Today Grapefruit turned 7.

Seven years ago, we left Necomm and Mon­itorul (both part of Nord­Est Media, at that time), because we felt we could do bet­ter. And we did.

Five months ago I left Grapefruit, again because I felt I could do better.

The issues have been the same both times: work place iner­tia, men­tal iner­tia (read: they couldn’t undergo a paradigm shift); it was more or less about semantics: in the first case it star­ted with implied vocab­u­lary semantics over com­mon gram­mar and
syn­tax (read: XML and web stand­ards), in the second with expli­cit semantics and open world assump­tion (read: semantic web).

In the past years, Grapefruit shif­ted its focus from inter­act­ive media to brand­ing, and by includ­ing the inter­ac­tion design in the brand­ing pro­cess, it suc­ceeded to over­see the social aspect of the web and fre­quently limit the inter­ac­tion just to present­a­tional aspects.

Although I believe that this change was mar­ket driven, Grapefruit reached a point where it became unin­ter­est­ing from my point of view.

And here I am, pur­su­ing my dreams, as a research stu­dent at Know­ledge Media Insti­tute (The Open Uni­ver­sity), where I work in both NeOn and Open Know­ledge projects.