As you will know if you’ve been following my FriendFeed lately, Kaplak.com and all subdomains suffered a a major wreck when the server crashed due to the change of some hardware. What was worse is that the latest backup of the database turned out to be 3 months old :
I’ve now managed to reconstruct the lost articles on the blog – now in a new home at http://blog.kaplak.net (hosted by Slicehost) as well as the lost comments, partly thanks to Google’s cached versions of the articles, partly thanks to Backtype for comments to the latest article which was not cached by Google. Unfortunately Backtype doesn’t carry the accurate timestamp information of posted comments, so the timestamp information on those 6 comments remains permanently lost. But it’s a small price to pay in order to recover almost all Kaplak Blog data.
Over the course of the next half year or so I will begin to redefine the purpose of Kaplak (a process already in the works). To a very large degree I will have my hands full as a teacher of history and media studies – especially as someone learning and aiming to become a good teacher. But for one thing, I still very much want to maintain and improve my web building and web developing skills in my spare time. And for the second, I still want to explore the problem we set out to solve (”helping niche producers have an easier time connecting with their markets”), which in turn have shown to be a wide set of interwoven and ongoing challenges to be worked with continuously rather than just one problem to “solve”. In other words, the Kaplak site will take form and shape again, as we continuously rebuild.
Before we begin exploring concepts and concrete examples, we may do well from presenting the boundaries, within which this blog will operate.
First, this blog is a blog of a start-up company, which has the overall purpose to make money, eventually. This is worth noting. We view everything through this lense of creating a surplus of value, first for our customers (for without these, we won’t make any ourselves) and second, for Kaplak. It is also, and most importantly, a blog exploring a specific set of problems concerning cultural distribution on the internet. Last, but not least, it is a channel to communicate our progress, to eventually link to our demos and prototypes for you to try them out, and to ask for help filling in our surveys.
We need to get in touch with people, who share our problem and vision, and who can help define, explore and shape it. We need to test assumptions, collect qualified data and ressources for us to build valuable, flexible, lasting solutions to the problems at hand. We also need to hook up with people, who has very specific expertises and talents, in order to succeed with Kaplak.
According to the description for Kaplak.com in our internal wiki, the blog is part of Kaplak’s strategy to generate traffic from very specific individuals, which could be our first early customers, actively looking on the web for solutions to their very specific problem. We do this best by writing a well-written, (somewhat) regularly updated blog with great articles, containing
[...] valuable information relevant for our target group, around the specific theme “the ecology and economy of niche products in the digital realm”, in the past, present and future. Secondly, the blog will seek to identify challenges (at the core) for niche producers, and thirdly, explore how Kaplak is going to meet these challenges. At a later stage, the blog will also seek to follow the development of Kaplak prototypes, and present them to the public as we go.
To examine the ecology and economy of niche products in the digital realm means :
In the past, present and future
Understand the premises we stand on, past and present examples to learn from, and future technologies and social patterns which promise new solutions to known problems.
To identify challenges
What are the problems met by niche producers? What are the challenges for their customers? What does the digital consumer-producer convergence entail for cultural production and distribution? How does one get “seen” on the internet? How does one get paid? And much more.
How is Kaplak going to meet the challenges?
Conceptually, architecturally and technically, how do we want to tackle the problems, we need to solve? What does our solutions look like? How do they work? How much do they cost? How can they be made available?
