You may have seen or heard of my Vanity Fair piece on Friday in which I conclude by announcing the project whereby we'll be improving the capabilities and reach of the blogosphere with the end goal of forcing accountability on certain traditional news outlets such as The New York Times and CNN and... we're not bothering with Fox because no one gives a shit, but you get the picture. As mentioned, the project makes use of software that's currently in development by my associate Andrew Stein, who headed up Hearst's digital paper/reader device project a couple of years back and who's since gone on to develop databases and other collateral for banks and other financial firms. The application should be in beta by April. The other component of this effort involves a distributed network of bloggers organized by way of invitation - I've recruited a few already, and those who are accepted will thereafter be capable of bringing new bloggers into the network, and everyone concerned will be able to draw upon this application in order to better obtain, evaluate, characterize/tag, and distribute portions of information - in a nutshell, it will allow websites to "talk" to each other. Between the human network and the software's AI, this campaign should provide for at least a small degree of improvement to the means by which the political blogosphere contributes positively to the manner in which Americans are informed on crucial matters.
I'll be providing further details on all of this in a series of articles for T/S, HuffPo, Daily Kos, and a few other outlets, starting later this week, but wanted to give you a heads-up first. Charles Johnson is working with me on this effort, and Allison Kilkenny just joined us as well, as have a few other commentators; I'll begin recruiting in earnest after the official announcement goes up a few days from now. Meanwhile, I think the comments at this post are probably representative of the sentiment of many blog readers and online news junkies in general, many of whom tend to be fairly cognizant of the failures of the traditional news media and are thus somewhat enthusiastic about challenging the existing media structure:
As for the software, I'm going to make sure that it's easily integrated into T/S as an embedded widget since three of your contributors will be using it at this early point and others will certainly follow. A venture capitalist group over by Union Square that's made up of former tech entrepreneurs has asked Stein to bring them a proposal, so we'll be meeting with them in early March to discuss potential investment. We also wanted to keep you informed on what's going on in case you have any interest in making wider use of the end product at some point in the future, after we have a finished product, or otherwise care to provide your input; obviously you guys know what you're doing in terms of your business model (congrats on the latest unique visitor benchmark, by the way; that's extraordinary for such a young company), so we'd love to have your thoughts on this project going forward.
Anyway, thanks again for having me onboard at T/S. I should be able to contribute more now that my book is finished.