| Organization: | OurEcho |
| Location: | Atlanta, GA, USA |
| Contact: | click here |
| Biography: | Bahamas - 1963. I'm the stud on the left... Since I started OurEcho, I thought it was appropriate to add a little information about myself and my motives for starting OurEcho. So here goes… I grew up in Phenix City, Alabama. These days it is just another sleepy southern town, but from about 1920 to 1955, it was known as the the wickedest city in America. By the time I came along, the graft and corruption was gone. For me it was just home. There are lots of great stories from this area and I will try to post some of them. I am currently 44 years old. I live in Smyrna, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. I have two sons, ages 18 and 11. I am still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I have already been a Student, an Airman, a Real Estate Agent, an Appraiser, a Loan Officer, a Computer Programmer, and a System Designer/Analyst. I am currently a consultant specializing in the design of business intelligence systems. People often ask me why I started OurEcho and I will try to make some sense of it for you. For one, as a child I was always exposed to great storytellers. Anytime more than a few members of the family were together, someone would invariably mention something like the time Aunt Margie skated down Thrill Hill or the time Granddaddy and his friends bought a plane. We must have covered the same ground a thousand times, but because of it, I remember. My children haven not had the luxury of knowing some of these wonderful people, so I write down the stories for them to learn about them. I think it gives them a better sense of who they are. Maybe they learn their love of sports comes from a great grandfather who played ball or that tendency to laugh too loud was shared with their grandmother. Stories are wonderful way to preserve and continue our heritage. Children might not care today, but at some point, they will want to know more. They will be glad someone took the time to write it down. OurEcho is a means to document and share this information. I have also been fortunate to have been exposed to people like my Aunt Margie (Margie Stillwell), who without much formal education, still reveled in the written word. She wrote, not to be published, but because she liked it. Some of her stories are wonderful and it would be a sin not to share them. I had the skills to build a website for her to share her pieces, but others may not. OurEcho is an extension of this concept and her original site. It is a means for not just writers, but storytellers to share some of their work Beyond these personal reasons, I am also interested in the community interaction that is possible through the internet. I design applications that allow large companies to store and analyze large amounts of information. By implementing these systems, corporations are better able to understand problems and make reasonable decisions. I am interested in extending this concept to a larger audience. My hope is that in capturing pieces of ourselves, it will allow us to better understand each other and interact accordingly. I realize it is a lofty goal, but one worth pursuing. So that is my two-cents. You will also notice that I have included an advertising solution (AdToken) I developed with this site. It is not active at this point, but my goal is for AdToken to help offset some of the expense of maintaining sites like this one. In keeping with the flavor of OurEcho, AdToken provides interactive advertising at a local level. As with other applications I develop, I share any profits with charitable/educational organizations. I hope this information helps you better understand OurEcho and I encourage you to post. This site will always be about the story. You do not need to be a writer or an English teacher to participate. |
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