I was asked one question over and over again at the Web 2.0 conference: what is Corante's business model?

Not that I expected everyone to know what we are up to, and the conference was defitinitely the sort of setting where asking people for their elevator pitch is what passes for polite conversation. Still, it was interesting that so many people -- two or three dozen, at least -- even those who professed to read Get Real or other Corante blogs, would just not know what we are up to.

Here's the elevator pitch, whittled down over a busy few days:

Corante Elevator Pitch

Corante is a small media company. If you ignore the web aspect, we are a lot like other, more traditional media companies. We make money from advertising and other sponsorships on our publications, which are (at the moment) exclusively blogs. We are launching seminar and conference businesses at the present time.

Our focus is to seek out the best writers in every area we enter. We view our contributors as artists: artisan journalists. They are not employees, just as Dave Matthews and Alicia Keys are not employees of their record labels. We work to promote the written works that our contributors create. (I personally believe that this viewpoint is revolutionary, a step beyond the model of twentieth century "journalism".)

We are involved in rolling out what we are calling Corante 2.0, which will change a lot of what we do and how we do it. At its core, Corante 2.0 will allow us to grow from the 100 contributors we have today to 1000 or 5000 over the next year or so. I don't wanjt to preannounce the details of this push, but they obviously involve a lot of recruiting, which we are spending a great deal of time on.

On a personal level, I am working to decrease the consulting work I have been involved in over the past few years at Corante, which was a temporary expedient to pay the bills. While I have enjoyed working with clients like Businessweek, in the future I plan to limit my for-fee work to activities that are much more media-like: speaking engagements, seminars, and the like. I will be spending a lot of time getting the Corante seminars business humming in the next few months. I plan, for example, to start a master class in technology blogging starting in the next few weeks, where I will work with a small class of aspiring bloggers to hone their skills. I will continue my advisory work with start-ups, because I love that sort of innovative and entrepreneurial frenzy, but that is a special sort of involvement, and allows me to stay close to the edge, where all the heat is. And I am always open to weird and wonderful ideas, although I am trying hard to decrease the burden of travel that is the necessary curse of the life I am leading.