My main interest now is in the transformative potential of the emerging person-centered social media.

I read mostly blogs... starting from just a selected few... and following the links from there:

• dana boyd (apophenia)
• Marc Andreessen
• Michael Parekh (on IT)
• Charlene Li (Forrester)
• Brad Feld (Thoughts)
• Simeon Simeonov
• John Battelle (Searchblog)
• Jon Udell
• Mashable
• Meg Hourihan (Megnut)
• Read/WriteWeb
• Jason Calacanis

I must be a considerate idealist... according to this personal DNA test... :)

We created Aidpage so that people come together to help each other. We believe that web enabled "peer-to-peer" micro-helping will meet needs not readily met by government, nonprofits, or business.

Aidpage is a response to two related problems affecting millions of people in the US and globally - (1) erosion of traditional support networks, and (2) institutionalized aid growing increasingly complex, conditional, selective, and competitive.

Erosion of traditional support networks

Today's global markets by all definitions do not exactly "care" about individual livelihoods. People generally accept this as a fact of life, try to prepare accordingly, and do not expect "help" from the markets. People try to develop high levels of competitiveness, autonomy, mobility, and capability to change. This, however, accelerates the disintegration of traditional social environments built on cooperation, mutual dependencies, locality, and predictability - like extended family, neighborhoods, childhood friends, etc.

The erosion of these traditional environments has two aspects - (1) the psychological loss of informal, unconditional "giving and taking", and (2) the practical loss of a historically well established support layer for people "in need."

We design Aidpage as the "people aid people" platform - based on the following principles:

• person-to-person giving is a basic human need
• empathy and compassion need no incentives nor conditions
• everybody always "gives" and "takes"
• immediacy and informality work better than "process"
• people are "wired" for trust.

Institutionalized aid growing increasingly complex, conditional, selective, and competitive

Institutionalized aid (government and nonprofit) in the US is a huge system driven by over a trillion in tax and donation dollars annually. The distribution system is so complicated and vast that it is rather opaque to traditional processes of public scrutiny. Episodic media interest - notably after big disasters - "let's see how the money will be spent" - is only scratching the surface of the problems. Despite recent well intended efforts, nonprofit organizations still largely operate as purely private organizations that do not feel enough pressure or need to be transparent to the public. The knowledge about the bysantine mechanics of the aid system is embodied in fully blown professional occupations like fundraising, program development, grant making, grant administration, grant writing, grant consulting, etc.

Most people turning to government aid are already having trouble coping with competitive markets. They are indeed looking for unconditional assistance. True, there are the big "entitlement" programs like Medicare and Social Security. But also true is that many other vital areas of government support are strictly conditional, competition-based, selective, restrictive, outcome based, and policy driven - such as student aid, medical expenses assistance, small business assistance, housing and home repair assistance, etc. Average Jane and Joe have to "inquire", "apply", "prove", "qualify", "compete", "perform", and "report" - to get the aid that is funded by their own tax money. If only they knew how to do all this.

Nonprofit aid has even more openly discriminatory distribution policies - tolerated on the assumption that the money is "private". But let's see how "private" is it. Annually, the nonprofit sector gets about $250 billion in tax incentivized private donations ($210 billion of them from individuals)... and about $390 billion from government grants and contracts - pure taxpayers' money that is (see data source).

Access to institutionalized aid is acutely problematic for the intended beneficiaries. Naturally, there is an unending public interest in the "who, how, how much, and why" of the distribution processes and outcomes. And there is an unending frustration with the complexity, lack of transparency, selectiveness, and competitiveness of a system whose main purpose is to help people.

Information on these processes is publicly available - residing in thousands of different sources and formats. However, the information is one sided - it is only produced by institutions and naturally reflects "institutional" points of view and bureaucratic "defending of turf." The other main participants and de facto "owners" of the system - the aid beneficiaries - do not have any outlets, formats, or platforms they could use to publicly speak out, discuss, and reflect on these processes. Money wise - the system is a full circle from the public up and then from the institutions down. But information wise - it works one way only... whenever it works... to the extent it works.

We design Aidpage as a bottom up conversational media:

• aggregating large bodies of information offered by participating publishers
• easy self-publishing (blog-like but non-geek)
• audience participation on each page - commenting, adding of links, system-wide communication
• system-wide findability - search, tagging
• public space, mutual visibility, transparency.

See also:

• Why Aidpage? (a more passionate answer from my partner Ivan Ivanov)

A big, big "Thank You" to all aidmates who gave time and care here on Aidpage in 2006!

WHO~KNEW, soulight ... you definitely are THE aidmates of 2006!

And everyone of us - here on Aidpage - is the "Person of the Year" for 2006! They say, in this article in TIME Magazine, that "really a revolution" is happening... enabled by the web:

"It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing."

But we knew that long before hearing it from TIME Magazine, didn't we?

Merry Christmas!

Great choice of TIME Magazine for Person of the Year. Here is the bit from the article we like most:

"It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing..."

Here is more from the article:

"The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year...

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it."

Here is the full article...