The Virtual Webmaster
My Journey to Digital Freedom
Career Overview & Highlights
47 years in IT. Still jumping to the next thing…
My IT journey has been less about climbing a career ladder or becoming a recognised expert in any one field, and more about exploring emerging technologies. I have always been an early adopter of technology. OK, I admit it: I am a geek. My roles have always been hands-on, technically focused, and centred around helping people solve problems. My broad range of experience and exposure to different technologies has given me a unique perspective, providing insights and enabling me to recognise patterns that many experts do not see.
Forty-seven years of jumping to the Next Thing through diverse roles, technologies, and industries does not just build experience; it builds perspective. And perspective is what allows me to see patterns, connections, and the bigger picture that deep specialisation, almost by definition, can make harder to see. I recognise now that I operate with a Pattern Weaver mindset, akin to generalism, multipotentiality, or lateral thinking, by synthesising my experience across a vast array of fields rather than staying in one lane.
Over the past decade, I have become increasingly alarmed at the takeover of IT and the Internet by Big Tech. I have watched as Big Tech has crept into almost every aspect of our digital lives. Big Tech is transforming this Information Superhighway into a digital toll road, where every click comes at a cost. They’ve created road rules designed not to protect us but to control us, appointing themselves as the highway patrol to police our digital activities. They’re blocking exits and installing surveillance systems to track where we go and everything we do. The Information Superhighway is now taking us directly to a Digital Prison where you become their Digital Slave.
Late 70s into early 80s
first thing
Micro to Mainframe
My IT journey started in 1979 when I bought a Sorcerer microcomputer. It came with a whopping 4k of RAM. No internal storage. No graphics. No sound. I learned programming by typing code out of books and saving it to a cassette deck.
My first real IT job was as a Computer Tape Librarian at Telecom, managing reel-to-reel tapes for the mainframes. I applied to become a Computer Operator and was sent off for two weeks of intensive training. It turned out what I was doing at home on my microcomputer was more technical than anything we did as mainframe operators.
While working at Telecom I enrolled at night school for a Diploma course in Operating and Coding where I learned Pascal and COBOL. The college had a minicomputer which introduced me to Unix.
Mid-to-Late 80s
next thing
Application Developer
Once I graduated I was offered a trainee programming position as a COBOL maintenance programmer. I joined more than 50 application developers supporting an ageing COBOL system, but I never wrote a line of COBOL. The team I joined worked on PC-to-mainframe interfaces and screen scraping. As the trainee programmer I was given the role of documenting the entire system and handed a box of floppy disks containing the C language (no ++), and told to create graphical splash screens for the apps we were developing.
At home I continued to develop my personal computing skills, upgrading first to a Microbee running CP/M and then to IBM compatibles running PC DOS.
Late 80s to Early 90s
next thing
PC Manager / Help Desk Manager / Project Manager
I applied for a PC Manager role at ACI / Pilkington with the mission to take control of the proliferation of personal computers and bring them under IT department control. My first task was to conduct an Australia-wide audit. I created a semi-automated audit process using my programming and technical skills. I sent 5¼ and 3½ inch floppy disks to every office that would auto-run, collecting all the information about the computers, hardware and software installed, plus a copy of the directory structure being used. I then set up the PC department and PC standards for the organisation.
My next role was at Ericsson Australia, the Swedish telco that used to make mobile phones. They had manufacturing plants and offices around Australia. I was employed as the National Help Desk Manager, in charge of 20+ support staff covering 1st, 2nd and 3rd level support. This included supporting the SunOS environment.
After a couple of years I was invited to join the IT Project Management team and sent off for a full week of training at a boutique hotel where a group of us from around Australasia were trained in the PROPS project management system. I had really enjoyed working for Ericsson under Swedish management, but they recruited a new management team from Telstra which I hated, so time for the next thing.
During this period only two of the Big Tech giants we know today existed. They were Apple and Microsoft and the two were like two different opposing camps. I was in the Microsoft camp but got to play with my brothers Macintosh and was impressed. In the Microsoft camp, the MS DOS users looked down on the new Macintosh graphic interface as for “dumber” users, but quickly adopted the new interface upon the release of Windows. I remember sitting at my desk when a package from Microsoft arrived in my in-tray containing version 1.0 of Windows. Then it was just a program that ran on top of MS Dos and incredibly buggy as were the early version of their Office programs. The existing programs were far superior but I watched as Microsoft employed various unfair tactics to push out the competition including sabotage how the targeted competition worked on their platform and quickly monopolised the desktop application market.
