New Media Med Blog

Mark Little asked the panel in the web summit last night for advice on setting up his new venture. The last word of the evening came from Wired Editor-at-Large, Ben Hammersley. He just said “Whatever you do Mark  – Make it beautiful”. We all laughed and Mark was really bemused at having  to tell his colleagues in his startup in the morning to “Make it beautiful”. But when you look back at the evening, there was one common theme running through and it was the passion which every entrepreneur had for their idea such as Chris Horn’s joy of getting the first sale with IONA. That simple theme of “Making it Beautiful” was there throughout the evening. There was Craig Newmark’s passion to keep Craigslist as it has always been and not to sell it. And Matt Mullenweg’s clear core values of democratizing writing and making the writing as good as possible.

People ask me how New Media Med is going to make money and I often get very caught up with all the myriad of tantalising economic models which have emerged in the Internet.

Now I’ve settled on

“We make and sell online communities.”

No more complicated economic models.

And keeping it simple is beautiful.  Thanks Ben Hammersley for that suggestion.

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia spoke at Trinity College Dublin last night. I went there to find out about wikinomics. The word wasn’t mentioned once but there were enough clues to how Wikipedia economics works from the philosophy of Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia is a non-profit organisation and is one of the top five Internet sites – enough said on the discussion about whether Wikipedia is a success or not.

He delivered his talk in a very matter of fact unassuming way – not like the big testosterone driven speeches that you get from some of the leader of commercial software companies who either prance around the stage or talk about having the biggest yacht in the world. In fact, it was more like reading s wikipedia article.

Here are some of the things I took away from the talk:

Wikipedia is free – free as in free speech not as in free beer. That’s a key message of the open source movement.

Wales didn’t like using the word crowd-sourcing. When Mark Little asked him about crowd sourcing, Jimmy explained why it wasn’t a good word for what Wikipedia volunteers do because of the connotations with out-sourcing. They don’t do it for the money.

Even though Jimmy Wales is strongly espousing the non-profit, philanthropic message now, he didn’t exactly start out that way in 2000. He wanted to build an online encyclopaedia, Nupedia and he paid people to write articles. In 2001 he decided to switch to the open source model and everything changed.

In the early days he got a lot of encouragement from a lot of the people in Slashdot.org – that’s where the essence of the community came from.

Wales firmly believes in is that generally people will act in good faith – the community usually trumps the very small minority which wants to create mischief. It’s interesting that every discussion that I’ve heard on radio or newspaper about Wikipedia always focuses on the few mischief makers. We in New Media Med have seen the same positive community spirit in an online epilepsy community which we started for James’s Hospital. People are helpful and no-one has uttered anything remotely destructive – even though they could – it’s a free open forum.

There is a commercial side to his business. It’s called Wikia but I didn’t get much enlightenment on how that’s going to work out – although he did say it was growing very fast. That development is pretty much the same as Linux and Apache being used in mainstream commercial enterprises.

I went to see Tim Draper, 3rd generation VC from Silicon Valley speak in Trinity College, Dublin last night. He took a 10 million foot view of the world (from Mars actually) and told us that anything is possible. Everything will probably happen eventually but the question is when. It’s easy enough to predict that all horses which start a race will finish but if you knew the finishing order beforehand that’s where the money is. Those who get the timing right make the money and that’s the VC’s job. They want as many entrepreneurs as possible to participate and they will pick the winners. It’s no mean feat to pick the winner and Tim didn’t really tell us how he can predict the finishing order except to say that he has a very good team to do that for him. Overall it was an inspiring talk and great encouragement on a Friday night – something entrepreneurs need at the end of the week.