There are many sites on the web dedicated to sustainable living, "green" products, social responsibility and similar ethical concerns of modern living. Here we describe MakeThePath, how it fits with and what sets it apart from others

MakeThePath requires the following in order to function 1) a newer browser (IE7+, Firefox3+, Safari3+ or chrome) 2) javascript must be enabled, 3) a newer version of the Flash plugin (9+), the program should prompt you to download a newer version if needed. That means that some older machines, and some machines running older browsers (like you may have as your office PC) may not be compatible with MakeThePath. We suggest switching to Firefox if you're on Windows.

 

MakeThePath is for people who want to live a more sustainable life, who want to reward those companies that are "walking the talk," who want to be part of a community that creates improved quality of life for everyone, who want to engage the productive aspects of markets, who reject passive consumerism, who believe that a small group of committed people can make important change, who want to share non-consumptive forms of wealth, who want to MakeThePath by walking.

 

MakeThePath is also for busy people, people who want good organizational tools for their life on the web, for people who don't have the time or interest to read long blog postings comparing products, for people who want to keep up-to-date on trends, who want access to local information (wherever they are at the moment), who want to use advanced social computing to help solve a real-world problem, who want vetted information about the best products, services and goings-on in their communities and beyond.

 

MakeThePath is for the 15-25 million adults in the US (and a larger number beyond US borders) who want to express themselves by how they choose to live their lives. For those who believe that individual choices impact the health and sustainability for us all. That we need to reconnect to our power as "customers" (not merely consumes) to create the sustainable supportive communities that the world's survival depends on. Through the cumulative power of many small actions, MakeThePath community members show the way.

 

Finding good information can be hard. MakeThePath helps by creating a community and harnessing its collective intelligence to help distinguish between the "green-washing" claims of brands that have changed their packaging more than their practices from those companies that have developed new more sustainable approaches to creating the products that we all need.

 

Remembering information when it comes time to make a purchase is hard. Many of us have been to sites that describe a problem, and those working on the solution. Finding that information later when we're about to make a purchasing choice can be hard. MakeThePath addresses this problem by making it easy to retrieve that information a month or a year after you first saw it.

 

Sometimes it seems like one person can't really do much. By joining the MakeThePath community your actions are magnified across the community, and the choices you make lead to better choices by everyone. MakeThePath employs advanced algorithms that make the contributions of users ripple throughout the community. Simply by using the content that you like, and "flinging" content you think doesn't belong users create an ad hoc vetting that is propagated throughout the site (we'll have more to say about "flinging" in the Help file). The MakeThePath community creates a parallel economy with its own GDP. By gathering together the community becomes an important force in the market and an important voice to influence the behavior of companies and other community members. By working together with companies in a productive way, we can help shape future products and services. By using MakeThePath all of the small decisions you are probably already making become part of a larger voice for change.

 

MakeThePath presents a new kind of interface to web content. It's innovative, dynamic, simple and at times surprising. You'll be presented with connections that other community members have made that you may never have thought of. We'll be implementing new features like walking on the paths of others, jumping to the most surprising connection on the site, seeing how things and people are interconnected, and even learning about where products and services are made and who makes them. We are connected in a web of interrelations. MakeThePath makes exploring the web more fun (and more web-like).

 

MakeThePath is fun, flingable, elastic, plastic, useful, surprising, irreverent, different, positive. MakeThePath is you!.

MakeThePath is a flexible and dynamic interface for browsing with powerful social computing algorithms that help the community vet and home-in on the most relevant content. On our Paths you’ll find content that has been surfaced by community consensus. Path content is dynamic and continually refreshed by the “votes” cast by the community (including you). Content that is deemed most useful will be most prominent, content that over time is deemed unworthy will reduce in prominence and even “disappear from the site.

