Building Blocks

• Blogger. Independent publishing. Blogger was launched in August 1999 and enabled people to easily publish on their own independent sites and since inspired many more: Movable Type, WordPress, etc. Freedom of the press brought to the people.
• Creative Commons. Re-use, re-purpose, and remix. The initial set of Creative Commons licenses was published on December 16, 2002. CC licenses make it easier for independents to create reusable content building blocks. You can re-use without having to communicate which is another level of independence.
• wikis. Independent iteration. Asynchronous collaborative authoring. Wikis enable independents to contribute and collaborate, typicaly without having to sync-up or coordinate with others. Independence of time, and a way for otherwise independent folks to more easily collaborate to build something much larger/better together than any of them could have purely on their own. Reduced the barrier to entry so that anyone could make small improvements, and one such result is Wikipedia.
• irc.freenode.net. Independent realtime discussion channels. While various corporate instant messaging services offer group chat services, NONE of their user interfaces compare in terms of speed, efficiency, and real-time "feel" as IRC. Sure, you can't tell when people are typing, but that's about it. Freenode has emerged as a defacto IRC network for folks looking to chat independently at conferences (AKA the backchannel), or looking to organize and plan something new.
• tags. Classification: Tags lowered the barrier for anyone to add keywords and organize anything. Delicious, Flickr, and Technorati aggregate tags and enabled independents to classify collaboratively without any extra effort.
• microformats. Enable millions of web authors, not just programmers, to share structured chunks of information about people, events, reviews, classified listings, etc. This is also about the freedom to easily share chunks of data. Sharing requires interoperability = another word for standards. Thus microformats. We have to make it easy for *content* people - see microformats principles. Other format efforts focus on the programmer. But EVERYBODY is a content person. Only a few are programmers. Microformats focus on the publisher. Think like a content person. Make it easy for publishing and presenting. And relatively easy / possible for coding. For more, see Microformats: Evolving The Web.
• SuperHappyDevHouse. 2005 SuperHappyDevHouse by Jeff (progrium) and Andy Smith, hosted by David Weekly. All night hack fests, think LAN Party but with creating brilliances of code and art in the company of other highly enthusiastic peers, fueled by Krispy Kreme, pizza, sodas, Red Bull, and other energy drinks.
• FooCamp. In 2003 Tim O'Reilly implemented participant driven tech conferences with FOO Camp. Conference grid started empty, then filled up, then changed over time. I was fortunate enough to be there for the 2004 FooCamp and was at the right time and place to invent hCard and hCalendar, and have Ray Ozzie encourage me to go for it. 1.5 years later he's demonstrated web clipboard built on it at 2006 ETech Conference.
• BarCamp. A BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. See also: Tantek's BarCampHistory for a personal recount of barCamp origins.
• nerdcurious. new! nerdcurious is a series of small informal participant-organized gatherings that was founded to help bridge the worlds of those who are curious about new technologies, terminologies, etc. but are not techies themselves, and those familiar with such things who wish to enable and empower more people via increased techliteracy and help them become more active participants in our rapidly evolving modern technoculture. nerdcurious events are shorter, smaller, and focussed on a single introductory hands-on topic in order to be more accessible and easier to organize than BarCamps which are in contrast intended for larger crowds and often present an expectation of a more intermediate or advanced familiarity with modern technologies. See WhatIsNerdcurious for more details.
• Coworking
  new! Coworking is a low-cost, community-run working space that is somewhere between a coffee shop and an office, where independants can go and share ideas, get things done and collaborate with other indepdendants to create ad hoc project teams and accomplish big tasks, only thought to be able to be accomplished by large organizations. Currently, there are 4 coworking spaces in San Francisco, one in Manhattan, one in Paris and several others popping up around the world.
• OpenID
  new! OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID has emerged as the de-facto user-centric identity framework allowing millions of people to interact online. With programs such as the I Want My OpenID Bounty, developers of Open Source projects are rapidly adding support for OpenID in order to enable their communities.
• BarCampBank
  new! A wiki think tank with ideas for rethinking and innovating money, banking, investment, and more. Designing business and economic models around open and transparent interactions.

• Pinko Marketingnew! Essential thinking about unmarketing and open marketing.

• Open Business Models WikiHivenew!: The mission of this hive is to explore, build, and test models and theory of the dynamics of business, and exchanges of value around OpenContent, OpenSource software, and Commons and KnowledgeCommons based products, services, and economies. This WikiHive also acts as a development space for OpenBusinessModel and OpenContent project proposals.

Some others to consider:

• Librevox free audio books online - a community-based, open-source project where anyone can contribute their reading (and translations) of books online...excellent resource for small business entrepreneurs
• Lulu and Cafe Press and Good Storm - self-publishing tools...set up your own stores.
• Media Temple Grid Server extremely low cost virtual server hosting, yet can also handle huge volumes of traffic (slashdotting). Look for other grid serving hosts to emerge over the next year or two.
• Amazon Web Services: Amazon S3,  Elastic Compute Cloud

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