Marc Benton dot Com

Its been an extremely interesting few months since leaving my last job.  Changes abounded in every aspect of my life, some good…some not so great. 

At my last organization I was almost completely focused on CMS implementations, ignoring most of the other aspects of website development.  CMS work is nice, its the backbone of the internet, but I was missing
the application engagements that precipitates true user interaction.  After leaving there one of my first adventures was attending the New New Internet conference in my hometown of Reston, VA.  I was introduced to (or should I say immersed in) social media and the reality of Web 2.0. My next few months entailed my engagement in the Facebooks and Twitters of the web, more usage of my LinkedIn account, and a presence at multiple local tech activities. I’ve met and interacted both in person and over the internet with many great people, too many to list here.

My challenge became finding a position that leveraged the two.  Most social media positions today are in the marketing and PR domain.  Unless I wanted to start my career over from the ground up I did not see those domains as options.  Weeks became months which became quarters while I looked for that job. I then stumbled across a local startup named WorthPoint.

WorthPoint is a social media site that catalogues and tracks the sales history and current value of antiques and collectibles from around the world, and makes this
information available to everyone.  Anne Zeiger stated “The company is gaining significant
visitor traction and is well poised to capture the lion’s share of this
untapped market.”

Thats the company’s story.  For me it’s the perfect match I was looking for. 

We utilize Drupal as our CMS.  Well utilize is the wrong word, we actually push Drupal up to and beyond its intended limits.  We provide a plethora of tools and features for collectors of every domain.  Communities that include user abilities to list items in their collections, videos of them, mixing of professional knowledge along with wisdom of crowd knowledge, blogging, buying and selling, along with a deep database of historic data on auction items called the Worthopedia.  Thats just the short list of features, there’s more in the works (whoops, I almost said worx. old habits huh?).

Whats my role in this you may ask?  They’ve asked me to manage the product development and implement an Agile process using the tool Rally Dev.  Our first sprint started today.  I’m happy with the team so far as they’ve taken to the change in the way they work and the new tool.  Rally Dev is an interesting application that I plan to cover in another post but I will say now that they have a great sales and support staff.

So for now I’m deep in the midst of a CMS driven social community application utilizing an Agile process with distributed teams all over the world.  To quote some of my older relations back in Arkansas….I’m like a pig in shit!

Have you changed jobs recently?