 

Are your bookmarks a mess? The PathBuilder interface makes it easy to keep content organized, and makes it fun and intuitive to hunt for new content. Looking for ideas for your latest home improvement project? Check out the House/Home path to learn about green building, energy efficient appliances, energy tax credits and local suppliers of sustainable building materials. Looking for non-toxic baby bottles, or more sustainable diaper solutions? Check out the Kids Path. Looking for new wheels (either 4 or 2)? Check out the Transportation Path. On each of these Paths, and many more, you'll discover the best solutions found by the other members of the community. Tried something that wasn't so good? Fling it off the Path and your vote will be counted for others in the future. Use something a lot (like a kids gifts site), that counts as a vote too. By using MakeThePath to make your life easier, you help others find the best stuff, and avoid the posers and wanabees.

 

Because MakeThePath isn’t inundated with ads and does not allow advertisers to determine what content is most prominent (no paying for the top search result at MakeThePath), you'll find more of the stuff you need, and less noise. What MakeThePath does allow, for companies of all sizes, is the ability to connect to you, to learn what you're interested in, like and don't like about their products, and to offer special deals and coupons for you to try them out. We'll never (ever) share any information without your permission, but if you want to offer your opinion directly to a company, we help make that possible.

 

Yes, there are many excellent green-living sites on the Internet, and many are accordingly featured here. MakeThePath doesn't see itself as competing with these sites. In fact, our users love these sites, and MakeThePath gives tools to keep them even more closely connected to the sites they love (and vice-versa). MakeThePath doesn't write articles about green products, doesn't blog on eco-topics and doesn't have glossy brochure-ware. MakeThePath is a gathering place where all of this content co-exists on an even footing. No site is given preference based on ad-revenues or other affiliation. MakeThePath is a flexible dynamic portal to this content, maintained by a community interested in helping each other live more sustainably MakeThePath creates an eco-system where these sites can engage their audience and prosper.

 

No (<- you knew that would be the answer, right?). We are trying to create a cooperative and productive relationship between users and the companies that are part of the community. At MakeThePath we believe that you get what you pay for, and that if a site is entirely supported by advertisements, it is inevitable that the advertisers will influence the content (or that you'll be seeing belly-fat ads).

 

MakeThePath does not allow any company to gain additional prominence on the site based on their willingness to pay for an "ad placement." See here for a more details about the "revenue model" but suffice to say that any company can be voted off the site, no company is given higher prominence based on how much they're willing to pay, and that a company that pays nothing to MakeThePath can still become the most popular on the site if that's how the community votes.."

 

The MyPath path is your personal, private Path. You can keep links to your facebook, gMail and Yahoo sites without sharing those sites with the rest of the community. Examples also include personal photo-sharing sites, links to your company’s intranet, and news sites that you like, but are not particularly related to sustainability. When you import your bookmarks, they are placed on the private MyPath path first. We hope you’ll have many bookmarks to share with community, and that you’ll put these links in the shared Path where you think they belong. However, we understand that some information is personal. We wanted to create a place where you can use the power of the PathBuilder interface for keeping things organized and “at-hand” without necessarily sharing them. That’s the MyPath path.

 

OK, so we'll just come right out and say it. We're here to change the world. We don't think that living a modern life always means a race to the bottom that maximizes externalities at the expense of others, the environment and the future. Externalities, are the hidden costs of low-priced goods. Coal for example, is only the least expensive source of fuel if you don't have to pay for the environmental effects of mountain top mining, the social costs of how mining labor has historically been treated, and the health costs of mercury and particulate poisoning from coal emissions. Those costs are externalities, and when you factor them in coal is much more expensive than it at first appears. It is is no longer the cheapest form of energy. Given the human cost, we believe it is among the most expensive

 

We believe that people are ready to make a change in business as usual. There are great companies making great products and services that consider the costs to society and try to incorporate them as much as possible. The MakeThePath ethic is to help these companies succeed. Many of these companies are great to work for, and the MakeThePath ethic is to help them create the sustainable jobs of the future, and yes, to work for them. MakeThePath is a modern technology tool that helps individuals retake their position of importance in social, cultural, economic and political life. We believe that there are many forms of wealth that don't involve consumption. We have a local "wild-space" nearby where we go hiking. Cost is next to zero, and we always feel wealthier after hiking there. In contrast, we'd feel much poorer if that wild-space were taken away. Family, community, art and culture are all forms of wealth and enrichment that don't necessarily involve owning a new gadget, or a bigger car. They can be produced in almost limitless quantity without running out of resources. MakeThePath wants to share these forms of wealth as well. MakeThePath provides a platform for story telling, and we think that learning from and about each other is the ultimate renewable resource.

