Scott Lupo

Most of you on the site know my story, but I wanted to do several things with this spotlight piece. First, put a face with a name. Yep – that’s me. I have no idea where that gray hair is coming from. I keep trying to convince my children that it’s turning blond, but they aren’t buying it. Second, I wanted to share some thoughts from my bio that some of you have not seen. Finally, I wanted to provide some insight into the focus and direction of OurEcho over the coming months.

People often ask me why I started OurEcho and I will try to make some sense of it for you. For one, as a child I was always exposed to great storytellers. Anytime more than a few members of the family were together, someone would invariably mention something like the time Aunt Margie skated down Thrill Hill or the time Granddaddy and his friends bought a plane. We must have covered the same ground a thousand times, but because of it, I remember. My children haven not had the luxury of knowing some of these wonderful people, so I write down the stories for them to learn about them. I think it gives them a better sense of who they are. Maybe they learn their love of sports comes from a great grandfather who played ball or that tendency to laugh too loud was shared with their grandmother. Stories are wonderful way to preserve and continue our heritage. Children might not care today, but at some point, they will want to know more. They will be glad someone took the time to write it down. OurEcho is a means to document and share this information.

I have also been fortunate to have been exposed to people like my Aunt Margie (Margie Stillwell), who without much formal education, still reveled in the written word. She wrote, not to be published, but because she liked it. Some of her stories are wonderful and it would be a sin not to share them. I had the skills to build a website for her to share her pieces, but others may not. OurEcho is an extension of this concept and her original site. It is a means for not just writers, but storytellers to share some of their work.

Beyond these personal reasons, I am also interested in the community interaction that is possible through the internet. I design applications that allow large companies to store and analyze large amounts of information. By implementing these systems, corporations are better able to understand problems and make reasonable decisions. I am interested in extending this concept to a larger audience. My hope is that in capturing pieces of ourselves, it will allow us to better understand each other and interact accordingly. I realize it is a lofty goal, but one worth pursuing.

At its core, OurEcho is focused on the writer and storyteller in all of us. Our goal is to provide mechanisms for contributors to easily capture and share their stories. In doing so, we also hope to deliver an enthusiastic audience of readers.

To this end, we are always experimenting with features that enhance OurEcho. Over time, we hope to provide products and services that aren’t available on any other site.

Over the next three months, our focus will be in three areas.

Serial Fiction - Anne Bonny
The internet is quickly developing as a true entertainment medium as digital video, audio, photo and text all converge into one seamless package. Although serial fiction goes back to the roots of publishing, at the same time, the internet is breathing new life into it. I recently read of a new publishing machine that can print a 300-page book with a color cover for pennies a page and in less than 3-minutes. Innovations like this one will revolutionize the publishing industry and provide internet content with a viable print mechanism. No matter how much I like the internet, I still like long-form pieces printed.

Within the next 6 weeks, I hope to announce a contest for the next serial project – a creative non-fiction story of Horace King. The contest will have a nice prize with publication on the site as well as a nice web presence for the story (I should have the Anne Bonny homepage completed shortly and it looks pretty cool). I would like to encourage writers in this area and I hope to continue to sponsor projects like this one.

Audio
I am still chasing audio, though it offers many challenges. My current focus has been on the recording process and I feel like I have recently made quiet a bit of headway. Using Skype, I have successfully recorded audio from contributors over both VOIP (internet phone connection) and traditional phone lines. I’m impressed with the quality and feel pretty good about the solution. I don’t know that it is truly scaleable to capturing large amounts of audio, but it’s a good start.

Once I have a good handle on the recording process, I’ll concentrate on editing and listening to recording over dial-up connects.

Family Memories
Within the next month, I hope to also announce a new Family Memories project. The goal of this project will be to provide a template or “wizard” to help contributors document their childhood memories. I’ll post a topic each month and then encourage OurEcho contributors to post about the same topic. Obviously, many of you already do this very eloquently, but my objective is to provide a structured methodology for others like myself that struggle with it.

Miscellaneous
I still have big plans when it comes to rewarding contributors through sponsorships and awards, but my first task is to increase the number of contributors and readers. If I can develop a larger audience, then that potentially leads to advertising which in turn leads to more resources for me to allocate to contests. I’m afraid at the moment, you’re primarily stuck with just me and depending on other aspects of my life, many times there just isn’t enough time and money to go around.

In the coming months, I do plan to revisit how contests are judged and also how posts are placed in the Hall of Fame. I spend a great deal of OurEcho time and resources judging contests and Hall of Fame entries and I need to find a more efficient means to do this.

As some of you have noticed, I recently partnered with The Writing Salon to sponsor the Anne Bonnie serial fiction project. I would like to do more of these arrangements and hope to announce other partnerships in the near future.

I hope this gives you some vision of where OurEcho came from and where I’d like to take us next. I’ll continue to update you as things progress. I encourage you to keep posting and personally thank all of you for the pieces you have already contributed.

Story ID:	804
Written by:	OurEcho Admin (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	In The Spotlight
Location:	Atlanta GA USA
Year:	2006
Person:	Scott Lupo