Bay area, center of the world?

Is the Bay Area the center of the world? If it isn’t, why does the IT world revolve around things happening over there and not anywhere else? I’ve been wondering about this ever since I began to think about building or joining a start-up. Think about it: The conferences are in SF, the new companies are in SF, the hip projects were born there or are moving there soon (think Flickr).

In a time where I believe we should be getting close(r) to establishing the idea of a global network of creative companies and people, it seems like things are focussing down on one point of the map, and that’s probably not healthy. I’ll give you two distinct examples:

• First, Ben Hosken emailed me about his own start-up, started in australia in 1999 but that had to move into the US early on to create a market for it to grow on. He put the situation in a brilliant way: “Its damn hard to be so far away from the “action” as you I’m sure recognize….if only we were in SF”. So very true.
• Second, my own case. Portugal is definitely not the place where you want to have new ideas because you feel powerless to climb the ladder through layers and layers of concepts from the 90s and Web 1.0-centered companies. It could be a lot better because it has a huge market of IT-aware youngsters to explore, but there are no real examples of people taking the time to try and develop new services.

  Naturally any start-up that focusses on what I’ve been working on (social networking, folksonomies and the future of the web itself) will be thinking about dealing with a worldwide market, but it is always good to know that the people in your own city and country know what the hell you’re doing.

Its a weird world, the IT world. And we’re far from being global in terms of economy, even though the internet may get you to believe otherwise.