Two years ago I co-founded Pligg.com, both a popular open source content management system and a website for support. The site began as a simple forum for users to report bugs and bugfixes and slowly evolved into today’s Blog, Wiki, forum and Shop.

Founded on December 17, 2005 by Damon “AshDigg” Wirth and I, Pligg began as an English translated version of the popular Spanish website Menéame. Over the two years since the founding of Pligg it has gone through drastic re-designs and added functionalities. What had begun as what some call a “digg-clone” has developed into one of the most social content management systems available.

I spent four years studying film and nonlinear post production in college. My college only taught one product for editing in the film department: Avid. We had state of the art facilities with a range of Avid products that would suit everything from the beginner filmmaker to the most advanced color correction labs available on the market. All of the hands on experience with Avid products made me comfortable with dealing with editing films and that resulted in me specializing my studies on post production my senior year.

My personal relationship with Avid Technology began in Spring 2007 when I had a chance to be an Avid student representative at NAB 2007. I was selected as a student representative for Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) along with three other SCAD students. About twenty students from 5 other schools were invited to be a part of the Avid NAB experience, and during this time we were asked to video blog about the show.

I was later selected to be an intern at Avid during the Summer of 2007, where I was part of their Marketing department and worked on several projects. Two of the project were websites based on open source technologies that were designed to help market Avid to a larger audience. One site targeted users who were familiar with Apple’s post production software and were making the switch to Avid. The website template was designed to mimic the look and feel of a Macintosh operating system and feature videos designed to familiarize the user with Avid software. Another website was designed to appeal to groups of Avid users who organize monthly events and meetings. The difficult part about this project was creating a site that was easy to use on the front end and back end, where administrators could learn to enter their data effortlessly to update the site.

I founded the video game news site Yankidank.com a few years ago when I was frustrated with existing game news and review sites that were littered with advertisements and lacked quality content. There were few sites in existence that seemed to run the gamut for video game industry news. I took it upon myself to start my own site and aggregate content from various sources to edit together articles that I felt were both entertaining and important.

Soon after starting the site I took a leap from written editorial writing to starting an audio podcast. Podcasting was a new concept at the time that few people had started to get into, this was long before Apple endorsed the idea through iTunes. I hosted a weekly show featuring the latest news from the video game industry and would give my impressions of the latest games and demos. The podcast grew in popularity and I quickly became one of the most recognized podcasts at the time, and probably the best known video game podcast.