iThinkMedia was founded by me, Vee, and has been published on the Internet since July 31, 1999! It started a few years after graduating from SDSU in Educational Technology. Those were the days—I had a front-row seat to the dawn of the information age. As a graduate student in Educational Technology at SDSU, I began experimenting with something called the World Wide Web in 1994.
I remember building web pages with a notepad/Dreamweaver and thinking, “This is going to get tedious and complicated as sites scale with thousands of pages.” I also recall consulting with the San Diego Tribune before they had a substantial web presence. My mind was racing because no one was developing dynamically generated database-backed websites. However, I had just read Philip Greenspun’s book, “Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing,” and it resonated with me, completely changing my perspective on the web.
Another book that greatly influenced my early thinking was “Being Digital” by Nicholas Negroponte. What’s funny is that it’s still a great read. Back then, I was so immersed in the information age that it felt like everyone else was too. But years later, I realized they weren’t. I’ve often been on the bleeding edge of movements when it’s hard to gain traction.
Sherry Turkle’s book, “Life on the Screen in the Age of the Internet,” was incredibly useful in those early days and should be required reading for everyone who uses the Internet today!
In the late ’90s and early 2000s, I became involved with Open Source and learned about a project called PostNuke in late 2000, early 2001. I was an active contributor and had the opportunity to meet the father of the Open Source movement at the O’Reilly Open Source Software conference in San Diego in 2002. It was a great time, although I didn’t realize then that we were making history. In 2008, as the President of the Zikula Software Foundation, I collaborated with William Lizito of NameWire to rebrand PostNuke and bring it into the Web 2.0 world. The new brand name and logo were created from several Zulu words, one of the official languages of South Africa. “Zila ukudla” means fast and “Lula” means easy, which reflects the main attributes of the software. Shortly before the seventh birthday of the PostNuke project, which originated as a fork of PHP-Nuke, it was renamed and launched as the Zikula Application Framework.
Additionally, I made a significant contribution to Distance-Educator.com, where I shared my insights and expertise in the field of educational technology and distance learning.
Most recently, my time has been focused on digital tools, AI, gardening, sustainability, and building community both online and IRL.