Who is JedKantos and what is Zude?

A little introduction is necessary for this first blog entry. My name is Kantos Kan, I am a Jed of Lesser Helium, one of the principal cities of Barsoom. What? You’re confused already? Okay, let me explain it further. This is my online persona, my alter-ego. It is based on a fictional world created by the “grandfather of science fiction”, Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB). Best known now as the creator of Tarzan, his first novel, published in 1912, was called “A Princess of Mars”, which became the first in his Barsoom series of novels. The term “Barsoom” is the name, ascribed by the local inhabitants in this series, of what we know as the planet Mars. Kantos Kan is one of the protagonists in the story. A “Jed” is a ruler of a city or principality on Barsoom, being subordinate to a “Jeddak”, which is a supreme ruler of an entire region of Barsoom.

So, that pretty much sums up who Jed Kantos is. What about this Zude thing? What is that? Even the creators of Zude have a tough time trying to answer that question! Zude is a website, located at http://www.zude.com which could variously be described as a home page hosting service, a social network like MySpace or Facebook, or an “enabling technology” which puts the power of the latest web technologies into the hands of anyone, even novice users. People who have a registered account on Zude are referred to as “Zuders”, and the collection of pages that they have created within Zude is called their “Zudescape”.

This blog serves the purpose of documenting my own development of my new Zudescape. I intend for my Zudescape to be a far-reaching, feature-rich, centralized hub for anything and everything to do with my web presence. Instead of being flung across the broad expanse of the World Wide Web, in a disjointed, ad-hoc fashion, my web presence is going to be unified. Everything that I do on the Internet can be brought together into one place here on Zude. I can even embed other websites into my Zudescape pages, just as I have embedded WordPress itself. Every entry that I make in this blog has been made from my Zude page.

My new Zudescape, naturally, is going to have a Barsoomian flavor. As I develop my new Zudescape, I will post blog entries of what I am doing, how I am achieving certain effects, what tools I use, etc, so that perhaps someone else might get some ideas for something that they could implement on their own Zudescape.