We create the stories of the connected society

Start the week off right and consider the big issues and ideas that will define your future and our shared future. Start with a good laugh, or a good cry. In either case, start here with Charlie Rose. Charlie is a well-known interviewer on US public television. Charlie once said, according to the CharlieRose.com “beta” [...]

Tech entrepreneur Joi Ito is the new CEO of Creative Commons, the alternative copyright licensing organization that has spawned widespread sharing and reuse of digital content and educational materials – like course lecture notes available for free from MIT. The founder of Creative Commons, Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, has moved on to a [...]

What would you do to provide a better news service for your community? Or for any community? David Cohn, one of our We Media Fellows at this year’s We Media Miami conference, is trying to ferret out good ideas for one community, San Jose, California, from an obvious source: people who live there. On April [...]

Jordan’s Queen Rania is answering questions about stereotypes of the Arab World on YouTube. She says “I want people to know the real Arab world, to see it unedited, unscripted and unfiltered, to see the personal side of my region, to know the places and faces and rituals and cultures that shape the part of [...]

From Singapore: Conference Bay, an eBay-style auction marketplace for buying seats at conferences worldwide. Nothing new here, right? We all know about online auctions. The only innovation is applying a well-tested online transaction model to a different niche -  in this case a potentially high-value niche that may provide real utility – and new buying [...]

Last night while watching the NAACP’s Image Awards, I began thinking about the connections between my personal guilty pleasure, American Idol, and my professional passion, We Media. When the preternaturally talented Jordin Sparks took the stage for an Aretha Franklin tribute, I felt some strange sense of connection with Sparks, the way you feel about [...]

We’re please to announce a new service for members of the We Media Community. The iFOCOS Media Intelligence Report is a periodic review of key trends, ideas and issues in media, along with analysis of what these findings mean for the connected society. In the new Intelligence Report we’ll consider trends in media and their [...]

The social web depends on content, tagging and utility created or improved by the good will of the people formerly known as the audience. Where does good will end and greed take over? That depends on whether you’re a giver or taker. Dan Gillmor at the Center for Citizen Media is bothered by the free [...]

Facebook and other social networks are a new tool for citizen-powered justice. See, for instance, Witness Hub, which focuses the tools of media – video cameras and web video -  to document, draw attention to and underscore campaigns against human rights abuses worldwide.  But social justice is in the eye of the beholder. Recently a [...]

It’s a widely used open-source blog platform with enormous potential for future growth and evolution – and some think it’s a viable alternative to Facebook-style social networking. (It’s running this site). Analysis: News companies remain painfully focused on their internal woes and remarkably disengaged from investments in innovative new opportunities. The New York Times Co., [...]

You could and probably should dive into Jeff Jarvis’s reports from this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, where the theme is Innovation. I  found his report on an exchange between Al Gore and Google Foundation head Larry Brilliant extraordinary in revealing the amoral flaw of Google’s famous "do no evil" mantra. Moderator Thomas Friedman [...]

Five years ago we boldly forecast the “Digital Everything,” a future where information, communications, entertainment, business, home life, transportation and the interconnected pieces of personal, daily living are conducted in an always-on mediascape. That future arrived in Las Vegas this week at the Consumer Electronics Show. It comes to your homes, offices, vehicles, and life [...]

Google is trying to grab a bigger chunk of local advertising by expanding its network of resellers – third parties that incorporate sales of Google AdWords into their offerings. See: Official Google Blog: AdWords and local markets  

The U.S. agency that regulates broadcasting, the Federal Communications Commission , has finally decided to allow publishers to own both newspapers and broadcast stations in the biggest U.S. markets. No one is happy. Publishers don’t think the ruling goes far enough. Cable TV companies say it is anti-competitive. Public-interest groups forecast a new round of [...]

Tribune Company is a U.S. media conglomerate that owns newspapers and television stations coast to coast, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. Tribune acquired the LA Times in 2000 when it purchased Times Mirror Co. for $8 billion. All of Tribune, including the Times Mirror assets, is now worth $3.8 billion, according [...]