NowPublic: Why Go Changin'?

When I first showed Dan Gilmor NowPublic 18 months ago he said it was 'ambitious'. He also said that he thought we were 18 months ahead of the market. Dan was right.

The world has now caught up to our vision. Site's like digg are using the same types of voting tools that we rolled out in our first version. Youtube's video player is remarkably similar to NowPublic's early Thumbprint technology. Hurricane Katrina, the London bombings and other major news events woke the world up to the new realities of news 2.0.

Recently Gannet - publisher of USA Today, one of the worlds biggest papers - announced a major restructuring of their news gathering to employ the same kind of crowdsourcing strategies that NowPublic has pioneered. This week Yahoo is getting on the bandwagon too.

Every day another news organization announces that they too will try to tap into the wisdom of crowds. The future that Dan saw coming 18 months ago is now upon us. It used to be owned by someone else but the news is NowPublic.

So what have we learned in the last year and a half of trying to harness the global energy of the world's creative power? Well, …lots.