The internet is a wondrous anomaly, a technical and creative achievement grander than the Tower of Babel, an infinite tangle of knowledge, ideals, data, entertainment, beauty, trivia, terror, news, noise, hubris, despair. It’s a cultural blender, a mixmaster archive crammed with visions, twits and everyday things.
I’ve been thinking about the net, and its vastness, in anticipation of OneWebDay on Sept. 22. That’s an informal, loosely organized global celebration of the World Wide Web….
This week a New York museum dedicated to commemorating the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, launched a web site and asked for submissions of amateur photos and videos shot that day. The museum, scheduled to open in three years, has already collected thousands.
The day is said by some to be the most heavily documented ever by amateurs - and whether it was or not is beside the point. It was in any case symbolic of the transition from a world of The Media to a world of ubiquitous,…
Guest author Chris Seper is co-founder of MedCityNews, a health industry news startup. If you’d like to submit a guest post or become a regular contributor to We Media, contact: andrew AT wemedia DOT com.
Acquisition is part of the solution for “big media” companies to catch up in the era of new media. But they need to go further, including more investments in early-stage ventures.
Some recent deals illustrate how innovation through acquisition works:
Our friend Craig Newmark and his left-brain friends designed craigslist with the aesthetic panache of a spread sheet. From that perspective it is a success that would make an accountant blush: 47 million page views monthly in the U.S. alone, and revenues of $100 million annually from a small percentage of the site’s content that is not free.
But even the most dedicated admirer can see that craigslist is a fine mess of informational spaghetti that can cause design indigestion. Wired magazine…
Some people love to talk. All the better with wine and cheese.
Others are busy getting things done.
Between those two extremes you can ask yourself whether you’re stuck in an endless conversation, or if you and your business are focused on creation, innovation and achievement.
Here’s some of the latter. The winners of this year’s We Media investment challenge, SeeClickFix and The Extraordinaries, have been on the move and attracting lots of attention with their new businesses….
Dear Arianna,
About 2000 years ago the philosopher Seneca said that “the best ideas are common property,” which is an old thought rediscovered as the fresh ethos of the Internet.
To be fair, the current state of being on the Web allows me to bring to the same sentence a Roman stoic with the Greek word addressing moral character. Fun, but too easy. Much like The Huffington Post’s recent offense of idea hacking.
Earlier this year my organization launched a new idea at the We Media…
SeeClickFix, a company that helps people report and track community needs like roads in need of repair, was one of the two winners in the 2009 PitchIt challenge. That’s our early-stage venture investment competition. We invested $25,000 to help the company get off the ground - and they have been working hard ever since building out the service, attracting a variety of media and government partners, and now launching an iPhone App. Here’s an update from founder Ben Berkowitz. The other…
