Robin Good: to boldly go to where no other indipendent publisher has gone before..
The first time I met Robin, we were having dinner with Richard Stallman. When I asked him about his job he told me he was an independent online publisher. What I understood was that he was making a business out of brokering information, I had a look at his information portal masternewmedia and than asked him to meet.
Recently I stepped by his office and I spent a couple of hours watching him collecting news from the net using RSS-aggregators like MySyndacaat, republishing and commenting posts, studying Google analytics and keeping in touch with his co-editors. He is an information broker, running his info-entepreneur business on his own, without charging directly his customers. He is a proof of what Larry Wall said by the First O’Reilly Perl conference
Information doesn’t want to be free. Information wants to be valuable
Yes, his business basically is based on online-advertising. It works because he spent years looking for interesting sources of information, cooperating with software vendors to get useful tools to speed up his daily work, keeping users interested, working hard..
Yes, it’s a web 2.0 business model, and he has been clever enough to build up a team, his business goes beyond the one-man band limit.
Robin Good worked for years as design director, information designer and multimedia production specialist, spending some time collecting interesting resources from the Internet for his own sake.
Then he started publishing news on his blog, and as soon as he got ranked by Technorati and other sources he understood he might turn it into a business. After a couple of years he gave up with his previous jobs and dedicated himself to his mission:
helping both individuals and large organizations leverage the infinite potential for positive co-operation that the intelligent use of new media technologies offer us.
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