvements to the underlying projects, videos, blog entries, and tutorials explaining how to use everything, and entirely new stuff not shown at the above links - as well as finally having everything available in SaaS form.
Sadly my backlog of "ideas to implement" remains far larger than my bandwidth for implementing stuff, so FSM only knows if/when some of the stuff I want to do will ever see the light of day.
NOTE: the "demo" links you may find if you click through the above links are offline at the moment. I'm in the middle of a big infrastructure migration / automation effort; moving a lot of stuff from Linode and "other" to OVH, consolidating DNS at Route 53, automating deployments with Ansible, etc. And one thing that hasn't been done yet is to bring up the new demo server(s).
Yeah, the material that's out there right now doesn't do a good job of explaining the uses for this stuff. I had, at one time, gotten pretty decent at giving the pitch F2F and had it down in my head pretty good, but I doubt I could do it justice now. Part of the problem here being exactly that a lot of this stuff has lain largely dormant for a few years now due to external forces. Back when I was actively trying to sell the stuff to people, we had some interest from some people, and probably would have had some revenue already if A. I were more of a natural salesperson and B. I didn't have a heart-attack at an inopportune time.
That said, I totally hear you. There's going to be a lot of stuff coming to better articulate the vision of how this stuff can be used and how it delivers value.
To answer your question though:
What is your audience for this?
For what is really the core of the vision:
"Large companies (where we still need to refine exactly what the threshold defining 'large' is) with many disparate IT systems who want a more unified "knowledge layer" on top of all of those disparate systems, such that they can find content without having to jump from system to system so much, find useful connections between disparate bits of knowledge, and manage actions associated with content".
The genesis of all of this was an observation I had years ago, which somehow amazingly seems to still be true, that pretty much all enterprise search solution are a shit-show, and coupled with a belief that "social" tooling (things similar to FB, Reddit, etc.) can be useful tools in an organizational setting. Add semantic web tech to the mix, and I think there's a way to build a much better KM solution.
Now, pretend I just said all of that 10 or 15 years ago. It would have sounded better then. One unfortunate aspect of how all of this has played out is that the world has moved on in some ways. Things where we had interest a decade+ ago won't seem particularly novel now. But the key, I believe, is that many of those ideas still hold value even without being "cutting edge" anymore. The upside, if there is any, is that at one point some of the stuff we were talking about was actually pretty innovative, so the Rest Of The World has caught up to us, but perhaps not too much more. The "knowledge graph" stuff in particular is something that people are still talking about. OTOH, "social" tooling in the enterprise is pretty passe now.
So where I'm at now is working to update all the "old stuff" from a tech currency standpoint, get everything back to a good stable place, and then start thinking more about what has to change (if anything!) to represent something we can sell in today's world.
Sorry for the long ramble. Not wanting to do just that is why I almost didn't post in this thread at all. I've said before that I could probably write a book about my experiences, and at this point I probably should. :-)
There's a lot I could say on this topic, but TBH, I don't want to go into most of it in detail Right Now for various reasons. The main reason being simply that the side project stuff I might want to call attention to is largely not in the state where I'd want people looking at it right this minute. And the reasons for that, in turn, are manifold...
The good news is, progress is being made, and I should have some projects ready to put "out there" kinda soon'ish. Yay for being vague, I know. But I've learned to be leery of making hard promises on stuff like this. So much shit happens that you can't control. See above about "manifold reasons".
Anyway, we're not making any money yet... in fact, we've been losing money since day one, but thankfully the amount lost is relatively small since our expenses are small. Nothing that I can't just pay out of my $DAYJOB salary.
All of that notwithstanding, if you want a somewhat outdated view of what I've been working on for a while, see:
http://fogbeam.github.io/
https://www.fogbeam.com/
If things go well, this year will see lots of improvements to the underlying projects, videos, blog entries, and tutorials explaining how to use everything, and entirely new stuff not shown at the above links - as well as finally having everything available in SaaS form.
Sadly my backlog of "ideas to implement" remains far larger than my bandwidth for implementing stuff, so FSM only knows if/when some of the stuff I want to do will ever see the light of day.
NOTE: the "demo" links you may find if you click through the above links are offline at the moment. I'm in the middle of a big infrastructure migration / automation effort; moving a lot of stuff from Linode and "other" to OVH, consolidating DNS at Route 53, automating deployments with Ansible, etc. And one thing that hasn't been done yet is to bring up the new demo server(s).