 

Above all, MakeThePath is optimistic. We believe that we can help each other live better, richer, more enjoyable lives. Life is too short to focus on the negatives, let's get started and (you know the rest...).

 

No. Political, social and legal advocacy are important tools to punish those that break the laws and norms of society. MakeThePath is about making use of the productive and progressive aspects of markets. To us this means rewarding those that are doing the right thing, and letting the market do its thing on the others. We expect that our community will present great alternatives to the products created by companies that operate unethically and that the community will choose these products. At MakeThePath we vote with our feet.

 

Through MakeThePath the community will be able to connect to advocacy organizations, learn about their causes, and offer their support. We believe these organizations are worthy of our support, and helping them succeed is the MakeThePath way.

 

Let us say at the outset, that running MakeThePath costs money, and in the end we worked hard to to develop a revenue model that matches the ideals of sustainability that we espouse for the project as a whole.

Our goal is to provide a user-driven level playing field for people to find the best products and services, even if some of them are free. We therefore have adopted a model that is not solely ad-driven. Having said that, we are not working in opposition to companies, and want to offer them a way to join the community, and share on the cost of keeping MakeThePath fun, useful and relevant for the community as a whole. So here's our radical (well not that radical actually) approach to covering the cost of operating the site, and continuing to implement features that the users think are useful and cool.

 

1) 12$/year Membership (optional, recommended, we could use it): Until recently this would be the death-knell of any internet business. "You cannot charge people for anything on the net." That has been the conventional wisdom. However, that's also the wisdom that has seen journalism replaced by the opinions and musings of 13 year-old pundits, wrapped on all sides by blinking ads for belly-fat reduction nostrums. Okay, that overstates it a little bit.

 

At MakeThePath we think the something-for-nothing ethic of the prior web is part of the problem. He who pays the piper calls the tune, as the saying goes. This leads to a system where those companies that pay the most have the greatest voice, drowning out those with smaller marketing budgets but arguably better products. We've adopted a hybrid of the Consumer Reports model. We will not accept any "advertisement" from any company. No company can pay it's way to the top of the search list. Our goal is to charge the users as little as is possible to allow this approach and still keep the servers humming. In fact, we think we can offer users value far in excess of the yearly fee. We hope you'll agree and pitch in.

 

2) Company Membership: Our concept is based around users bringing sustainable products and services to the site. The prominence of any company on the site is determined by the vetting process performed by the community members. In other words, we won't push an unpopular site to higher prominence just because they are the highest bidder for ads in a category. However, we want to provide a way for MakeThePath community members to know which companies support this new kind of community. MakeThePath companies will have special "skins" that identify their support for the community and its users. Large companies will not have an advantage over smaller local firms. Through the skins, the companies will be able to offer special incentives to community members, including coupons and offers. We're also developing a twitter-like interface for MakeThePath companies for our members to share their thoughts and opinions with these companies. We think that users and companies will both find this arrangement useful and unbiased. We will charge companies for these services, and that revenue will go to keep the annual fee as low as possible without affecting the editorial content of the project.

 

3) Market Information: The actions of MakeThePath users provide a valuable source of information about the goods and services that the community wants to see in the ecosystem they are creating. Companies are eager for information about why people like their products, and why they dislike them as well. This information is valuable to companies and productive for community members as well. We expect to make this information available on a rate scale that all companies can afford irrespective of their size, again giving a level playing field. The information we're describing here is aggregated user behavior and is used to improve the kinds of products and services the companies are providing for the community, and never to allow a company to target an individual user for communications, advertisement or the like.

