We create the stories of the connected society

Game Changer Demand Media’s Byron Reese describes the different thinking about content and the process of creating content.

2009 We Media PitchIt! winners SeeClickFix’s Ben Berkowitz and The Extraordinairies Jacob Colker talk with Ely Bonder about where they are now and what they took away from We Media 2009.

Get the inside track on how to get your new idea off the ground with advice and feedback from entrepreneurial experts.

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 [...]

The biggest surprise from yesterday’s unveiling of Apple’s iPad was that print publishers and journos weren’t terribly excited. “Waiting to be surprised. That hasn’t happened yet,” said Jim Roberts, the only New York Times wonk who didn’t confuse Steve Jobs with Moses. Valleywag has a good take on Print Media’s Big Tablet Letdown.
Our [...]

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 [...]

Before we’re swept away (oops, but that seems to have happened already) by the unveiling of Apple’s tablet we ought to pay homage to technologies before the iPad and visionaries before Steve Jobs.
The original messiah machine: the Mac Plus. Introduced in 1986, this little beauty brought a revolution in publication design. It came standard with [...]

A few months after three, young software architects launched an obscure social networking and microblogging service, students at a rural Virginia university sent short messages to their friends from their PCs and cell phones as they hid from a gunman who opened fire in classrooms and a dorm.
“Everything you thought you knew about media has [...]

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, [...]

Magazine and newspaper publishers have fantasized, for more than a decade, about the day when portable digital display technologies render paper, ink, printing, trucks, postage and home delivery obsolete. The flaw, of course, is expecting too much from technology – the next big thing.

The future of the world’s news and knowledge system is on full display in and around the stories from the Copenhagen Climate Summit.

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.

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 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.