When I co-founded Morph's Outpost on the Digital Frontier magazine in 1993, I did it to recognize and serve an emerging tribe of interactive multimedia designers, developers, producers, tool makers, visionaries. They came from Hollywood, from video games, from training and education, from the computer industry, to create a new kind of software and to deliver it on new platforms. See the http://MorphsOutpost.com anniversary blog we published last year.
Yes, as a matter of fact, we did call it a tribe back then. Michael Moon and I waxed poetic on that topic later, in 2000, with the publication of our book, Firebrands: Building Brand Loyalty in the Internet Age, still available on Amazon.com, I believe, certainly second-hand, maybe an ebook.
Little Mo reminds me a little of Morph.
Heady days, indeed. At the Art Teco conference that convened at Fort Mason Center on San Francisco's waterfront the day O.J. made his most famous run, many ideas and business proposals were first discussed, which only now are becoming real in Web 2.0, in socialmediaspace. Some of the concepts discussed that day almost 15 years ago won't see light of day until Web 3.0.
Morph's Outpost existed to serve this new tribe.
To give them a platform where they could talk to each other, exchange technical insights and how-to.
"Written by developers for developers" was the editorial law, and in fact our wizard multimedia producer readers contributed virtually all of the editorial content, with help from an eager but minuscule editorial staff.
People like Marc Canter and the other cross-fertilizing geniuses who got this business started, who had helped to make multimedia possible in the first place, as discussed in earlier posts stemming from our meeting with Marc yesterday.
Now we've identified a new, and far larger tribe, and engage them daily in our crude but effective and always evolving test site, http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com
We used Flickr to identify dozens of groups and hundreds of people who appear to share our love of graphic novels and comics, streetart, and edgy scrapbooking. We figured if they liked to do the same things that we like and write about in our book, they are likely to enjoy reading this prose+comics scrapbook novel.
We manually searched and read thousands of Web sites, blogs, Facebook and Twitter profiles, and identified hundreds more specific individuals likely to enjoy The Concrete Jungle Book. We started inviting them to come and Preview our book online.
This tribe wants more than Little Mo and The Concrete Jungle Book, of course.
As we move into the next phase of our roll-out, Little Mo will take a more active role to guide members of our tribe of edgy young creatives, to other great graphic novels, comics, webcomics.
We've already begun giving our readers social media tools we're building to help our readers find friends for discussion and online fun, at http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com plus creative tools they can use to mash up their art and words with the pages of our book, in the read/collaborate Preview now underway.
Hundreds of the more ambitious and creative members of our tribe have found us early on and gave us valuable feedback, through our read/collaborate Preview at http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com. We're incorporating it the "1st Edition" now in production. You know who you are.
More of you have offered to contribute your edgy scrapbook pages and art work to TCJB SCRAPBOOK EDGE, which I announced the other day, http://nonhumancommunications.blogspot.com/2009/02/publish-your-art-in-our-new-tcjb.html
Next up: our tribe is going to help me, Steve Porter, Srayla Tip, Little Mo, and the rest of the Nonhuman Crew, to help shape the sequel to The Concrete Jungle Book.
This may be a first. We hope you'll join our project. You're invited.
Oh Yeah, the Widget
Next, we're going to make it easy for tribe members to pass along our top content, the fruit of our effort as curators, and invite new people into the creative collaboration circle, with a widget that they can use in their blogs, social media profile pages, Web sites, and elsewhere in socialmediaspace.
Because our tribe, though emerging, remains somewhat hidden.
How many edgy teenagers are already subverting Mom's cute scrapbook supplies?
Drawing goofy comic strips and publishing them on the Web?
Curating a Flickr image pool for art & healing journal fanatics, or a collection of streetart and graffiti photos?
It takes one to know one. They know who Little Mo needs to know. And, based on the way they're helping already, at Facebook, at Twitter, at http://TheConcreteJungleBook.com, I think they want to do this and more, the more we can give them tools and fun reasons to do it.
What do you think? Would you like to help? All comments and feedback welcome. Leave comments here. Direct message my partner, http://twitter.com/dougmillison or email pynchonoid@yahoo.com.
Thank you for your kind attention.
Marc Canter on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Canter
Read Marc's blog http://blog.broadbandmechanics.com/
Learn about the Open Mesh in a fun video, http://blip.tv/file/1377855
Buy & read his state-of-the-art book,
How to Build the Open Mesh http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/564581
Scrapbook page presentation we gave to Marc Canter the other day.
