This blog belongs to Jonathan Vanasco, just another guy in Brooklyn.

About Me

Quick Intro

Hi, my name is Jonathan. I'm a guy in Brooklyn who does things with computers, words, and raw materials when he's lucky. On Wednesday nights you can find me in the East Village playing competitive skeeball on Team Brewniccula (formerly known as Goatskee); I ended this skeeson with a 28.07 average which was very exciting. In the summers I play Brooklyn Kickball.

My History

I graduated from Pomona College (possibly the happiest and smartest place around) in 2000 with double majors in Political Science and Media Studies. I was fortunate enough to spend a semester on the East African Coast, where I studied Urban Art Forms & Methods, spent far too much time in Mombasa with the greatest artists you'll never hear of, and played nonstop cards and football on Lamu Island.

While at Pomona I created something called "The Booty Party" (later named "Campus Cupid"). You might have heard of it, as people seemed to like quite a bit - it was the first college-specific, closed crush matching & compatibility website which launched the winter of 1999/2000.

I've since worked as an online media strategist, branding consultant, technologist and designer with major record labels, media outlets and beauty brands. I've designed both hardware and software for kiosks, and worked on the first RFID enabled retail shelving units, which were placed in WalMart stores. A few years ago, I co-wrote a screenplay about Breast Milk and Fads with this guy, and have written several equally irreverent shorts since.

In 2005 I left the 9-9 world to focus on my own projects, with a concentration on identity, syndication, and workflow efficiency. The umbrella for my online startups is called SyndiClick, and aims to help consumers and publishers deal with the proliferation of online networks. Every property we've developed has been about significantly ahead of the market.

RoadSound.com is a content-management platform designed to manage PR information for inter-connected entities, we beta-tested the system from February-May 2006, and decided to shelve it while the market grows. RoadSound's technology lets a band update their website and instantly syndicate that information across all their social network profiles, cross-referencing that information onto their record label, pr firm, and booking agent data streams; concert dates are cross referenced against supporting acts and venues. If you're 'in the industry' how does this sound: 1 person can now update 1 website, instead of 20 people updating 200 websites - and there are lots of checkboxes for your legal departments to approve information with.

In August 2006 I launched FindMeOn.com - the first platform designed for Centralized Identity Management and Cross-Network Content Syndication with user privacy as an ever-present concern. In October 2006 I launched OpenSN ( The Open Social Network ) - a collection of open standards used to create a truly open internet. Within months of each launch several high-profile internet startups would clone our widgets , api and core-site functionality. A year after launch, some of the largest companies on the internet would re-implement our offerings. FindMeOn's patent pending technologies are the building blocks for cross-network communications and identity mappings.

Why 'Destructuring' ?

I thought Destructuring was another one of those words that some postmodern author imagined. On a whim, I opened some Derrida or Foucault book, flipped to a random page, and chose the least-likely-to-not-be-a-real-word word to where my finger landed. I was *pretty sure* Destructuring wasn't real: and I was half-right. There is no real word 'destructuring', however it does exist as Computer Science term which is popular in the Lisp community ( and growing in JS, from what I'm told ). However... the CompSci definition had little to do with the manner in which the PostModern author used it, so they're still wrong. I'm just less right. And I'm okay with that.

Why All the Crappy Movies & Books?

I studied film for several years in undergrad. One day I realized that film/media studies makes you hate movies, and ruins your creativity - people end up focusing on inane revisionist histories like "the usage of white & black in Citizen Kane". Orson Welles couldn't have cared less about white/black and what it could convey - his cinematographer was drunk or high and just shot what looked cool. When I realized what a bitter, cynical cliche those classes were making me, I dropped the studies. To detox I started watching awful movies for a few years - and it finally worked - I actually enjoy watching films now. Sometime around 2005 I played around with exporting Netflix and Amazon histories into blog entries, and trying to do 1 line summations. Some worked, some didn't.

My Projects

Current

Commercial Projects

Open Source Projects I Maintain

Open Source Communities I'm Invloved with

Too many!

Past

Commercial Projects