It comes as no surprise that Dan Gillmor has posted an eloquent and articulate apology for what happened with his ‘Bayosphere project.  I really like Dan and I’m sorry to see him go through this.

I orignally assumed Bayosphere WAS a non-profit effort and waited - with baited breath - for the commercial sponsors, distribution deals and non-existant business models to appear (which clearly Omidyar and Mitch Kapor knew about ahead of time - before they invested in Dan - right?)

I hate to say it - but I sure as hell knew that Dan would fail, not because he’s not a great person, or a well intended and brilliant writer, but because the world is a cruel place and altruism doesn’t convert into capitalism.

What is now clear is that Omidyar and Kapor were using Dan in some crual experiment, seeing if altruism COULD be converted into capitalism.  I guess they figured it wouldn’t cost them much to find out.

Sort of reminds me when Fred Wilson invested in del.icio.us - publicly stating “we have no business model - yet - but we’re gonna try to find one.”  Well the difference between del.icio.us and Bayosphere is that Yahoo bought del.icio.us - that was their business model.

Though Dan has a few well intended disciples - who now have to ‘fend for themselves’ - that’s not enough to bootstrap an entire ocmpany and fund ‘citizen journalism’. But whoever said you’re supposed to get paid to be a citizen journalist?  You do it for the love of truth and for freedom - right?

I know this - as it’s something I deal with everyday.

I have all these high ideals about how open source infrastructure should enable a distributed mesh.  But no one seems to care and no one seems to be willing to fund it.  So we just go and build it ourselves. Well no one but PuSub I should say.

But then YouTube comes along and does the same thing - but calls it a product.  Well I can’t figure out how YouTube is gonna pay for 16T of badnwidth - a day. Seems like bubble economy math - all over again.  But I’m getting tangential here.

Dan’s current efforts are now geared towards a non-profit model and I’m sure he’ll thrive in such an environment.  I guess the real thing to talk about is: “what were Omidyar and Kapor thinking?”

Why did they think that Dan - an untested entreprenuer could pull off something that much more experienced people couldn’t?

I myself was pitching ourmedia.org to Omidyar at the very time when they committed to funding Dan.  I was also being led on and eventually ‘expropriated’ by other ‘do-gooders’ on the scene (names withhold to occlude these folks who ‘borrowed’ some of my ideas. God bless them - BTW.)

It’s funny cause I remember the Omidyar people saying to me ”well we like the non-profit sector, but we’d really like to invest in a for-profit model.” So I guess Dan listened to them.

I myself explained “no - that’s NOT what ourmedia is” (knowing about Brightcove, Odeo and YouTube.)  “But I’d love to pitch you Broadband Mechanics.”

Well they didn’t seem to grok us and most don’t, but that’s OK - that’s how it went with my first company - too.  Funny how most people seem to forget what it took to develop the world of multimedia.  It’s not like anybody grokked me in 1984-87.

But then they did and the 15 year evolutionary cycle for Director->Flash began.

Now we’re at that same threshold again.  Only this time its DLAs (digital lfiestyle aggregators) and what I’m now calling ‘persona editors’.  Its gonna take a LONG time for folks to grok me - again.

But that’s OK - I’m patient like the happy Buddha on the hill.

The best part about Dan is his honesty.

How many failed CEOs would blog it - and explain what went wrong, their own shortcomings and deliver an honest apology?

So I say “good luck” to Dan.  Hopeflly I’ll see him at the dinner tonight.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2006 at 3:32 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.