Pop Quiz with Mr. Popdex
Shanti Braford is a 23-year-old programmer, database geek, blogger and much, much more. He's the creator of Popdex, the wildly popular news and blog index, as well as the founder of MetaPop, a community Web log. He decided to take some time away from his busy schedule and chat with webraw about his projects, blogs, the Web and a bit more. (June, 2003)

webraw: How do you keep the Web raw?

Shanti Braford: I work on projects that interest me - creating sites that I would use personally.

Shanti on the Web
webraw: Who are you, what have you done, what are you doing and what will you do?

Shanti Braford: I don't know how to answer that one, to be honest. It's more of a psychology 101 term paper topic, unless you were just looking for the generic where did you go to school, what do you do, etc.

webraw: Sure.

Shanti Braford: My Popdex projects have all been done in my free time. I'm happily employed, by day, and when I have time, work on external projects that interest me. I work as a database administrator, at a large company here in St. Louis. I'd rather not mention their name. But it's a very good job and I work on the largest data warehouse in the world. I recently launched the Popdex Game, but it will be discontinued soon and will come back as something else. The details are still yet to be fully worked out, but that's the plan as of now.

webraw: Come back as something else — anything general in mind?

Shanti Braford: It won't just be a Popdex project. I should be working with another familiar blogosphere personality. I don't want to say who right now, since we're still figuring it all out.

webraw: So it will cover all blogs and not just those that show up in Popdex? Will it still be some sort of "wagering" system?

Shanti Braford: To be honest, I'm not sure exactly how it will all work yet. But there will be some kind of "wagering". It may work differently, but the idea will still be to somehow predict what will be popular (by whatever metric) in the blogosphere.

webraw: What are your feelings about the success of Popdex? Have the met, failed or surpassed your expectations?

Shanti Braford: I didn't have many expectations coming into it. I threw the site together to see if I could do it, on a programming level. It's nice that a fair amount of people find it useful.

webraw: At the risk of sounding critical (which I'm not) your two most recent and visible projects (Popdex and MetaPop) have been greatly inspired by existing projects. Is this merely coincidence or do you actively look for existing applications that you can improve upon or modify for different and better uses?

Shanti Braford: I've taken heat for this before, and it's totally understandable. The general complaint though is when you don't improve upon an existing idea, and instead take the exact same concept and copy it. Well, evolution takes time. I want all of these projects to improve over time. As I mentioned earlier, this is all done after hours in my part-time, for fun. Of course I want to improve upon existing ideas, and not just "clone" them or whatever. The story with Popdex was that I just wanted to see if I could do it (create the site). My next question was, well, I spent almost a month of nights & weekends making this thing, should I just not let anyone see it, because the concept had already been done before? Jenny from TheShiftedLibrarian.com actually saw the referral URL from when I had clicked-thru to her Web site from Popdex, and the next thing you know my site was Blogdex'd and the cat was out of the bag. MetaFilter is great, but they're not accepting new members, so I can't join. It's market economics 101 — competing entities will spring up when their is a latent demand for the product.

What's in a name?
webraw: Your name has caused a lot of confusion for one reason or another so for the record can you clear up any confusion?

Shanti Braford: You're right, it causes a lot of confusion offline as well. I'm a white, Caucasian, 23 year-old male. But the name Shanti is hindi (sanskrit) for peace, and is usually an eastern Indian name for girls. The easiest way to explain it, is that "my parents were hippies." I'm constantly saying that when I meet new people, who want to know the origins of that name.

Making Apps
webraw: You created and sold an mp3 search program/site. Please elaborate on this. What application/site was it and did you make out like a dot-com bandit?

Shanti Braford: I sold the program/site to a company that I had begun working for at the time. They were called GlobalStreams (and are still around today, doing something entirely different). They needed the traffic (I was getting ~ 15k page views per day), so I "sold" the site to them in exchange for stock. No, I wish that I was one of those dot-com millionaires. My school loan processors can attest to that! The stock has always been privately held. If they were to ever go public, it could be worth something, but the IPO market remains bleak.

webraw: 15K - how does that traffic stack up to Popdex?

Shanti Braford: The site became "artiststreams.com", and hasn't been up for a long, long time. Popdex only gets about 10K per day or so, depending on which popular keywords people are searching for on Google and Yahoo.

