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T A B L E__T A L K Do you read online diaries? Are they rampant displays of egotism, or touching autobiography? Pen your thoughts in Table Talk's Digital Culture area R E C E N T L Y The 21st Challenge No. 11 Results The church of Amiga Let's Get This Straight Microsoft.orgy Let's Get This Straight - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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A lab for online experiments - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Does the Web need nonprofit funding to keep its edge? BY SPENCER ANTE | In the summer of 1995 I was hired right out of graduate school to produce content for the online division of PC World magazine. This was the early days of the Web, and my boss told me I could devote half of my time to developing something new and different. After thinking deep thoughts for a few weeks, I proposed an online magazine called the Annex: a space for thoughtful reviews and feature articles aimed at a general audience interested in the human side of technology. Surprisingly, my superiors agreed to bankroll the project. The Annex lasted almost a year, until the higher-ups realized that the product wasn't geared toward PC World's traditional target audience of PC buyers. One of the truly exciting things about the Net is not only that it has held out a utopian possibility of the rebirth of democratic communication -- but that such a revolution would be financed by private interests. The Annex, like many early Web projects, was justified as groundbreaking research and development. Media companies paid people like me to develop content because they were clueless. Now that's all changed. The money that once flowed to experiments has dried up, as the captains of the new-media industry focus on bolstering the bottom line by assembling vast, TV-like audiences. But the ideas are still searching for an outlet. As the Web grows more commercial, who'll put out for the innovative, edgy and irritative speech that carries subversive potential? This is the question that Marc Weiss has been asking himself. Weiss, an indie film and video maverick, is the creator and executive producer of Web Lab -- the first nonprofit group dedicated to the finance and distribution of Web sites with a social and political punch. Through the agency's funding arm, the Web Development Fund, Web Lab will distribute more than $150,000 to nine projects ranging across a wide swath of issues -- from a museum devoted to Cold War culture to an interactive theater piece examining attitudes about the turn of the century. PBS Online and a group of foundations are footing the bill for the first year. The idea is to create the virtual equivalent of PBS. "The notion of experimentation with the medium is getting marginalized," says Weiss, who for seven years was executive producer for the "P.O.V." television series. "We need to carve out a section of the Web that is a section with public support." N E X T _ P A G E .|. But why should Web sites be subsidized? |
