I AM A 1961 model, more than 90 per cent water, with various salts, electrolytes and industry-inspired inorgano chlorines mixed together and enclosed in a rubbery wrapping. In short, I am a human.
I live in Toronto. I attended the University of Toronto in the 1980s and while there began writing for the Globe and Mail, Canada’s National Newspaper.
That started more than a decade in print journalism, either staff or freelance, for publications such as Time, Fortune, the Independent (U.K.), Saturday Night Magazine, Financial Times of Canada, Old Farmers’ Almanac, Toronto Star and others. I also produced television for Canada’s CBC-TV and contributed to some television and radio stations in Canada and the United States.
I have been lucky to interview some of the most unique people to grace the planet, including Paul Reichmann, Kenneth Thomson, Bill Gates, Pierre Trudeau and others, and I have worked with some great editors, who often let me investigate things uncommon or unexplored.
But another pull came in the early 1990s. I pondered forms of ‘needs’ journalism, as opposed to ‘news’ journalism, and looked for ways and publishing styles to effectively create an accessible resource of needs-based information. I wanted to craft an easy-to-use information resource to help people define and fulfill needs more effectively.
For a Canadian bank I developed a database of finance-related articles, but it was a direct dial-up service quickly usurped by the web. The looming informaion super-highway, as we once called it, captivated me 30 years ago.
With its mid-1990s maturing as the web, I jumped in full-throttle. I began to develop numerous sites. I developed notions about the evolution of the online economy and started investing in descriptive and generic domain addresses.
They indeed became valuable, as was predicted almost a decade ago by the monopoly domain registrar of the day, Network Solutions, in its pages promoting domains as investments.
I also have published numerous web sites and have more in development.