Rzklkng makes some very good points. My thought would be that we need to build a community where tech creatives, nerds if you like, find these things: 1) a comfortable, interesting place to live, 2) enough work 3)ready access to one another, 4)no significant barriers to their interconnection, and 5) reasonable access to funding for those startups that want it.

Philadelphia still has the old neighborhoods with the personality that Graham described. I can’t comment on the job and work market, but I am hearing more people say that they are busy than say that they are scrambling for work. This very site is one piece of evidence that we are trying to reach out to one another and I don’t believe that funding is the problem. In other words, Philadelphia does have excellent potential.

A few things on the other side: Toonerstan mentioned to me at BlogPhila that our main area of startup development was in life sciences, not web/tech companies. What little I know of this says he is right. However, this isn’t all that negative in terms of attracting and keeping the bright folks around. It does bring to mind Graham’s point about needing a critical mass - either the development takes off or it does not.

Being just slightly biased, I don’t agree that there is no point to trying to make an old ex-industrial city like Philadelphia a city that has a vibrant tech center. I say this because we have so many of the factors for success he noted: the right kind of neighborhoods and housing, reasonable weather, lots of universities (not sure it has to be just one world-class tech school), sources of funding, and finally! a city government that is paying attention to the importance of the creative community. (Not that the government is the answer, but support is good and neglect is bad for us.)

I believe that the critical mass can be built, and that there are folks out there sitting up at night doing just that. It is a great thing to see and be part of.

The condo rush in Center City and retiring baby boomers will likely concentrate wealth into the core of the city, which will change everything. Philly has been in decline as a manufacturing city post-WW2, the problem is that nothing has stepped in to fill the void. Perhaps the influx of late-20s and early-30s “hipster” creatives.

I can’t disagree with the brain-drain, Philly’s been fighting that. And our nationwide war on science certainly isn’t helping in producing the next batch of innovators.

Gov’t involvement no longer means “the Manhattan Project”. Instead, it is grants, funding, contracts, and incentives, not bureaucrat-run enterprise.

The biggest unspoken assumption is what a “Silicon Alley” would mean in Philly. The companies, products, and technologies that he pines for seem to be 1960-1990s era, and largely hardware-centric. It’s unfortunate, but we as a nation have been getting out of that business for a long time. That is clearly at odds with the current service-focused innovations that we’re seeing, such as mashups, webapps, and social networking.

All Philly needs are some small-c creatives (entreprenuers) to complement the big-C Creatives (artists, designers, and such), and the embryonic community that we are seeing insures we can be competitive.