We create the stories of the connected society

How to profit from the business and behaviors of the Weconomy.

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.

We may be powered by collective, global, networked intelligence. Even so, singular stories from singular points of view still move me, still rip my heart out.

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.

A new design for Craigslist – better, easier and pure fantasy.

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

“Today is a good day to do big things,” Amanda said when she was eight. It was so profound that I wrote it down and saved  it. That was more than 20 years ago. She’s lived up to her words, but I seem to have let them slip over the years. Today I was given [...]

Vanity Fair put theirs on Sarah Palin’s resignation speech. If you value accuracy, clarity, spelling and good sentences, check out the work of people who wield smart pencils here. If you prefer to watch and listen, William Shatner makes Palin a poet.

Register now for our annual innovation festival.

Stories float, diffuse, wash over us.

Designer Jonathan Harris explores new territory.

Back in the September, I wrote that “one of the fundamental tasks of design and business is to stand between revolutions and life, to help people deal with change.” That was the premise of The Right Brain Rules, a strategic vision and a portfolio of assets for creating value into the future. Allison Arieff goes [...]

Here’s what Mathew Robson, a a 15-year-old in the UK, wrote in a report for Morgan Stanley that has high-paid researchers, media execs and financial analysts wondering what they do for a living: Radio: With online sites streaming music for free they do not bother, as services such as last.fm do this advert free and users [...]