Remix Culture British Style

As I peek at media developments around the world, many of the interesting experiments in broadening participation in media are taking place outside the United States, such as a BBC program that allows Web developers to use its content in non-commercial ways that build on the original fare. The Informitv.com newsletter described the BBC initiative thus: “The BBC says it is committed to using open standards that will enable users to find and repurpose BBC content in more flexible ways. Suggested applications include: combining schedules with other web services; introducing a social element, such as rating or voting; or creating alerting systems.” Contact the BBC Backstage program for more information. Meanwhile, in the United States, the University of Maryland’s J-Lab has identified five noteworthy examples of media experiments that use the Web to gather citizen input or extend the usefulness of information by, for instance, posting crime reports on a publicly viewable map. They’re some good ideas and worth a look. Finally, an an unrelated topic, in scanning Paid Content this morning, I saw a note about a new principal joining Corante, a blogging company that gets far less attention than Gawker Media or Weblogs Inc. I read the Corante announcement on the arrival of marketer Francois Gossieaux, and also read Gossieaux’s blog entry on why he made the move. “Corante is not your typical publishing company,” he wrote. “Instead of hiring writers and publishing content, we connect readers with experts. And in this day and age of scarce reader attention span and information overload that is exactly what people are looking for.: I read all this because I don’t understand the Corante approach or business model, and still don’t. But I assume that is because their approach is too new to fit into the existing pigeonholes, and thus all the more interesting. Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy ‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media