We create the stories of the connected society

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.

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.

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 [...]

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.

Stories float, diffuse, wash over us.

Designer Jonathan Harris explores new territory.

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 [...]

Our social networks spin out from ourselves, and back again into us.

I don’t recall where I was when Buddy Holly died. But I’ll recall where I was when Michael Jackson died. I was on Twitter. – One Twitterer by the name of toomarvelous I will remember where I was when I heard the news about Michael Jackson because it came for me in an unexpected place [...]

Respectively submitted for your persusal: GM tanks. A plane falls out of the sky. The American president reaches out to the Muslim world. Newspapers slip-slide away. Every blogger has a better idea. Ashton Kutcher says he’s eclipsed CNN as media.  Surreal? Apocalyptic? Prescient? After forty days and forty nights of downpours, biblical storms, and consequential [...]