Blogs
webraw: Are blogs to the Web what reality shows are to television or are they more like E-mail — an indispensable part of the Internet?

Shanti Braford: I'm a big economics guy. It sounds cliche, but the "market will have to decide" that. People are willing to pay to publish a blog, or they are willing to let others advertise on their blog (Blogger) to have one. I'm always hesitant to say something is "indispensable". A lot of things we had in the dot-com era are now dispensable. Such as free 100mb email accounts, free hosting without popups, $20 / hour internships for kids with no experience. I'm constantly getting the "Your mailbox is at 85%. Please empty out your mailbox." on my Yahoo account.

webraw: So the jury's still out about blogs in your opinion?

Shanti Braford: No, they'll definitely be around. But I don't necessarily see them as being as essential as email. There are only so many landmark applications like that.

webraw: Were you involved with blogs at all before Popdex?

Shanti Braford: No. I used Blogdex and Daypop to find cool, interesting sites. I never planned on getting so into the blog world. Not that it's a bad thing! There are a lot of great people that I've met. That's been the best part of all this. I'm also obsessed with the viral propagation of ideas. I'll have to tell you about my new site later.

Miscellany
webraw: What book, film, musician or artist has had the biggest impact on your life?

Shanti Braford: It would be very tough to name a single one that had the "biggest" impact. Just looking at my actual bookshelf, I would have to go with my copy of "The Portable Nietzsche." On the lighter side, anything by the 1960's Zen guru Alan Watts is good. My all-time favorite fiction book would have to be "Catcher in the Rye," but don't worry, I'm not like Mel Gibson's character in the movie "Conspiracy Theory."

webraw: There is a constant debate about the value of open source (free) software vs. closed source (fee). Some have argued that (in the long run) open source software is actually harmful to the development community by ultimately removing the only incentive that matters — monetary compensation. What is your perspective on this debate? How do you (or developers in general) reconcile the need for money with the desire to have an open system accessible to the best programmers in the world?

Shanti Braford: I'm not going to knock anyone that voluntarily gives up their free time and dedicates it to an open source project. I've leveraged some great free (open source) projects for Popdex and other sites that I've built. Open source projects are great when they are good enough to become staple "commodities," which I don't mean in a bad way. Linux and Apache come to mind. I often do think about other professions though (such as Law) and how people would react in their industries if the product they were selling was being commoditized by a free competitor.

Microsoft and the big players might have to worry about open source competition, but for the most part, companies often end up wanting to customize the open source software, or build something slightly different. That will be good for us programmers. I use Linux on the desktop somewhat, and for web browsing (80% of my usage), Mozilla seems about 50% as fast as IE on my XP box, which is a serious problem for the desktop Linux people. It could just be my setup, but there are a lot of other things they need to improve before they can really compete with XP in the OS market.

webraw: SPAM is annoying. Now politicians are seriously talking about some sort of regulation. From a regulatory perspective what, if anything, should be done about SPAM. Additionally, from a programming perspective, what can be done to effectively prevent or reduce SPAM? Is it even possible without dramatically altering the existing system?

Shanti Braford: A lot of technical people think regulation is a waste of time in regards to SPAM. I don't mind if there are laws on the books against SPAM — I'm all for that. Of course, if the legislation was successful you'll just force them all offshore. Just look at the offshore tax loophole problem and it's clear that the U.S. can't control what other countries let people get away with in their countries. So legislation would only put a short-term dent in the number of SPAM emails I receive daily.

Was it Dave Winer who talked about how Europe switched currencies in a day (with few hitches) to the Euro? This analogy is great. Bring on SMTP 2.0, in my book. My grandma wouldn't be too happy with her Outlook Express breaking, though. I don't think AOL and MSN would look forward to the tens of millions of tech support calls they'd receive, either. But in the end, it's probably going to be worth it.

webraw: What Web mover and shaker do you most admire and why?

Shanti Braford: That would have to be the two Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I use their product at least 25 times a day, it seems, on a normal day.

webraw: Pretend you're a futurist for a moment and predict what the Web will look like in 10 years.

Shanti Braford: The blink tag will become standard once again in all browsers. Google will automatically award a PageRank of 10 to any site that includes blinking text in their site. ;)

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