So we finally made it out there. Probably the best starting point is to tell what happened so far:

The team behind System One has always been driven by technology, its context and what it's able to do. In 1998 Tom Fuerstner was technical director of ORF ON and responsible for bringing the so far reluctant media house to the web. He quickly discoverd back then that it makes more sense not to replicate traditional formalisms to the new medium - instead taking advantage of the new opportunities. Based on UserLand's Frontier he developed a prototype utilizing the back then rather unknown concept called weblogs for traditional reporting.

Soon it became clear that the technology couldn't handle the demand (the front page of ORF ON still looks mostly the same as back then, but traffic rose from 1,8 to 230 million pageviews a month), so Hannes Wallnoefer proposed porting some Frontier concepts to a Java-based platform, mixing them with a lot of new ideas. This was when Helma was born, one of the first highly scalable and rock-solid Java-based application servers.

Around 1999 Chris Langreiter didn't belive that creating a weblog system was a herculean task, so for fun he created his own little system during the Christmas weekend. To add some spice, he came up with a stunningly simple,  yet brilliant idea: Wikis and weblogs can not only be joined together, they are essentially the same system: Title, Author, Message and Links. So Vanilla, the first truly integrated Wikilog (aka Bliki) saw the light of the day. A simple Wiki where pages can be given the attribute of a weblog-entry, resulting in a reversed chronologically ordered display of these pages, and thus a weblog.

In the years that followed, Tom kept pushing conceptial boundaries as professor for Visual Media Arts, Hannes steadily improved Helma and Chris churned out more Wikilogs and other brilliant ideas. By 2001 we more or less knew what the Semantic Web was, but it took as a beer on a hot summerday together with Dieter Fensel and some days of contemplation until we realized it's potential.

The omnipresence of a graph perspective changed a lot: Not only media contents became hypertextual and non-linear, but also the basic storage technologies behind them. And most important: Society as well. 2003 the Web 2.0 gained momentum, breathtakingly fast. Suddenly dozens of great small services appeared like vernal flowers, allowing people to articulate, organize and communicate themselves better and easier than ever before, and in a digitally adressable way. People started talking to, sharing, reflecting and remixing each other. If the fragmention of global society wasn't fast enough, this was adding even more speed to process. Especially the economic change was crucial to us: If companies need to adapt but don't have the tools, there is a market. But we also knew from some projetcs that Social Software works well for individuals with shared mindset, but mostly fails within organizations. Comparably few people form the backbone of the Blogosphere or Wikipedia, which by the way isn't a point on the web. A percentage certainly not high enough to grant those concepts success within the closed community of an organization. For 99% of the employees, the clear benefits where missing. It wasn't our mission to evangelize people within companies, but to provide them with a set of tools that we knew will work and also enough personal benefits to use them. The Semantic Web backend paved the way: Hey, everybody gets too many emails, has to take care of too many files and knows that there is more than comprehension (even Google supported) allows out there on the web. So why don't we stop trying to convice everbody to switch to Social Software but rather use our Wikilog ideas as collaboratively written navigation layer on top of the ubiquitous information overload? So now everything was making sense.

We had our passion, the needs of people and organizations, and a clear solution. So it was obvious to start a company, the one whichs journal you're reading right now. A lot of preceeding  inspiration also helped: Vannevar Bush, still the classic, Doug Engelbart, still doesn't see what he hoped for out there, Ted Nelson, the literate laying out the concept, and also more recently people like Thomas Malone and the work of his OVAL team and Alexander Chislenko, who unfortunately passed away too soon, and many more out there.

Whats coming in the next months? More ideas and thoughts on this journal from different backgrounds, not only technology, but also design, sociology and all the other relevant context. It feels good to finally be off the ground and we hope you join us from time to time. Keep on rockin' in an open world.