It seems that a cover story on the business-famous FastCompany magazine is what has kept Chris Hughes off the media as he undertook a self-imposed moratorium to stay away from the press while the man he backed and helped become the president took center stage in Washington.

That seems pretty strange for a young man who is pretty used to being in the spotlight by co-founding the largest and the most popular social networking site on the planet and then going on to unleash the web-built base for the most extensive and captivating presidential campaign in US history.

Under the headline The Kid Who Made Obama President; How Facebook Cofounder Chris Hughes Unleaded Barack’s Base- and Changed Politics and Marketing Forever, the cover story reveals a bit more info about Facebook’s co-founder from a personal standpoint. Starting from coming out of the closet when in boarding school, to how touched his parents were when Obama acknowledged his efforts.

Now we wonder, how being Chris Hughes would be like … [via Gawker]

Bandwidth Blog sat down with Rafiq and got the low down on his latest project, biggest achievements and becoming a TV star for being online 24/7.

Rafiq, introduce yourself and describe some of your daily activities (daily routine)?

Rafiq Phillips – Web AddiCT, QuirkStar and co-founder of www.idrive.co.za.
My daily routine will be aired on TV pretty soon and i do not believe in re-inventing the wheel, you’ll be able to see it all there. Google reveals all too. What they didn’t show was me spending time away from the internet: With awesome Friends, not enough with my family and recovering from a heart smashed into more pieces than there are web pages indexed by Google.

You recently won the Top ICT Youth Innovator in Africa Award – what has that meant for you?

Nokia-Siemens were the category sponsor for at the African ICT Achievers awards. It’s still in the early stages but there are some awesome things about to happen. How about a Bandwidth Blog scoop when it’s official? (done deal – ed)

Last week Carte Blanche filmed you ‘living on the internet’ which ended up at cafe Neo – tell us more about what you did and how you experienced being behind the camera?

The Carte Blanche crew followed me around for 2.0 mornings. from waking up in the morning (yes there was a camera in my face when I opened my eyes) reaching for my mobile phone to go online to my daily SEO work at Quirk eMarketing, twitter, facebook, blogging, IM, MXit, Flickr, Shozu and ended up meeting with Charl Norman and the other half of idrive.co.za and Web AddiCT(s); – Miguel dos Santos at Caffee Neo. We did bit of an interview, the cameras didn’t really bother me. Just was a bit weird being woken up with a camera in my face and having to walk into the QuirkStation 5 times for them to get the perfect shot. Yeah, and it was laundry day too.

who do you think is the hottest web startup in SA?

*shamless self promotion time*
It was Guy Kawasaki who once said, “Make meaning, not money.” I believe the hottest web startup in SA that was not built-to-flip is www.idrive.co.za. A vertical search engine that connects learners drivers throughout South Africa with credible driving schools via the web, mobile and MXit. It’ll make the roads we all travel on safer by ensuring those more likely to cause a fender bender are actually taught the basics right by driving schools who actually know what they’re doing.

Another web app I believe will be huge internationally is the Online Reputation Management tool BrandsEye – it enables you to extract the knowledge required to make key decisions which will affect your brand’s future in real-time. BrandsEye then goes one step further and allows you to quantify your online reputation letting you benchmark against your competitors and yourself. I first became aware of BrandsEye pre-alpha when Quirk while monitored their own Online Reputation with it. Whenever I mentioned Quirk in a blog post on Web AddiCT(s); there would be this funny referring site in my stats. When I confronted them about this I was told it was top-secret. Rob Stokes later invited me to beta test the ORM tool and I was pretty much impressed. I wonder if I’m allowed to talk about this… let me stop there. *Disclosure – i joined Quirk 9 months later.

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Jon Waraas, the director of Developer Hut Inc, took some time out of his busy schedule to drop the BasementGuru 20 Questions… Below he shares his knowledge on a variety of webmaster related topics and talks about the websites in his network.

Q: Can you give us a short introduction to yourself?

My name is Jon Waraas. I am nineteen years of age and currently work for myself as a dot com entrepreneur. I have been in the online scene for about five years now. I own and run Developer Hut, Inc; which is a online network/ad network.

Q: When did you create your first website and what was it – What interested you in online media?

I got into the online world on accident. I am not a computer geek at all. I actually started developing websites when I was 15 years old. I owned a skateboarding company that manufactured skateboarding rails for people. I wanted to sell on ebay and such so I tried making a website for my stupid little skateboard rails

My very first website was customskateboarding.com, and it was originally hosted on tripod.com, haha. I got addicted to working on that website! I didn’t have a computer back then, so I had to work on it at the library, so I would go to the library 6 days a week for like 5 hours a day.

I wasn’t rich back then, I could barley afford the $6 a month hosting. But working on websites was the funniest thing ever for me to do. I had that website for a few years. After I put adsense on that site and started making some money off of it, I realized that this is what I wanted to do for my career.

Q: Do you have a network of websites? Tell us more about the websites in the network.

Yes. I own Developer Hut, Inc. My network consists of about 30 websites. Most websites are based on MySpace.Com, but I also have some blogs, some forums, some webmaster websites, etc.

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