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Scoble’s New Thing: Building 43
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link»Scoble’s New Thing: Building 43
Mar 14, 2009 21:30:24 GMT Share
A week ago we reported that blogger Robert Scoble is leaving his current job running FastCompany TV. Now he’s going to start talking about his new project - a new content and social networking community called Building 43, which he’s building in partnership with his new employer, Rackspace.
More details will be announced on the Gillmor Gang at 3 p.m. Saturday (today, Pacific Time) live at TWiT Live. Scoble will join Steve Gillmor live via Skype from Rackspace’s offices in Austin, Texas.
Regarding the name Building 43: “The first time I visited Google they gave me a tour of Building 43. I found it to be a fanciful place where not only did the founders have offices, but they had this fun board in the lobby called “Google’s Master Plan.” VC Steve Jurvetson has a picture of that board here - seemed like a good metaphor for a community that’s for people who are fanatical about the Internet. Make Building 43 open to everyone.”
Why Rackspace, a hosting provider? Scoble says he visited the company a year ago and was impressed with their approach to building communities and technologies. It’s also a good fit, he says, because the company has touch points with thousands of other companies (providing hosting and other services). A focus of Building 43 will be visiting and profiling these and other companies, with a look at how they grow over time.
I asked Robert how Building 43 will differ from Channel 9, the Microsoft video channel that he started in 2004 that tries to create discussions between Microsoft, its users and developers. His response:
I was one of five guys who started that and, yes, we broke a lot ofcorporate rules. We put customers on the home page who could write“Microsoft sucks” and we wouldn’t take that down. We didn’t follow the colorguidelines of Microsoft’s branding department. Channel 9 was one of thefirst corporate sites to have RSS feeds everywhere. It was also one of thefirst to have a wiki.
Building 43 will definitely live by that same philosophy, but it will go alot further. First, our content will be available via Creative Commons soyou can use our videos or photos or other media on your own sites. You cancut it up, edit it, or claim it as your own. Second, Building 43 is not aplace. It’s not a website. It’s a distributed community and you’ll engagewith Building 43 on your favorite social network. No need to visithttp://www.building43.com at all. Plus, we’ll have new videos that you caninteract with via technology like that available on 12seconds.tv andseesmic.com so you can post your own video tips or techniques or demos.
Second, on Building 43 you won’t just find information about Rackspace.We’re going to help the entire cloud computing industry get more adoption,users, customers. We’ll cover technologies from Rackspace’s competitors likeAmazon, Microsoft, Google, GoGrid, IBM, and others. Our philosophy onBuilding 43 is a rising tide lifts all boats, so we’re going to look to getyou the best advice on both how to build your business better on theInternet as well as have fun, too. We’ll also link to the best ideas,videos, demos, blogs, on the Internet. I’ve already been practicing that. Inthe past year I’ve linked to more than 16,000 things onhttp://www.friendfeed.com/scobleizer/likes my likes feed on friendfeed.
Third, and this won’t be on Building 43 in the first stage, but in thefuture we want to make Building 43 a place where you come to build your owncloud-based applications or services or try out all sorts of new approachesthat the industry is pitching our way.
So, yes, we’ve learned from Channel 9, but we’re going to push it a lotfurther and a lot of that depends on how the community evolves on Building43.
Robert says his personal blog will remain a separate property, but he’ll move it from Wordpress to Rackspace hosting to “make that a showcase for new blogging technology (like the various commenting plugins that let you federate comments to friendfeed, for instance).”
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