 

Let us be clear. We will never (ever) make any personal identifying information available to any third party (unless you explicitly give us permission, so you can be contacted by email for example).We take this very seriously (see our privacy statement).

 

4) Technology Licensing: The technology that underlies MakeThePath has other uses beyond the creation of the community that we've described here. In order to support the MakeThePath community and to be able to create the best, coolest, most neutral, most useful site possible for our community, we will explore other uses for the technology that can generate revenue for the project without shifting our focus. We plan to do this through licensing that allows others to use the technology for other applications, while allowing us to stay focused on the MakeThePath mission. So there's our model. The guiding principal is to develop a sustainable business model that allows us to continue to serve the MakeThePath community with cutting-edge technology (to solve what is actually a pretty hard problem) without having our mission diverted in a way that destroys the underlying value to those involved. If everyone contributes, we should be able to find a win-win-win-win solution (there are probably more wins there, but you get the point).

 

This is where we are supposed to say that we take your privacy very seriously. We do. However, we want to point out why privacy has become such a big issue on the web and why the issue goes deeper than "don't use my information." When users use a site for free, there are only a few things that the site operators can charge for in order to keep the site operational (and in some cases provide return for investors). 1) your eyeballs. If an internet company were a manufacturer, then your eyeballs would be their widgets. They manufacture eyeballs (by attracting you to their sites) and then sell those eyeballs (called impressions) to advertisers. 2) Demographic information. This helps the advertisers understand who's clicking their ads, what regions of the country they come from, their ages (if you've given that information) etc.. No personally identifying information is exchanged, and this practice doesn't upset most people. 3) Targeting. By looking more closely at what you do on their site, they can target ads to you. While this can be good if it gives you more relevant ads, it can get out of control. How do you feel about your friends being targeted with ads based on the things that you like? It can get a little creepy. 4) Rare, but most troubling is the practice of selling personally identifiable information to assist companies in marketing to you by other means, by e-mail, by mail, by telephone? Most people would agree that these last two are significant privacy issues. Let us say now. We won't do that. (<- see that period at the end of that sentence?).

 

Remember, the goal of the site is to allow you to be as influential over the MakeThePath companies as possible. We will therefore be collecting aggregated user information and non-personally identifying information about those things that people like and dislike and making that information available to companies. The point of making this information available is not to better target you for advertising. The point of this information is to help good companies understand what they're doing right (and do more of it), and to help other companies understand where they could do better. The only advantage any company gets on the site is a level playing field on which to present products and services that you think are great. If they can learn from the MakeThePath community what those products are and how to make them, then we have succeeded in creating a true fair market economy with a free flow of information yielding better products over time. And no, we will never give out personally identifying information unless you specifically authorize it in order to communicate with a company or other member on the site.

 

We will be developing a skins API that you can avail yourself of regardless of your advertising budget. In the future we will make a page available that describes how to signup for the skin service and what the terms are. In the meantime, enjoy your free and unfettered (and unbiased) access to the MakeThePath community. If you'd like to show your support prior to the API being published, please feel free to contact us.

Will there be an iPhone app?

Yes. The iPhone interface will not be identical to the interface you see on the web, but will have your MyPath path, all the other MakeThePath content, as well as the ability to see content local to your current location. We think it will be a great way of connecting MakeThePath to the outside world, and vice versa.

 

If you have to ask this question, you wouldn't believe our answer. Please reread the FAQ paying special attention to our use of the words markets, information, externalities, revenue-model, economy, competition and prosper. If you find yourself returning here, then yes, we are a bunch of communists. Here's your $12 bucks back, please run along.

 

If you have to ask this question, you also wouldn't believe our answer. Please reread the FAQ paying special attention to our use of the works community, collaboration, sharing, information, externalities, ethics, and sustainability. If you find yourself returning here, then yes, we are a bunch of green-washing capitalists. Here's your $12 bucks back, please run along.