You might not realize the role that Portland — and to that extent a couple of particular Portland writers — played in the era that was Web 2.0. One of them was Adam DuVander who served as the editor of Programmable Web, the repository for a wealth of the information on the APIs that drove Web 2.0. And the other was the first writer hired at TechCrunch who then wound up as co-editor at ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick.
For this post, I’m going to focus on Marshall — I mean, Adam is great too — because that’s who Richard MacManus, the founder of RWW, focuses on in the latest edition of his serialized memoir Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley’s Web 2.0 Revolution.
As I got to know him more, I discovered that Marshall was very much a native of Oregon. He lived in Portland, a small city renowned for its Keep Portland Weird slogan. I’d not yet visited the “bridge city” (another term that suggested a city that wasn’t your ordinary urban center), but it soon became clear that Marshall would never move to the big smoke of San Francisco. He was almost the polar opposite of, say, Mike Arrington or Om Malik, for whom the big city was a necessary conduit for their insider networking. Even Pete Cashmore had decided he needed to emulate Arrington and Malik, rather than stay put in the UK. But Marshall, I knew shortly after I met him, would always live in Portland—not so much a Silicon Valley outsider as someone who wanted to deploy his talents on his own terms.
The self-assurance I’d noticed in Marshall from our first email interactions became even more evident as the conference progressed. On Wednesday he published an excellent report on APIs and developer platforms that quoted and summarized the thoughts of people he’d spoken to at the event. He appeared to be at ease wandering the conference venue and chatting to people about web technology. He also used quotes from people he’d surveyed on Twitter.
I’m greatly enjoying Richard’s look back on those strangely heady days of the post-mortgage-crisis tech bubble that began to take full advantage of gradients, APIs, and that still somewhat new Cloud infrastructure thing. And I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight Portland’s place in that story, thanks to Marshall and a number of other Portland-area writers — on RWW and elsewhere — that helped document the comings and goings of that Web 2.0 era.
If that sort of thing strikes you as interesting — or if you’re curious about the perspective from outside of Silicon Valley — I encourage you to follow along.
[Full disclosure: I worked for RWW for a while as a late night stringer. While I wasn’t composing the best prose or doing Marshall-level research, a post or two did wind up on the front page of Digg from time to time.]
More news from this week
