User:Websage

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John Anthony Hartman (born September 12th 1970 in Oklahoma_City)he is the President of a company called [Feedia]. He lives in the northwest and is heavily involved with social media and the web 2.0 space.

John was previously the technology evangelist for the Digital Universe Foundation working closely with Larry Sanger and many others to develop the Encyclopedia of Earth project and the Digital Universe.

[edit] SELF-BIO

My Name is John Anthony Hartman and I am the President of a company called Feedia.

I was very fortunate to have had family that owned a computer store in 1981 this kindled the spark that now burns through out my life. From desktop to server and all the topology in-between I have worked the full spectrum of the Information Technology. I have been working with connected networks since before the web existed. 300 baud modems and the like back when BBS was the WWW of it’s time.

Inspired by Rheingold and Lanier I had a stint as a Virtual Reality consultant back in the mid 90’s. This was an unbelievable time and some of the technologies I saw back then still have yet to come to maturity. If you really want to understand this space watch what DARPA, NASA or the Military are doing. The world was not ready for VR on the consumer end and I moved into my other passion at the time this little thing that Tim was working on called the World Wide Web.

I worked with Intel early on beta testing some of the very first “web” servers and developed what I have to guess were some of the very first Intranets. I tried in vein to get video on demand project put together with one of the major video rental companies. 14.4, what are you crazy, they told me it would take forever to download. What I tried to convince them was that by the time they brokered all the deals and built the infrastructure needed that the bandwidth would catch up. Alas in my exuberant youth I still had some lessons to learn about big corporations.

I ran a consulting firm prior to the dot bomb and then took an offer I could not refuse from one of my clients that I was doing Y2K consulting for.

I then went on to become the Sr. Network Engineer for an international company with 30 subsidiaries where I modernized that network. I was responsible for entire corporate network including LAN, WAN, and Internet presence. I researched, proposed, and implemented new technologies as well as maintaining legacy systems. I worked with government agencies and major corporations on a litany of projects in the IT space and one day decided it was time for a change.

I left and went to work on a project that is trying to change the world by creating the Digital Universe. Based in part on Carl Sagan’s borrowed idea from the writings of Isaac Asimov that someday there may exist an Encyclopedia Galactica. “The Digital Universe aims to be the definitive repository of human knowledge online.” I ended up as the Technology Evangelist for the Digital Universe Foundation (DUF) where I worked with major scientific organizations and universities to create next generation vetted internet content. Developing Semantic web strategies and helping to evolve the Digital Universe from a customized Mozilla browser hooked to a PostgreSQL DB to a browser independent platform using Dojo Ajax framework and a customized Media Wiki implementation called the Encyclopedia of Earth.

This was an amazing project to work with but the itch of entrepreneurialism in me needed to be scratched and thus I stepped back from the DUF and started my own company around social media and this new web 2.0 space. I also wanted to jump into the metaverse space and extend my experience from projects like creating a prototype for 3D data visualization of information about the Indian Ocean Tsunami Disaster in 2004 and present that data overlaid onto a globe in web browser. Looking at platforms like Second Life, Google Earth and others to start developing what some are referring to as web 3.0. You can read a little more about this in a post I wrote entitled The Power of New Media.

I am happily married and have an amazing little boy who both make life a joy.