We create the stories of the connected society

A new survey is certain to stir the Clash of the Myths.
An overwhelming majority of reporters and editors now depend on social media to research stories, according to a new study by The George Washington University and Cision intelligence services. Among the journalists surveyed, 89% said they turn to blogs for story research, 65% [...]

Meet François Ragnet, focused on bringing the latest technology developments into mainstream use at Xerox.

30 inches of snow at We Media world headquarters in Reston. More on the way. Help. Please register for We Media Miami today. Will buy the mojitos.

Near the end of PBS’s Digital Nation, we’re taken to a military facility in the desert an hour outside of Las Vegas where a soldier sits in a cushy chair and pilots an unmanned drone over Afghanistan. The drone’s cameras send images from a war zone to a screen at the soldier’s work station. As [...]

If Ashton Kutcher’s 4.5 million Twitter followers make you feel inadequate, I’ve got good news: scientists investigating social networks have punked the “influentials” theory that drives celebrities to the top of the charts.
Aplusk, who boasts that he’s bigger than CNN, is apparently overrated. A new study finds that the importance of most influential spreaders in [...]

Amra Tareen, the savvy and ebullient founder of AllVoices, has
just closed a $3 million funding round for the innovative, citizen journalism site. That brings funding to $9 million for the two-year-old start-up. Not bad. TechCrunch has a good take on the AllVoices funding.
How does she do it? Amra returns to We Media [...]

New technology spawns new ways to tell stories. That’s the exciting part of Apple’s new tablet, an old idea whose time has apparently come.
Now comes the hard part: creating the content and designing the experience for the next wave of consumer devices that deliver our stories. We’re about to discover whether incumbent publishers and [...]

Going boldly where everyone has gone before, the Federal Communications Commission has launched an investigation into the future of news. Yesterday the FCC issued an 11-page request for information about the state of the news business and announced it plans to examine the current state of the news industry, industry trends and what the agency [...]

Maybe I was just wary of thin networks, shallow relationships that have become “friends,” the shameless self-promotion of celebrities, opportunistic brands suddenly going social, and a collective culture that celebrates the trivial above the meaningful through the madness of crowds. I was having second thoughts about collective awareness and the promise of unifying knowledge through We Media. Then this happened: #Haiti at 90999.

It seems that every story begins as a Tweet or a post. The amateurs use them to source and update stories in newspapers and on news broadcasts. They link to our Twitter feeds, blogs, photos and video. They’ve created their own Twitter accounts and started blogs. They publish streams and comments. They link to our [...]

Fifty-six million stories. Where’s the one about transparent government?

The We Media PitchIt! Challenge is open for entries.
Our annual investment challenge begins with a simple goal: We want to find the best communication start-ups and help launch them. We’re looking for brilliant ideas to make the world better through innovative uses of media, communication and technology. Commercial and non-profit ideas welcome.
Find all [...]

This is a true testimony to the magic of a system that allows for open communication and collaborative problem solving around public concerns. You can really see how media, industry, government and private citizens can work together to improve their communities:

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.