Early to Mid 90s
next thing
IT Contracting / MCSE
I started working as an IT Contractor and Consultant with my own company structure and updated my qualifications by becoming a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE). Over the 90s I had numerous short and medium term contracts including:
IBM – contracted as a team leader for the national roll-out of an SOE. The project was behind schedule and facing strong resistance from some offices. I was able to convince them that the SOE would not impact their productivity and we actually got the last computer upgraded on the last day. I was offered a full time role at IBM but I had another next thing to do.
Snowball was a financial management startup I joined. I designed and built the IT systems from the ground up and then managed IT for the company. When Snowball was floated, it sank into the snow and that was the end of Snowball.
Sacs Consulting was a group of four recruitement companies including one that specialised in IT recruitement. They had a database with hundreds of IT proffesionals and selected me to setup and manage a their new IT systems.
GE Capital – hired specifically for my Microsoft IIS qualification. They had around 40 servers being migrated from Microsoft IIS to Apache on Linux because of major security vulnerabilities. I was technical support for the Microsoft side, but the Linux guys knew what they were doing so there was almost nothing for me to do. This gig was the easiest thing ever.
Victoria Police – hired as a relief System Administrator for their systems. This required a high security clearance, which I would still be eligible for, but I have no interest in working in any government related role again.
Around this period I read Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth and he was just talking my language. I realised my true love – creating systems along with a passion for customer service. Neither of those were being met by contracting and consulting roles. Time to create my own thing.
Mid to Late 90s
next thing
Computer Troubleshooters / Managers
I was tired of the corporate thing and the increasing political correctness, so I decided to put my extensive PC Support and Help Desk Management experience from the previous decade to good use by starting my own PC Support business targeting SMEs.
I launched The Computer Troubleshooters with 8 support people across Melbourne providing on-call on-site support. I did the marketing and allocated the work to them via a pager system with a free 18000 number answered by human operatored service that would answer the call and greet the customer using our Company greeting and send us a brief text message on the pager. Nobody had mobile phones back then as they were still huge bricks and expensive.
I also co-launched with a friend the Computer Troubleshooters BBS (2 lines). This was a pre-internet dial-up bulletin board where my support people could log in and access support information and files. It was also open to the public as a free trouble shooting resources.
Through one of my clients I was introduced to NLP (Nero Linguistic Programming). I enrolled in their training course to become certified as an Ericksonian NLP practitioner, I completed the first half but was already exploring the second half online and never completed the second part of the training.
This was my first venture into the entrepreneurial world and had moderate success operating for two years but I was very inexperienced and found managing a network of independent operators challenging. I was also very hands-on supporting my own customers, I was also building and upgrading computer systems, and selling and installing software packages. Sometimes I was on my hands and knees, like crawling under the administration building at Jayco Caravans with a crimping tool in hand, installing their very first Ethernet network for the MYOB accounting package, which at the time I was an official reseller for. I learnt a lot for that experience including the need to focus and commit.
It was during this time that I realised that what SME’s needed much more than just technical support was help managing their IT, so I registered a new business called Computer Managers…but then I got distracted by the next thing.
Late 90s to Early 2000s
next thing
Internet Marketing
I had been dabbling with HTML websites in the mid 90s and had a few popular ones, but there were few options to monetise back then. I got a website builder called NetObjects Fusion and started building websites for clients and providing web hosting services.
I started promoting affiliate programs and discovered passive residual income. Dodo Internet launched their affiliate program and for almost two years I sat at number 1 in Google, creating a steady stream of daily sign-ups. I did a similar thing with NOD32 Virus protection and others. I also set up and operated my own affiliate program exclusively selling popular ebooks for an author I had partnered with. Blogs were the next big thing and I first started building them as flat file HTML until CMSs came along, before switching over to WordPress.
This was also the period when Google launched its Search Engine with the Page Ranking scheme which I embraced. I was soon building PBNs for AdSense/AdWords as well as my own money sites. Websites like shippingcontainers.info were number one for Google searches for over a year, sometimes earning up to $1000 a week in AdSense. I sold that domain to an actual shipping company before the 2012 crash. At the peak I had well over 100 domains spread over more than 20 web hosts around the world. The big players were into the thousands of websites.
Mid to Late 2000s
next thing
Outsourcing / Virtual Assistants
BPO and VAs were the thing. In countries like the Philippines you could hire an IT college graduate for $5 per hour and English-fluent VAs for writing content and other tasks. My plan was to greatly expand my Internet Marketing business using a team of IT graduates I would personally train and manage. In 2006 I moved to the Philippines to implement my plan and stayed there for over ten years.
This was the period Google started to dominate search and SEO became THE thing. In the beginning getting top position in Google was relatively easy, just dynamic content like blogs and building back-links using link farms. Over time it got a lot more complex. We moved from basic keyword stuffing to proper on-page SEO, then to building back-links that were actually relevant and independent.
