Democratized media

Riffing a bit more on Derek Powazek and his 8020 Publishing, what’s interesting is that while he, Threadless, OpenDemocracy, Boxes and Arrows, and others are all prime individual examples of we media, what we’re doing is really democratizing the tools needed to do we media.

What I mean by that, specifically, is that 8020 Publishing has spent significant time and money building an outstanding platform. And so has Threadless. And so has Boxes and Arrows, for that matter. But while these other platforms are just for them, we’ve built ours for everyone to use.

What we ultimately want to do is empower a whole generation of community-first, user-driven, collaborative, social, or simply “We Media”. We believe that there’s going to be not just a handful of businesses doing publishing this way, we believe it’s a trend, we believe it’s the way to produce everything from global news to niche publications. Anything from national news to local news, trade journals, company newsletters. All the areas where a community of people need to share stories and insight in ways that benefit them all and strengthen their sense of community, and, by the way, they don’t have as much time and money as they’d like.

There’s so many of these groups, and so few of them can afford to hire the talented web designers and engineers required to build their own solution. That’s where we can help out. We make it cheap, and we bend over backwards to make people save time.

So if you haven’t already, sign up to be notified when we launch at http://publicsquarehq.com/. We’re laboring hard to polish the last bits and pieces based on all the good stuff we’ve learned from being in real-world use for over 9 months, and we can’t wait to open our doors for business.