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First things first: I'm not the musician Chris Whitten, the golfer, the college athlete, or the US Marine that served in Guantanamo Bay. I'm the thirty-something boot-strapping FAQ-farming Megan-adoring scuba-diving fossil-collecting vegetarian libertarian Chris Whitten from Massachusetts, New York, Chicago, London, and now Westchester NY. [Whew. That should cover any possible way you know me.]
I grew up in Fitchburg, a small city in central Massachusetts, with my older brother Ted and mother Donna. My father Ted and stepmother Vicki lived close by in Ashby, Mass. After graduating from Fitchburg High School in 1989 I went off to Lyndon State College in the beautiful Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, for their small business management program. My economics classes there — with a gentleman farmer named Joe Wynne — changed my life. I spent my freshman year wrangling with ideas that seemed to contradict my bleeding-heart nature. I slowly became convinced that economic and social freedom are inseparable, and freedom is the sine qua non of human health, happiness, and prosperity. With the zeal of a new convert I devoted myself to libertarian political philosophy. I transferred to New York University in 1991. NYU was an intellectual center for the Austrian School of Economics. I was lucky enough to take many classes there with a great scholar named Israel Kirzner. And the summer before my senior year, I had the privilege of being a Charles Koch Fellow and interning at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC. After graduating from NYU in 1993 with a degree in economics, I went to work for Andrea Rich at the Laissez Faire Books mail order book catalog. Before Amazon.com Laissez Faire was the only place you could buy many books on liberty. Working closely with Andrea and her husband Howie was a wonderful experience. In 1994, I started experimenting with the Internet to see if there were new ways to communicate with our customers. Since many techies are libertarians we were one of the first businesses to find a receptive audience online. Even before there was a graphical web browser we were selling books on the Internet. I was so excited by the Internet that I quit my job in 1995 and created a libertarian community portal called Free-Market.Net. In 1997, I started a non-profit organization to maintain it. I named the organization The Henry Hazlitt Foundation, in honor of the great popularizer of free-market ideas. By 2000, we had five full-time employees and over 200,000 unique visitors a month. I'm very proud of what we accomplished, but by 2001 the fundraising and administration of running a non-profit had exhausted me. I wanted to be an entrepreneur again. I started experimenting with a small number of targeted websites on various topics under the umbrella of Interesting.com. Each of them had a community bulletin board for discussion. I began to realize that interaction in these forums was forming the most unique and valuable content on the sites. Interaction almost always took the form of questions and answers. It was the same as the early days of the Internet, where people would generously answer each other's questions in the USENET newsgroups. That got me to thinking about FAQs and how they evolved as a way to preserve the valuable Q&A so that the same questions didn't have to be answered over and over again. The problem with FAQs is that they're usually maintained by one person and they disappear or fade away when that person loses interest. I knew that with the recent advances in interactive technology something much more dynamic and powerful could be created. FAQ Farm was born in 2002. Since 2004 it has been wiki. Wiki questions and wiki answers set FAQ Farm apart from the new crop of Q&A sites by enabling the quality of the content to grow over time so that the Q&As become valuable permanent resources for everyone. In 2006 FAQ Farm became a part of Answers.com and I became their employee. We're now working to integrate wiki answers into a complete answer resource that takes advantage of the store of human knowledge in reference works, the power of technology, and the unique capabilities of human interaction. It's an exciting project that I believe will create something truly valuable for humanity. That's plenty. Feel free to drop me a note at chris [-(@)-] interesting.com. Chris P.S. You want pictures? I got pictures:
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