Google provided guidelines for SEO, but if you actually followed them it was almost guaranteed you wouldn’t rank. The only way to rank was to ignore the guidelines and outsmart the algo.
Late 2000s to Early 2010s
next thing
Search Engine Optimisation
As an Internet marketer I was already focused on SEO in the late 2000s. While living in the Philippines I met another Australian expat who was running an SEO company based out of Hong Kong. His background was in accounting and he was targeting professional verticals in Australia. We decided to team up, combining his business experience and network with my IT background. I became a co-director of Visisearch.
SEO was becoming a huge industry and there was a proliferation of automation and obfuscation tools available to us to build search rankings such as SENuke, Xrumer, Scrapebox and GSA.
In 2012 my business partner was in Sydney, sitting on the top floor of a corporate boardroom presenting to a board of directors. He was there to demonstrate our dominance in the professional vertical in Australia. For the short keyword term “Accountant” in Australia we ranked number 1 and had 5 other sites in the top 10. What he did not know was that Google’s Penguin and then Panda updates had just wiped out all our rankings. Not just off the front page, but completely removed from the index. Not just our websites, but the websites of all our clients who trusted us to optimise them.
The part that really got me was that they penalised hundreds of thousands of smaller business websites that had, in good faith, used an SEO service like ours. The process to get a website off the Google blacklist required manually disavowing hundreds of back-links. Many SEO companies just closed shop, leaving their clients with blacklisted websites. At the end of the day it did not stop Black Hat SEO or deliver any sustained improvement in search results and the same result could have been achieved without the massive penalties affecting innocent parties acting in good faith.
We recovered and adapted to their new rules, which they never publish, but it became an endless game of cat and mouse. That was the turning point for me. I was done playing their stupid games and I started to see a darker motive related to the corporate takeover of the internet – pushing out the small guys that had helped them build their empire when they were no longer needed.
Late 2010s to Early 2020s
next thing
The Virtual Webmaster
The one thing I noticed while working with our Visisearch clients was that most of them came to us with broken websites. Many didn’t even perform basic maintenance and would only act when something major actually broke. On-page SEO was one of the first things we did because if the website doesn’t load fast, has errors, broken links, poor navigation, or is missing basic things like a privacy statement and sitemap, then all the external SEO work is far less effective.
I also saw how frustrated business owners were trying to manage their own online presence. The industry was full of cowboys who didn’t really know what they were doing. Clients thought they had someone properly managing their website, but they didn’t. The idea of offering proper website management services had occurred to me, but we were always too busy just servicing the clients we already had. The concept was simple: manage the back-end technical side for small businesses, including the security, the updates, and the stuff the cowboy developers ignore.
I started developing The Virtual Webmaster with a team of Filipinos workers including developers, SEO specialist, graphic artist and Tech Savvy VA’s. We set up a 24-hour help desk with Filipino staff handling first-level support and proper escalation procedures. We offered monthly management and support packages including VA services. The Social Visibility Online idea was really just absorbed into The Virtual Webmaster offerings. We provided on-page SEO and could help with social engagement, but we didn’t push SEO as a main offering.
With the team in place, I returned to Australia and launch the business properly having registered The Virtual Webmaster Pty Ltd, secured the domain thevirtualwebmaster.com.au, and set up a 1300 number along with everything else needed to run the company.
Soon after arriving back in Australia, COVID hit and everything collapsed including my business. We lived through the lockdowns in Victoria, which were among the most severe in the world and as soon as we were able we relocated to rural Queensland where we currently live.
Early 2020s to Present
current thing
Digital Freedom Alliance
I created Digital Freedom Alliance as a platform for collaboration on what I call Digital Freedom Technologies. It’s based on the philosophy of Agency and Control over our digital lives.
CARS Digital Privacy System is the flagship project. CARS stands for Compartmentalisation, Alternatives, Responsibility, and Security. It’s a methodology and framework that provides a modular system for building private digital compartments called CARS, helping users escape surveillance-based platforms and reclaim control of their digital lives.
HATS is part of the CARS system and deals with the human interface to technology. HATS stands for Human Autonomy Technology Shield. The idea is to create a buffer between the technology and the user so they can exercise real Agency and Control. The first implementation of HATS is focused on AI.
10 Steps to Escape to Digital Freedom FREE online gamified training course on how to apply the CARS Digital Privacy System. Walk Away from Big Tech
Digital Freedom Coaching is for both businesses and individuals who want help managing technology including learning how to harness the emerging Web 3.0 space.
These are some of the projects I’m currently working on.
“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” – William Blake