Ben Brown (blogger)

For other people named Ben Brown, see Ben Brown (disambiguation).

Ben Brown (born January 25, 1978, in San Francisco, California, United States) is a co-founder of the social networking website Consumating. Raised in Derwood, Maryland, he attended Colonel Zadok A. Magruder High School, he began attending the University of Maryland in 1996 but did not complete his degree in English and instead dropped out in 2000 in order to pursue personal interests.

Publishing

Ben has been a co-founder of several zines including FlabJab, TEETH, ^[1] and Über. His personal website http://benbrown.com/ has been in existence since 1997 ^[2] and has at times served as an outlet for his creative works of fiction, as a personal blog, and also as a connecting reference for his software and literary publications.

In 2001 he co-founded ^[3] an "ultra-micro-mini" publishing company with James Stegall named So New Media and used it to create and publish the literary magazine Words! Words! Words! as well as the public performance venue Bookpunk. ^[4]

Internet

In 1999, Brown co-founded the Deepleap website which provided an extensible utility for searching and interacting with various websites, social bookmarking, and eventually user-generated XML feeds for creating custom web applications. The site shut down in late 2000 for financial reasons. ^[5]

In 2001, he moved to New Zealand where he was on the team that created an online tool for the certification of milk and dairy exports for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. While in New Zealand, he was also hired to write episodes of a popular children's television show, Squirt.^{[ citation needed ]}

In 2002, he and Adam Mathes created the Personals sub-section on their zine Über, which served as the initial foundation for and was eventually renamed to Consumating.

Ben served as founding editor ^[6] for the Austinist social event blog beginning in early 2005. In late December of that year, he announced ^[7] the CNET purchase of Consumating, ceased work with Austinist, and moved to San Francisco to work on Consumating with Josh Goldberg.

On April 3, 2007, Ben announced ^[8] he was leaving CNET and Consumating to work on a next-generation community site with extreme programmer Robert Swirsky.

In November 2018, Ben announced he had sold XOXCO, the Howdy chatbot, and the Botkit open source framework to Microsoft. ^[9]

See also

• Blogging

Notes and references

1. Partial archive of the zine TEETH, as provided by the Internet Archive. Retrieved on 2006-08-11.
2. Prior to 1997, Ben used the FlabJab site for his personal page, according to a WebbieWorld interview by Mark Connell with him, c. 1999. Retrieved on 2006-08-11.
3. "Bookpunks: So New Media and their very serious stapler". Bookslut. 2002-10-01. Archived from the original on 27 August 2006. Retrieved 2006-08-11.
4. Partial archive of Bookpunk, as provided by the Internet Archive. Retrieved on 2006-08-11.
5. "Goodnight, Deepleap". Bryan Boyer, co-founder of Deepleap. 2000-08-22. Retrieved 2006-08-11.
6. "An Excess Of Civic Pride". Austinist. 2005-03-08. Archived from the original on 2006-05-06. Retrieved 2006-08-11.
7. "Consumating is now part of CNET Networks". Consumating. 2005-12-05. Archived from the original on 3 September 2006. Retrieved 2006-08-11.
8. "You can now download the source code that powers this site!". Consumating. 2007-04-03. Archived from the original on 20 April 2007. Retrieved 2007-04-18.
9. "Microsoft to acquire XOXCO, bringing together leading bot development communities to help advance conversational AI". The Official Microsoft Blog. 2018-11-14. Retrieved 2019-02-19.

External links

• http://ilovebenbrown.com/ - Ben Brown's current blog
• https://www.flickr.com/groups/ilovebenbrown/ - Ben Brown fan group on Flickr
• Ben physically assembled each book in the printing of: Pollack, Neal (2003-01-25). Beneath the Axis of Evil: One Man's Journey into the Horrors of War. So New Media. ISBN   0-9727636-0-0.