I have been very lucky to have Adam Jackson on board for a lot of the big decisions. I know he doesn’t like being talked about these days but I can say that he’s done a lot to ensure I continue on just as he had originally planned. I’m shying away from the media coverage as of late due to the negative turn things took when Adam went on the news back in December. The media wasn’t responsible for things going awry but a lot of the attention wouldn’t have happened if he stayed away from the coverage. An interview performed right after the cam went offline has finally been posted on a popular tech blog called VentureBeat. I’m going to highlight a few of my favorite bits. Thanks again to Adam for agreeing to answer these tough questions.
VB: What do you mean by rethink?
AJ: From this point forward, in the next generation of the project, all the domains will be private, and the owner of Adam’s Block will not have any personal information up. Everything is a lot more private. That’s the way it has to be. There’s a reason why police officers’ phone numbers are not listed in the phone book. You don’t want to arrest someone and give them your home address. I never intended the project to get so big. And that’s where the fault was. I had been used to the negativity. But it was finally for my safety and my girlfriend’s safety that we kind of shut things down to take a break.
VB: If you did it over again, what would you do differently?
AJ: I think if I were to do it over again, I wouldn’t do it again. But if I did, certainly I would consider some of the privacy concerns and be a heck of a lot more private. Even putting the camera in my room, I’d make it more hidden. My lifestyle wasn’t really set up to fight crime with my transparency at that time. I think that if I were more private on the web, like now, I could have actually finished the project.
[During the project,] I transitioned from a Web 2.0 person to a mainstream person. Simple things we take for granted just being in the tech scene, like having my phone number on my blog and my Facebook totally open, in addition to my Twitter stream and Flickr stream. I would check [those sites], and there would be a post of someone saying, you live here! And being a Web 2.0 person [at first], I didn’t really consider that to be a threat. If you were mainstream, like Billy Joel, that’s what would happen. People would ask you for an autograph or maul you. So I kind of locked down my social internet life. It was the most challenging part, going from a very public to a very private lifestyle. It’s like being robbed of my life and having to start over.
The thing is, there are hundreds of web cams run by private citizens in San Francisco. And I run into people who say, I’ve done the same thing for 10 years, and I never got that many people. A lot of them were jealous. But when I started, I just thought it would be a web cam — not a monetized service.
VB: What’s next for the project?
AJ: One of my friends has taken over the project, though I’m still involved. I just want to make sure [the web site] is still charitable and still run with the right intentions. I told him my plan for Adam’s Block, and he may have his own objectives. I wanted to have a web cam on every street corner in America, globally. I wanted to buy web cams and have broadcasters all over — a neighborhood watch on a global level. In return, I’d get a portion of the advertising. I encourage all broadcasts to give at least half to local charities, to give back to the communities they’re in. All of my proceeds so far, which were just about $1,000, went to local and national charities. All the equipment went to charity. That has always been my goal with this. Never to make a lot of money [for myself]. We partner with a couple of organizations that run the web site. It’s a public records site. They can index public records, or show crime in certain areas by Google map. We [could] give a web cam link to all these areas. It’s a really low investment thing because all you need is the cameras.
You can read the full interview at VentureBeat.com
