Ben Brown (born January 25, 1978, in

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

, United States) is a co-founder of the social networking website Consumating. Raised in

Derwood, Maryland Derwood is an unincorporated area and census-designated place in east-central Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. It lays just north of Rockville, southeast of Gaithersburg, southwest of Olney, and northwest of the greater Silver Sprin ...

, he attended Colonel Zadok A. Magruder High School, he began attending the

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of M ...

in 1996 but did not complete his degree in English and instead dropped out in 2000 in order to pursue personal interests.

Publishing

Ben has been a co-founder of several zines including FlabJab, TEETH, and Über. His personal website http://benbrown.com/ has been in existence since 1997 and has at times served as an outlet for his creative works of fiction, as a personal

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

, and also as a connecting reference for his software and literary publications. In 2001 he co-founded an "ultra-micro-mini" publishing company with James Stegall named So New Media and used it to create and publish the literary magazine Words! Words! Words! as well as the public performance venue Bookpunk.

Internet

In 1999, Brown co-founded the Deepleap website which provided an extensible utility for searching and interacting with various websites, social bookmarking, and eventually user-generated

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

feeds for creating custom web applications. The site shut down in late 2000 for financial reasons. In 2001, he moved to New Zealand where he was on the team that created an online tool for the certification of milk and dairy exports for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. While in New Zealand, he was also hired to write episodes of a popular children's television show, Squirt. In 2002, he and Adam Mathes created the Personals sub-section on their zine Über, which served as the initial foundation for and was eventually renamed to Consumating. Ben served as founding editor for the Austinist social event blog beginning in early 2005. In late December of that year, he announced the

CNET ''CNET'' (short for "Computer Network") is an American media website that publishes reviews, news, articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos on technology and consumer electronics globally. ''CNET'' originally produced content for radio and televi ...

purchase of Consumating, ceased work with Austinist, and moved to

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

to work on Consumating with Josh Goldberg. On April 3, 2007, Ben announced he was leaving

and Consumating to work on a next-generation community site with extreme programmer

Robert Swirsky Robert Swirsky (born December, 1962, Brooklyn, NY) is a computer scientist, author and pianist. In the early 1980s, he was one of the first regular contributors to the nascent computer magazine industry, including Popular Computing, Kilobaud Micr ...

. In November 2018, Ben announced he had sold XOXCO, the Howdy chatbot, and the Botkit open source framework to Microsoft.

Notes and references

External links

* http://ilovebenbrown.com/ - Ben Brown's current blog * https://www.flickr.com/groups/ilovebenbrown/ - Ben Brown fan group on Flickr * Ben physically assembled each book in the printing of: {{DEFAULTSORT:Brown, Ben American bloggers 1978 births Living people People from Derwood, Maryland

Publishing

Internet

See also

Notes and references

External links