I Am Still Alive

I’ve just finished setting up a skeleton for the places section on I Am Still Alive. It’s still a bit half baked, but Martha added the studio data from the We Dig Yoga project which never really took – so we are starting off with 80+ yoga studios in Los Angeles and New York and a handful of my Brooklyn favorites.

In the next week or so, I will be opening user signups and allowing folks to claim listings, to add new ones and to add comments. Relating specifically to yoga, I will set it up so that if a studio claims their own listing, they will then be able to post their course schedules (which users will also be able to subscribe to or send to their mobile phones). This is pretty much just the first step in opening things up a bit and trying to engage people in a new way.

Ahem.

Admittedly, this all may seem a little strange. I mean, this is a design company’s website. Why add these strange off-topic (get back on that press, bro, and show me some wood type) social features? Where’s your portfolio? Well, I have been doing a lot of social web development recently and I have come to a few conclusions.

• I run I Am Still Alive. I am not a client list and a portfolio. I don’t really care about that kind of self-promotion. It’s a lazy short-hand.

• I want to spend my time working on the web producing things whose roots dig deep into community – that’s just the space I want to explore further and, between client work and other projects, I want iamstillalive.net to be something I am jazzed about building out (and not just another app to maintain as technology and other things change).

• I don’t want to spend all my time on one idea. There are a lot of sites out there that try to hone in completely on one niche, build a community around that (deviating only very rarely – what would the advertisers say), and do a good job satisfying the people involved. I really dig yoga. I go a couple times a week and am interested to learn about the ideas that undergird its practice, but I am more interested in the folks who are also into yoga. And by and large those people have interests that are broader than just yoga and its tenets. It’s pretty much the same story for letterpress or Ruby. But they are a medium and a programming language and I’d rather focus on people.

Clearly, iamstillalive.net is not going to be transformed into a yoga (or letterpress or Ruby or whatever) community. The different features on the site will largely be guided by my own diverse interests – of which yoga (or letterpress or Ruby or whatever) is one – but my goal here is to build a site around small applications that benefit the folks who also share my interests.

I am going to leave this at that for now.