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Well done, Dan — failure is educational
As an admirer of Dan Gillmor and what he has done in the past — and what he tried to do with his “citizen’s media” venture, bayosphere.com — I felt more than a twinge of regret when I read his open letter about the demise of Bayosphere. But I think Adam Green of Darwinianweb.com has the right viewpoint: Dan should be proud of what he tried to do, not ashamed because it didn’t work (neither should Mark Evans).
As Adam notes, failure is almost a prerequisite when it comes to trying new and challenging things. He says he asks almost every executive of a startup to describe a failure from their past, and is suspicious when they don’t admit to one. Adam also congratulates Dan for providing a “sincere and thoughtful analysis” of what happened at Bayosphere, and I would like to echo that thought as well. At this point, everyone is making their best guesses about what is happening with Media 2.0 or whatever you want to call it, and (hopefully) trying to learn what works and what doesn’t.
Dan’s post definitely helps in that regard, but it also raises plenty of questions — as it should. Was Bayosphere too local? Were the restrictions on who could be a “citizen journalist” too strict? Would a model like Newsvine.com, which is both broader in scope and more open, work better? What about one that incorporates both “old” media sources and new media, with a voting system — a la digg.com or reddit.com — built in? What about a system that compensates citizen journalists based on their articles, which Gather.com seems to be trying to build? Kent Newsome thinks Bayosphere is a sign of how hard building an audience in Media 2.0 is.
Anyway, congratulations on a valiant effort, Dan. You have nothing to be ashamed of.
Update:
Tim Porter has a thoughtful discussion of some of the issues raised by Dan’s experience at Bayosphere, one of which is that “community can’t be forced.” (hat tip to Online News Squared for pointing that one out).
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http://www.kottke.org/06/01/quality-editorial
(Hey, cool comment feature!)
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Your work seems to always hit on the themes I'm thinking a lot about, Matthew! I agree, everyone interested in this area is looking at what works, what doesn't, what *should* work but doesn't, and vice versa! And yes, unless you have the enormous built in traffic of a Google or Yahoo, it's very hard to build a stable traffic base. So I think that's partly why we're seeing aggregators on top of aggregators. It's really a mess in a lot of ways! But it also makes perfect sense given the explosion of media, information, people coming online, and relative newness of it all.
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Dan Gillmore has a fascinating open letter about why Bayosphere, his citizen media start-up, has stopped spending VC money. It's a frank and insightful piece on the emerging citizen journalism trend and the trials and tribulations of running a start-u...
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He's clearly learned a lot; much of it will be applicable to his next venture(s).
For me I know I cut my teeth organizing an event. Lost a pile of money the first year, was profitable for the next six (having broken even again in year three). I learned so much in years one and two about how to live and succeed (read learned about entrepreneurial lifestyle) when building something. Dan's learned this now too...again, curious to see if he applies it.
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