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Title: Development History

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==Part 1: How it started==
Around 2004 "Steve Lambert":http://visitsteve.com, having discovered the original AdBlock and later "AdBlockPlus":http://adblockplus.org/ made a connection with his "Budget Gallery project":http://wiki.budgetgallery.org, which replaced advertising in public space with art galleries.  He asked some smart friends if they knew how it could be done.  No one did. He filed the thought away.

2 years later during a fellowship at "Eyebeam":http://eyebeam.org, Steve remembered the idea and asked his new smart friends if they knew how it could be done.  Evan Harper had a prototype made within a few weeks.  The prototype was refined and posted on "http://www.addart.eyebeam.org/":http://www.addart.eyebeam.org/ so it could be submitted to Rhizome's Commission program around April 2006.

==Part 2: The Wave of Press==
===The Rhizome Commission===
Because Rhizome's Commission required a web based submission, the proposal and prototype was available online.  Rhizome users vote on the submissions, so shortly after the project was written up on blogs by Rhizome users, then written about by others.  This led to press that came before the project was done.  But, the project won the member choice and curators choice for the Rhizome Commission and received funding.

===Press===
AddArt was written about on a few blogs, when the New York Times rang.  After the "New York Times piece":http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/technology/14adblock.html, other print media ran with the story.  At this point, there was press in papers around the world, but the project had only been started.

The most of the work on Add-Art in 2007 was spent raising money, strategizing on how the plugin would work, and beginning work on the beta release.

==Part 3: Working towards Beta==
===Evan Harper Version===
Evan created the first proof of concept prototype.  I believe it was based on the original AdBlock (see "AdBlockPlus history":http://adblockplus.org/en/history) and simply swapped images that were standard ad sizes. Evan's plugin was stand-alone.  It missed some ads, and it replaced images that were not ads, but it showed that it could be done and got everything off the ground.

===AdBlockPlus Version===
Because of the press, Steve and Wladimir Palant (from AdBlockPlus) got in touch with each other.  Wladimir supported the project by writing some code for Add-Art that works along side AdBlockPlus.

Advantage of working with AdBlockPlus are:
# ad blocking code is done
# large number of existing users who may be interested in Add-Art - one of the goals of this project is to reach non-art audiences
# open source project with community of contributors who may help contribute to the long-term development of Add-Art

===Firefox 3 Problem (solved)===

When we released Add-Art FF3 came out a week later and Add-Art didn't work.  For months we couldn't figure out a solution. We put the problem on rent-a-coder and got a solution in a month.

==Part 4: Now==

This is where we are now. Development is happening in 2 parts:

# [[Add-Art Plugin development]]
# [[Add-Art site development]]

==Part 5: The future==

* create a way that people can make add-art feeds that others can subscribe to.
* Hand over admin duties to an interested museum or arts org like Eyebeam ("ReBlog":http://eyebeam.org/reblog as a model, the Brooklyn Museum, Rhizome, etc.

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