We are in Vermont this week. Roxanne’s parents own a summer house on Providence Island which is one of the small islands on Lake Champlain. I’m not a fan of taking vacations, especially ones far away in nature, but Annika loves it here, so I decided to come along. Instead of finding rare birds or fish, I found a magazine called The Sun. In its August 2008 issue, there is an interview with Judy Wicks, the owner of White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia. Apparently she is known for her leadership in the local-food movement and sustainable business. She is obviously an intelligent woman who has a talent for business, but she decided to use her gift not for growing her own wealth but for growing her own local community.

Humanitarianism is not exactly my cup of tea because it is usually morally motivated, and therefore preachy and self-righteous. I find that most humanitarians, social workers, and community organizers are driven by anger. Although giving into anger may make us more powerful temporarily, we cannot effect a lasting change that way, as Luke Skywalker realized in Star Wars. This is particularly relevant when we are speaking of “sustainability”.

There was something different about Judy Wicks. Her desire to support her own community and organize a national movement for sustainability, seems to be genuinely motivated by self-interest without being egotistical, hypocritical or deceiving. In other words, she does not appear to be driven by her desire to feed her ego with altruism. I don’t believe in altruism, especially when it is self-conscious. I believe that when self-interest is pursued by someone who is keenly in touch with her true self, it would naturally extend to humanitarianism. And, when it does, “altruism” or “humanitarianism” is not in her mind. Those are just the words that others project onto her.

Wicks’ words inspire me because her style of living and doing business feels pleasant, satsfying, and charming. It seems apparent that she does what she does in order for herself to be happy. It’s not about sacrifice. She sees her own happiness to be inextricably tied to her community and environment, so the line between self and others disappears in her mind.

“Community” has never been a big concern for me. I moved so frequently in my childhood that I never felt any sense of community. I considered this to be a good thing, because it is more in line with the only thing constant in nature: change. But I think having a child changed my view on this issue slightly. I’ve always strived to be self-reliant, but I believe much of it was driven by my fear of people. I have a feeling that the same logic applies to my attitude towards communities; I’m fearing rejection. Now that I have a child who needs not just her parents, but also her community of friends, I cannot be dogmatic about self-reliance. I realize that even the qualities that we generally consider virtuous, such as self-reliance, can become harmful when it is driven by a wrong motive.

The opposite is also true. What we generally consider sinful or superficial, such as money, can be positive when it is driven by a right motive. Judy Wicks aptly demonstrates it.

These days every business website seems to want a blog. Almost every Web project I discuss involves a blog. The reason why everyone wants a blog is because it is a good way to drive traffic to your site. The problem, however, is that not many people have the personality suited for keeping up a blog. Most of them are excited at first but eventually their blogs collect dust. Interestingly enough, people who talk a lot in real life are usually not good bloggers. I think they get a good enough dose of expressing themselves by talking, so they don’t feel the need to write a blog on top of it. Active bloggers, I think, are actually the quiet types.

Anyhow, I decided to add a blog to this site. Who knows how long we can keep it up. Without textual contents, it’s very hard to get any significant amount of traffic. The majority of traffic on most websites come from search engines. This is true for all the websites I manage. But, if you don’t have much text, search engines have no way of sending traffic to your site.

Bitskis.com has been around for a few years, but it only had Roxanne’s Flash animations. So, the average visitors a day on the site was low.

Yesterday, I put a link to this site on two most popular sites I have: AllLookSame.com and PainInTheEnglish.com. The former gets about 600 visitors a day and the latter gets about 1,000. Surprisingly (at least to me) this actually didn’t help much. But a friend of mine who does SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as a business told me that whether the link sends visitors or not actually doesn’t matter much. By linking, you actually increase the “Page Rank” (the ranking that Google assigns to every site) of the linked site. So, when someone searches for, say, “iPhone apps for kids”, bitskis.com would not get buried deep down. This is the annoying thing. Because SEO has become so sophisticated that if you don’t pay any attention to it, you don’t even get a fair share of your traffic anymore. It’s a tough virtual world out there.

So, here is the story so far.

We started thinking about developing iPhone apps because Annika loved iPhones so much, and because there weren’t many apps for her age. I figured it could be a good way to diversify my business too, since I have no idea where my business will be a year from now in this economy.

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