[qi:036] Long time GigaOM contributing editor Robert Young and Scott Karp, formerly of Atlantic Media and well known media blogger have just soft launched their new company, Publish2. Karp is the CEO and co-founder, while Young is the Chairman and co-founder of the new company.
The New York-based start-up will create a platform for journalists, giving them tools including book marking abilities, news aggregators and a publishing platform, and allow them to build a social network around these offerings. The company is using Drupal CMS as the basis of its platform. Scott Karp outlines the vision of the company in this blog post.
On a more personal note, I wish Young and Karp my very best – for they are sharp media minds, who have been kicking around with this idea for a while. If you read Young and Karp’s writings over past few years, the premise of the new company shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Interesting project. Thanks Om.
However, in his post Scott claims his new venture will be able to extend Digg’s model to every topic and every niche, and I don’t think this is the answer. Topix.net, coRank.com and Pligg/Drupal-based sites are (Publish2 is based on Drupal BTW, so there you go).
Why? Topix brings the news and let people democratize them, at any imaginable level. Just look at this: http://www.topix.net/dir
And coRank/Pligg/Drupal, although geeks tend to talk them down as stupid Digg clones, they let people create their own social news space about, quiting Scott “every topic and every niche”.
What do you think?
In my previous comment. last paragraph, I meant to say “quoting”, not “quiting” !
I wish I could add something to this. I have not seen this yet-to-be-released platform. I have vague ideas, but lets not do that, and wait for these folks to do their show-and-tell.
Any social new company? Interesting. Wouldn’t get the light of day from me except you are mentioning it.
With the emergence of so many 2.0 Web sites—New York Observer, MTV, Spread Firefox, etc.—based on Drupal, the credibility of the CMS as a robust, getting-all-done platform has sky rocketed! Dries would have never imagined that his small project would grow to such massive proportions when he first started.
However, with the next relese—Drupal 6—I just hope that the limited Ajax-enabled functionalities in the CMS are addressed; that would be a major step toward becoming more 2.0—fewer page reloads, unbroken user experience, etc.
All said, its ludicrously flexible structure and ungodly powerful modules (Views, Webform, ConTemplate, CCK, etc.) are a breath of fresh air in times of DNNs, SharePoints, and Typo3s. Its like WordPress on steroid, lots of them. 🙂