There has been a whole lot of analysis of Bayosphere's failure-to-launch (in the sense of growing up and becoming an "adult" company), stemming from founder Dan Gillmor's open letter on the closure. If new media isn't your industry, Gillmor is a former star of the influential San Jose Mercury News who left to create an innovative forum for online "citizen journalism," called Bayosphere.
I look at Bayosphere and the reasons for its failure seem perfectly clear to me. There are three of them. One was described in a comment on Gillmor's post:
The role of the editor should be emphasized here. Without editorial direction, guidance and oversight, it is hard to deliver a quality publication. Even high school yearbooks have editors, and online publications are no different. There are various editorial styles and orientations, but they all share common journalistic ethics which define and shape the publication. Without this editorial leadership, whether it is in the form of an editor-in-chief or an editorial staff, the publication in question may never see its second issue.
There are problems inherent in aggregating ideas. Ideas are different from data, and what works for selling lampshades (eBay) or person-to-person transactions (Craigslist) doesn't necessarily work for content. Whenever I land on the homepage of a new content-delivery site like John Palfrey's Top 10 Sources or Mike Rundle's 9rules, with their harvested, denatured headlines, I feel a sense of alienation. When I visit a great single-purpose blog like TechCrunch, or content site with a strong and cleanly articulated editorial vision like Cato Unbound, I am instantly drawn in and engaged.
Which brings me to the second thing Gillmor did wrong, in my book. He failed to go with the grain of the web. In trying to invent a stand-alone format for fostering "Citizen Journalism" he didn't see what was right in front of him--that Citizen Journalists already had the tools they needed, in the form of blogs and blogging software, and didn't need his proprietary site and clumsy content management system. Had Gillmor focussed on giving the bloggers something they needed, he might have made a go of it.
Instead, Gillmor tried to invent a one-step-back model based on an out-moded, custom-built content management system. I have had some experience with content management interfaces, and they universally suck. What works to help a corporation plug in repetitively formatted content isn't really good for fostering human discourse. What Gillmor did was to bring the worst of the newspaper world--dictatorial formatting and heirarchy--into a field of endeavor (blogging) that had already declared itself happily entrepreneurial and chaotic.
But wait, there's more!
The third thing that Bayosphere got wrong is that it lacked an innovative or elegant visual concept. The site is ugly. It offers the eye no point of entry. So many sites get this wrong. The problem reminds me of a parking lot I recently had the misfortune of visiting quite frequently in El Segundo, CA. This multi-level structure had three entrances and several levels, and was divided up into "sections" and no-man's-land cul-de-sacs with chains, cones, concrete pillars and aggressive yet vague arrows. Every time I tried to find my car I ended up having to hit the "panic" button on my key fob and follow the shrieking alarm to the source. That's a fair description of what it's like to visit most content-delivery sites today, including Bayosphere. If I'd been Gillmor, I'd have hired a game designer, rather than a CMS company to design my site.
Where, I ask, are the web designers with the chops to focus on structure and elegance of function, rather than pulling out some file folder-based template and slapping crappy flash animation all over the place like so much tinsel on a Christmas Tree (I'll give Gillmor that much, at least there's no Flash on Bayosphere)? In gaming, of course. When will the artifical barrier between gaming and the internet come down, I wonder?
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