King  Gary 

I’ve been getting several emails asking some questions, some of which have been said in my 15MOF segment.

Here they are:

Q: What age did you begin web development?
A: 2001 (age 13)

Also, the transcript for my ’speech’ is now here. (Since mesh posted the events on ITC, here’s the transcript if you don’t want to bother listening to it - still hasn’t happened yet):

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So, first of all, I hope everyone’s having a great time here at mesh today. I know I am.

Okay, well as you know, my name is Gary King from kinggary.com, and I’m a high school senior. If you read the mesh blog, you’ll also know that the team was nice enough to sell me an already-sold-out mesh student’s ticket, apparently due to my tenacity. But, I think there’s something even more important than simply being tenacious. Now, I know you’ve probably already heard this before, but it’s about being passionate. It’s about choosing something you love and really working at it. I’m not simply talking about these tickets; I’m talking about something on a grander scale. Now, I’m not here to sell you anything today; instead, I’m going to tell you a story of how the web can really empower a person with technology, without any regards to age, race, or gender.

Myself, I grew up in a fairly conservative family. When I talk about web 2.0, Ajax, or Ruby on Rails, no one knows what I’m talking about. Everyone just stares, and nods their head. Most of my friends are going into medicine and business, and so it’s obvious that my interest didn’t stem from my immediate environment. I think what attracted me the most to computers and to the web in particular, was how websites often seemed organic. People could interact with others on websites, leave comments, and post on blogs.

Several years ago, in 2001, I started learning PHP and MySQL, and I was eventually able to create entire websites with communities. In the next few years, I had a total of 60 clients; some big, some small. I eventually had to create my own project management tool, as products such as Basecamp hadn’t come along yet. I learned a lot of lessons along the way, and some of the most important ones were that you need to be flexible. You need to keep things simple. And you need to be focused. These very same ideals can be applied to most web 2.0 websites. Today’s web empowers people like never before. It gives them a voice with a blog. Open source allows anyone to use software, free of charge. And communication, organization, and collaboration allow anyone to participate in what we now call web 2.0. These are some of the strongest driving forces of today’s web.

My generation is not only becoming more and more involved; it’s also becoming more and more influential every day. As someone told me yesterday here at mesh, it’s the parents who have the money, but it’s the teenagers who really flex their purchasing power. Maybe not always with cash, but quite often, with clicks. Just look at MySpace, or the popularity of SMS and text messaging. Teenagers and young adults represent a considerable percentage of these businesses. Also, a learning curve barely exists for these websites and products, or at least, they have more time to spend and learn how to use them. I was able to get a number of my less-than-savvy friends to just jump in and start using websites like Writely, or Bloglines and RSS feeds. It’s often important to target this particular age group if you want your website to have maximum exposure.

I know for sure that I’m not the only student taking advantage of the technologies that are available to anyone who is connected to the web, even in this audience alone. I think that, now that it’s much easier to actually create websites by hiring the people with the proper know-how, it’s now important to change our perspective. Web 2.0 is considered many things, and one of them is a paradigm shift, changing the way we see and use the web as we know it. I’m sure there are some of you who are familiar with the recent debate regarding the number of subscribers to TechCrunch, and how many new websites are simply targeting a niche market without any thought on the rest of the market. It’s true that there are many websites that often force themselves to target only a small market, and so it’s important that we attempt to incorporate as much of the market as possible, unless it’s your goal to only target a specific audience. This is all pretty exciting to be a part of it, and that’s probably one of the main reasons most of you in the audience are here today. And so, I think it’s important that not only adults, but teenagers are invited to participate in this evolution of the web. Given the right tools, anyone can embody their creativity into something real, and it might even be something that no one has ever thought of before; something new, brave, and bold.As a certain Steve Jobs once said, “You’ve got to find what you love”.

Thank you.

(If you have any questions or anything that you’d like to ask, feel free to ask me when you spot me walking around in the atrium.) You can visit me at kinggary.com

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