Welcome the Information Valet Project – Bill Densmore

Posted on 03. Nov, 2008 by David Cohn in Business Summit, Money, Technology, What's Next?, Where Are They Now?

The New Business Models for News Summit is actually the second in a series of events. The first “Networked Journalism Summit” included Bill Densmore who is now working on his own project trying to tackle the revenue issue.

(For those keeping track, that’s one video using Viddler, the other two using Vimeo and Blip. Have a video platform you want me to try? Let me know).

I was able to get a brief chat in with Bill who has also provided a brief write-up below.

From Bill Densmore

Thanks for all your work on last week’s “New Business Models for News” summit at CUNY; I was unable to attend. But your on-demand video archives are a valuable fill-in.

I’d like your community to know about the Information Valet Project, which takes a cue from Jeff Jarvis’ advice to start building new business models. Our first summit to define and plan launch of the Information Valet Service is Dec. 3-5 at the new Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Univ. of Missouri. We invite participants. (To register: http://www.ivpblueprint.org)

We’re pushing a fairly specific notion of how to build a shared-user network with a revenue model baked in — the revenue model is similar to the sort of reverse syndication which Jeff talks about, and embraces the networking concepts outlined by Tom Evslin at CUNY.

“Blueprinting the Information Valet Economy” is a strategy summit designed to blueprint the law, ownership, management, marketing and technology of a shared-user network for user-centric demographics, privacy-protected purchasing and advertising exchange and compensation.

Evslin noted that the former newsPAPER industry — because of its unique content and relationship with 50 million customers who pay for information daily — is in a unique position to provide the content seed corn needed to jump start a network business — if it comes together on a platform and protocols.

We’ll put forward fairly specific ideas for doing this forward as a point of departure — and expect to hear modifications. We’ll end up after 2-1/2 days with a commitment to form a collaborative that will move forward with whatever is the consensus approach.

I hope there will be other events like IVP Blueprint — at CUNY, and elsewhere — which advance specific projects for sustaining the parts of journalism which contribute to participatory democracy.