We create the stories of the connected society

Two projects featured at We Media ‘09 are leading the use of digital media and technology in Haiti’s rescue efforts. Ushahidi, which was named a “Game Changer” at last year’s conference, is utilizing digital mapmaking technology and social media to map and verify vital information in Haiti. Ushahidi plots key information on a Google map [...]

Among the many extraordinary efforts to provide aid and relief for the people of Haiti comes this one from The Extraordinaries, winner of last year’s We Media Pitch It! competition: the Haiti Earthquake Support Center utilizes crowdsourcing and facial-recognition to help locate the missing. Anyone can post photos of a missing person or loved one, [...]

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 [...]

Worth a read at Forbes.com: Knight Foundation Head Alberto Ibargüen is bankrolling dozens of experiments to save the news business. Can he rescue newspapers? You may recall Knight was one of the winners of our We Media Game Changer Awards earlier this year, for reasons cited by Forbes: the foundation has pledged to invest $100 [...]

A few months back we asked each of our 2009 Game Changers Awards finalists to write about their projects, what they have learned along the way and what’s next. (Here’s the rest of the series). Somehow, amidst the flurry of conference preparations, this one slipped through our crack(ed) editorial process. But it’s important, so here [...]

Bold ideas came out of the opening session of the 2009 We Media conference. A review and summary of the projects and people behind the Game Changer awards had a common thread : In each case, these projects used social media to engage people, as individuals, citizens or community members in a way that is [...]

For the We Media conference, I wrote up essays on each of the Game Changer award winners (Here’s a roundup essay on trends we saw: Crowd-Forging, social good combined with profit. I had conversations with each winner, and they were often wide-ranging probes into the idea of what “we media” is, what it means to [...]

… and the winners are… Here is a quick rundown of the We Media Game Changer Award-winners. (Full essays on each will be available at the We Media conference and online, soon.) SocialVibe spurs social networkers to choose charities they can reward financially with dollars from sponsors who get a deeply engaged audience. Ze Frank [...]

We continue our countdown to WeMedia with an introduction to the GameChangers, from contributor Dorian Benkoil. We Media Game Changers Ignite The Spark of Motivation (See a list of the award winners.) The We Media Game Changers inspire us to give our most precious resources: time, energy, money and ideas.  They compel us to be [...]

Robin Wauters on TechCrunch talks about the end of “Web 2.0″ as a term, and ponderswhat the decline in use of the term means (giving some evidence as to why it’s declining). But as “Web 2.0″ declines as a term, that doesn’t mean that what Tim O’Reilly was describing in coining the phrase is declining, [...]

The Countdown to WeMedia has begun! In just over a week, two-hundred of the world’s most innovative leaders, executives, investors, marketers, activists, educators, entrepreneurs and game changers will gather in Miami for a one-of-a-kind conversation about the future.  Innovation and entrepreneurship are hot topics right now — more than just buzzwords or back-of-the-napkin concepts, the [...]

WeMedia is podcasting! Beginning today, WeMedia will produce a regular podcast that features in-depth interviews with prominent media, technology, and social change figures, as well as distinguished experts on current affairs and news. Our goal is to provide the WeMedia community understand the roots of the changes taking place in our society, hear from the [...]

NOTE: We asked each of our 2009 Game Changers Awards finalists to write about their projects, what they’ve learned along the way and what’s next. This essay written by Donna Liu, Director for Strategic Initiatives, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. UCHANNEL:  ACCESS TO A WORLD OF IDEAS The Woodrow Wilson [...]

Mark I. Pinsky, a former religion reporter for Tribune Co.’s Orlando Sentinel, makes a modest proposal in TNR.com for a government-funded program to hire out-of-work journalists. The historical precedent is the Federal Writers Project, which hired 6,000 writers from 1935 to 1939 – among whom were some rising American literary superstars, including John Steinbeck, John [...]

NOTE: We asked each of our 2009 Game Changers Awards finalists to write about their projects, what they’ve learned along the way and what’s next. This essay written by David Dunkley Gyimah at www.viewmagazine.tv. We tell stories. Everything we do is about stories. From the young child skipping home from school, the mother navigating a [...]