Hooray for Gather.com ! Their second launch of beta allows me to invite some of you to get in on the action. As I said it's beta so not fully there yet but I have some invites to hand out and I am definitely up for giving them to you if you are up for some joining, writing, pic posting, reviewing. I definitely want to get you in but I want you to contribute so get in touch if you want to. It isn't always going to be like the early days of GMail but for right now, it isn't fully public yet but it is already booming. Check it out. And think of it is a better blogging experience.
American Public Media Group (APMG), parent company to Minnesota Public Radio, has invested almost $1 million in the for-profit, Boston-based Gather.com. The new venture is a "social networking" website devoted to creating an online community of public-radio listeners.
"We think we can take audiences beyond what we give them in public radio and connect them with a whole lot of people who have similar interests," said Bill Kling, president of APMG. "We hope there is a point where they actually get involved in activities with each other -- to take a tour of Italy, or live in a compound in Santa Fe."
"We can't do that in public radio," he said.
Gather.com, set to launch in December, will operate along the same principles as MySpace.com and Friendster.com -- fee-free sites where people can establish their own home pages listing their personal and professional interests, keep blogs and communicate with other site members. Revenue is generated by selling advertisers space on those venues.
Social networking sites, with their young-skewing participants, have become red-hot commodities of late. MySpace, which has almost 30 million members, recently was purchased for $580 million by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
However, Gather may be different. MySpace caters to teens and young adults and has been described as having the personality of a teenager's poster-papered, music-filled bedroom. Gather, designed for public radio's older, more sober audience, might more resemble the parents' book-lined study.
That gather.com place looks interesting, If you still have any invites left, Id love to check it out more in depth and possibly contribute.
Posted by: djhinn | September 23, 2005 at 11:46 PM