User:Chrisabraham
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Chris Abraham (March 8, 1970 – sometimes called Abey Baby and nicknamed [[Israel_Kamakawiwo%27ole Iz], the Big Doofus, and the Young King, is a pioneer in new media, new marketing, online social networks and blogging with a natural facility for anticipating the next big thing.
Chris is currently Founding Partner at Abraham Harrison LLC, doing new marketing, new media research and analysis, web and Internet strategy, and search engine optimization (SEO). Chris has worked from Washington, DC, off and on since attending the George Washington University in 1988.
Contents |
[edit] Early Life
Chris was born in Saint Mary's Medical Center in Jersey City, New Jersey, to Barbara and Bob, on March 8, 1970. Bob Abraham, Chris' father, began his life as a Marine from New Jersey. After meeting is wife, Barbara Dunn, he moved to Manhattan and attended the School of Visual Arts, where is studied fine art and illustration. Bob took a job at Ogilvy as an illustrator and art director.
After his younger brother, Jack Abraham, became interested in photography, Bob fell in love with photography he realized he could do an entire illustration in 1/250th of a second. Bob was sold on photography for the rest of his life.
Soon after being born, Barbara and Bob moved Chris over to Murray Hill, NY, on the Island of Manhattan. After Chris was born, Bob left Ogilvy and started an advertising firm of his own, Robert Abraham Production (RAP), which them became Maloney, Abraham & Dunn.
By the time Chris was six, his parents decided they wanted to upgrade their island from being on the Hudson River to being on the Pacific Ocean and they move to Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1976.
Chris attended Aliamanu Elementary Schoolin the neighborhood of Salt Lake from kindergarten through sixth grade and then Saint Louis School on Kalaepohaku from seventh grade through graduation in 1988.
Chris was a member of the Saint Louis JROTC Rangers Club, wrestled for the Saint Louis Crusaders, was captain and founder of the speech and debate team, and was student body president.
[edit] Turning a Nerd into a Geek
Since elementary school, Chris was a nerd. His parent kept him neck-deep in books. NPR and PBS was a mainstay, and he played lots and lots of Dungeons & Dragons. Early in his life, Chris needed to start writing his elementary school papers with a typewriter, so awful was his handwriting.
In 1983, at 13, Chris used all the money in his little savings account, $2,500, to buy one of the first IBM AT computers in the entire neighborhood. With a 1200 baud modem, a green screen, two 5 1/2" floppy hard drives, and no hard drive, the machine required a bootable disk at all times.
The modem allowed Chris to go online, logging onto all of the ANSI BBS's on the island. Chris has been online since 1983, although he didn't get his first Internet email address until much later, in 1993: cabraham@media.sra.com.
[edit] The Washington Years
After graduating Saint Louis, Chris bolted to Washington DC, where he attended GWU.
As a young man just out of college in the early 1990's, Chris discovered newly-emerging web publishing as a way to showcase his writing. In those early days, the unformed structures of the Internet required every would-be web author to be a quick-learning hacker just to be able to put his work online. Soon, English major Chris was as much techie geek as well-read, bookish, weltschmerzen-suffering young writer.
[edit] Early Career
And since technologist positions were paying extraordinarily well, while creative writing was, and remains, a one-way ticket to the welfare roles, Chris sold out and became a corporate tech so he could afford his Mercedes, his Nikon, and his piles and piles of Velvia slide film.
[edit] Hobbies
Chris ran memes.org for over five years and coined the Wikipedia terms mediasphere, memespace, and memesphere. Chris is an avid rower and houses a Hudson Heavyweight racing single shell at a local Washington boathouse.
[edit] Passions
Chris attends Renaissance Weekend, rows a single rowing scull, and studies memetics for fun. Chris is a voracious reader and a media whore.
[edit] Professional Life
Chris worked at Picture Network International for acclaimed National Geographic photograper Nathan Ben, first as an image editor, then in the SRA image media lab, managing lots of Sun Solaris boxen, and doing customer support, where Chris discovered the Internet, Gopher, the command line interface, Unix, and later the World Wide Web.
After PNI, Chris moved to Hawaii to work as VP of Pacific Rim Productions, bringing the web to his father's audio visual photo studio, creating his first corporate website for Pacific Rim. PacRim, run by Bob Abraham, Chris' father, produced multimedia slide shows and commissioned photography for Hawaiian and International clients.
A professional stock photographer, Chris signed contracts with Pacific Stock and The Stock Market (now called Corbis)
After leaving Hawaii, Chris worked for Proxicom as a web developer until he packed up his Nikons and bought a round-the-world ticket. Chris traveled abroad with a bag of cameras, shooting stock for both Pacific Stock and Corbis, traveling throughout the Pacific, Asia, and Europe.
Chris joined Education for the Arts, based in Kalamazoo, as a creative writing teacher. EFA was a magnet program for high school students. The creative writing program was the first accredited online course to high school students.
Upon returning to Washington, DC, Chris took a job as a contractor to the US Treasury Department Office of the CIO for FCBS as Senior Application Engineer.
Chris left Treasury in order to take a job at the dot com startup Caucus Systems as Online Community Builder and junior Linux and Unix SA.
After Caucus, Chris joined beehive GMBH as Managing Director of beehive North America. Beehive NA developed web applications using Zope as well as offering Zope training. Chris started the Zope Python User Group (ZPUGDC) in Washington.
Chris is founding partner of Abraham and Harrison. Just previous to launching is own firm, Chris got canned as a PR Exec at Edelman within 90-days is working on the Online Advocacy team in Public Affairs in Washington, DC. Go figure. Well, considering all the allegations against Edelman of flogging, astroturfing, and blogger bribery, Chris is probably better off. Chris is a self-professed media whore and "blog expert." Chris lives and works in Washington, DC, and maintains the blog Chris Abraham - Because the Medium is the Message. Chris also teaching blogging workshops for the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and maintains a blog for the class, The Applied Blogging Workshop.
[edit] Personal Life
Chris is still an eligible bachelor and looking for the right women to support his blogging habit.
[edit] Underworld Connections
The international consulting firm Haft, Harrison & Wolfson has also taken him on as a partner, but there are suspicions that they are just exploiting him for his underworld connections.
[edit] Smart Mobs Bio
Chris Abraham is a strategiest and technologist at New Media Strategies. He has been a technologist for over a decade, focusing on online education, virtual community building, web publishing, and blogging. Chris is especially interested in memetics and emergence and how they direct culture. Chris was found in the company of a brood of Unicorns and is believed to have been bred for his skills in magic.
[edit] Projects
Chris ran memes.org for over five years and coined the Wikipedia terms mediasphere, memespace, and memesphere.
