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Well, it turns out that I’m an award-winning toadie. As all three of my readers know, I have this day job, being an software architect and a tech lead, and well, the client I work with, we just won a [voice mode=”the_old_man_from_a_christmas_story]major award![/voice]

Yep, picked up “Best Use of Technology” in the 2007 MITX awards show. Pretty snazzy. Oh well, done tooting my own horn. Carry on!

p.s. that’s me in the photo, NOT, wearing a suit.

As I’ve been hinting around for a while now (better part of this year) there is a new site in the works, and its finally starting to come together. The site called, The Autonomic Us, will be the first DIY-centric social networking/bookmarking site specifically designed for those of us into DIY projects (zines, music, crafts, what-have-you.)

This has been a long time in coming and after spending a lot of time, and I do mean A LOT of time looking at the mainstream options (Facebook, Digg, Mulitply, MySpace, Orkut, Friendster…) the realization came to me, as did the original realization to build DIYSearch. There is just too damn much noise out there.

No, Autonomic is NOT out to replace the use of these sites, that would be ridiculous, but the goal behind it is to lower the signal to noise ratio out there for the news/events/announcements folks like you and me, care about.

One thing I am going to be rolling out with this site is the inclusion of Google’s OpenSocial API. It is not my intention to create yet another bloody website you have to create an account on, so the idea is to have Autonomic act as  a host for these other sites and utilize Autonomic’s functionality (posting content, friending, chatting) without worrying about whether or not you have an account. There will also be a Facebook widget as well. I should also say that if you have an existing account on DIYSearch (if you added links) that that will obviously work with Autonomic.

So, when will Autonomic be launching? First of the year is the target. I don’t have a specific date, but it will be in January of 2008, which will mark its “public beta” period.

I’m going to keep posting developments as they are needed.

Stay tuned.

So, while I actually started DIYSearch in May of 1996, the actual thing didn’t get going until November 1996. Two years later I bought the DIYSEARCH.COM domain.

Here we are, 11 years. Over a decade. Its funny to think that we’ve been doing this Web Two-Oh thing (you know, user-generated content/submissions) for that long, way before it had some ridiculous pointless tag attached to it.

To mark our 11th birthday, we have decided to beg and plead with anyone who will listen to help sponsor this project. Its starting to hurt a little (paying all of the bandwidth and server costs) and… well I’m not here to bitch and complain, just to drop a little hint. Wink wink, nudge nudge.

Anyway, 11 years. That’s a long time. Yeah sure there are a few gaps in the history, like where the site went down for almost 3 weeks because I lost my job and had to move and find a new job, yeah things break and I try to get to them as fast as possible. Its the way of such things. The site and the project has been rock stable for a year, without any major mishaps or blunders (on my part) so I’m going to take that as a positive.

I’ve been really enjoying the survey responses, and have found them immensely helpful and useful. Such as over 90 percent of you who took the survey think DIYSearch is still relevant, even after all these years. You also have been providing some excellent ideas for future enhancements, real enhancements, stuff that I am going to work on, as soon as Autonomic is launched.

Oh yeah, and lastly, I believe we have a winner for the name change. Oh don’t worry, DIYSearch isn’t going away, but I feel very strongly over re-naming it. I’ll have an announcement soon (weeks) about the new name.

Well, happy 11 DIYSearch.