Corante 2.0: Hubs In A Network Of Stars. Get Real: Stowe Boyd's Soapbox

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Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive, and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative and social technologies. His new blog is Message.

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November 29, 2005

Corante 2.0: Hubs In A Network Of Stars

Posted by Stowe Boyd

Today, after years (literally) of discussion and planning, we are opening the kimono on Corante 2.0. The most obvious manifestation of the new Corante -- leaving aside the first of our Corante events, the Symposium on Social Architecture, which took place two weeks ago -- is the unveiling of the first three Corante Hubs. The Hubs are aggregations of the writing of members of the growing Corante Network in various sectors, and the three Hubs launched today are related to Media, Web, and Marketing. We have reached out beyond those who had been writing blogs for Corante, and the Network has grown past the 70 something contributors of a few weeks ago to include an additional 50 or so thought leaders. My writings at Get Real will now be collated into the Corante Web Hub, along with a stellar group, including Robin Good, Emily Chang, Pete Cashmore, and Nancy White, to mention only a few. We have similarly talented contributors in the marketing and media Hubs.

When Hylton and I began noodling about Corante 2.0, years ago, we were concerned about the barriers to attracting more great writers to start blogs with us, because many of them don't want to relocate their blogs, or are afraid of the schitzophrenia involved in creating yet-another-blog somewhere. The Hubs concept does away with that. We can simply invite those that we consider great writers and thinkers to join the network, and pull in a feed from their blog. No costs in moving. And of course, contributors share in the advertising revenue that we will be gaining from the Hubs. It's not just for fun. We have had -- little surprise -- very high levels of adoption so far.

This means that we can add our value for the community. Consider the hypothetical marketing executive, who is dashing into her office to check on email and what's happening in the world for 26 minutes before her first meeting. She scans email, responds to one or two critical ones, and then opens her RSS reader to find... what? Hundreds of new posts. There is no way for her to simply find the most critical posts in the 22 minutes she has available. Our goal is to provide some stucture to what is otherwise a haphzard process. Our editors provide pointers to posts that we feel are most critical -- in the outside world or from within the network -- as well as a merged feed of the Hub's contributors.

And of course, we have just started. Francois Gossieaux joined us recently as CMO and all around ball-of-fire, so we are planning to roll out many more Hubs in the upcoming weeks and months. I can envision the Corante Network growing to include thousands of the world's most influential minds in dozens of Hubs in sectors like economics, art, entertainment, management, games, telecom, politics, and so on.

So, be prepared to see us rolling out more Hubs, more technology embedded in them to make the reader experience more involving and rewarding, and new forms of media -- video, for example -- integrated as well.

[tags: Corante 2.0, Corante Hubs, Corante Network, Corante Symposium on Social Architecture]

Comments (25) + TrackBacks (2) | Category: Corante

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1. Arieanna on November 29, 2005 02:01 PM writes...

The Hub looks amazing. I love the nav in the tag cloud.

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November 29, 2005

Corante 2.0: Hubs In A Network Of Stars

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