"In an anachronistic joke, The Daily Dot, a media news site, released a print edition at this year's SXSW. Befitting an old-media technology, they hired a team of newsies to hand out the broadsheets."
New blogs launch all the time, but The Daily Dot launched today with a well-known team of backers, $600,000 in the bank and a focus on using data analysis to unearth the stories of people online. The Dot says it wants to be the "home town newspaper" for all the different social networks and communities on the web - and it uses math to find its way.
If the Internet is the public square of the 21st century, the Daily Dot wants to be its town crier. The newly launched online media startup is trying an experiment in community journalism, where the community is the web. It's an interesting vision, and one that looks to capitalize on the amount of time people are spending online.
"Like the past few years at SXSW, the buzz over the past week came down to what apps are hot and what are not. But the deeper questions will go unanswered for quite some time. We do not know what the data says about the direction for new apps such as Highlight or Forecast. We can only speculate how the community will shape the identity of the apps that got the buzz. Until then, the only ones who may have a clue are the technologists themselves. But that depends on how well they are studying their own data and the relative activity of the users, the churn rate and any other host of factors."
"I've never been that good at memes. I may have a pretty reliable stock of YouTube videos with which I could amuse the average non-Internet person, but compared to some Web residents, I have no idea what's going on. That's why I read The Daily Dot. It's the Internet's hometown newspaper. When I don't know the significance of some weird video or graphic people are sharing, that's where I turn to learn more.
Internet culture was on full display in person this week at South by Southwest, and I got a chance to sit down with Owen Thomas, founding editor of The Daily Dot, to talk about how they cover the Web not as a tool, like we do at RWW, but as a place."
"Everyday through sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and other social media, we share pictures, news, and opinions on a global scale.
One entrepreneur decided to bring all of that together on one site called The Daily Dot.
A very well known Austin writer is joining in this effort to create a hometown newspaper of sorts for the World Wide Web. Austin Powell, formerly a columnist with the Austin Chronicle, spoke to KVUE about The Daily Dot."
