NEW YORK -- The Web Lab is an innovation designed to spark innovation.
The Silicon Alley brainchild of executive director Marc Weiss, who also fathered P.O.V., the award-winning independent film showcase on PBS, the Web Lab nurtures the development of visionary online projects through its Web Development Fund.
Last year, the fund provided US$150,000 worth of assistance and matching funds to nine projects, including the community forum Living with Suicide and Working Stiff, a keeping-it-real webzine for 9-to-5ers. Weiss, however, is careful not to call the fund's allotments grants, preferring to compare the role of the fund to that of a book publisher. The Web Lab is supported by the Ford Foundation, PBS, and private donors.
"It's not just 'Here's the money,'" said Weiss. "We're looking for people who are willing to work with us over the long term toward a greater goal."
Web Lab will begin accepting applications on 17 August for the second round of funding.
Weiss spoke with Wired News about Web Lab's first year, the state of Silicon Alley, and the future of the medium.
Wired News: What lessons did you learn from the last round of funding?
Marc Weiss: One thing we learned -- that we probably should have known going in -- is to be very clear about what our expectations are. We were pretty casual last time about what we expected to happen with the sites that we supported. We ended up spending a lot of time going back and forth with project directors. Some of the collaborations were less collaborative than we would have liked.
Some sites used fairly specialized software and technology to do very creative things, but my fear is that some of the new technology may not be replicable -- they may not be things that a lot of other people can do, because the software is so complex and proprietary.
One of the sites that uses fairly complex technology is a MUD [Multi-User Dungeon]-based social commentary/fictional end-of-the-world scenario called Cataclysm. We still haven't seen a prototype of it, but the people who are working on it are very smart. If anyone has a chance of making it work, they will.
But I'm not sure that's going to spawn a whole lot of other social-commentary MUD sites [laughing]. What we want to do in the second round is to encourage people to write proposals that use simpler, widely available tools in more creative ways.
WN: You seem to be trying to push Web development in certain directions, such as using technology to create community, emphasizing content over flashy interfaces, and wrestling with difficult social issues. How does that vision fit into where the rest of the Web is going?
Weiss: It's counter to where the rest of the Web is going -- intentionally so. The two areas of huge development are the personal homepages, which are growing exponentially on places like GeoCities and America Online, and the other dynamic is the money pouring into the Web for commercial sites. Ultimately, what we're ... about [is] carving out a space that is as legitimate as those two poles and is in some ways a middle ground between them. Making that space very vigorous and very creative, and increasing visibility for this kind of work.
WN: What pressures are being applied to Web developers as the medium becomes more popular and mainstream?
Weiss: There's a tremendous given that some people accept unexamined and other people are struggling with: that bigger is better. That bigger is the only possibility. In this culture, there's some truth to the idea that small is obscure and marginal. The question is, how do you define big? Does it mean millions of eyeballs passing through on a daily basis?
What it means for me is more quality than quantity -- having some kind of critical mass, which is probably a fraction of what a commercial site needs, of people who want to come back because what they're getting is a really enriching experience. I don't think that what we're doing is ever going to be mass in the way that a Disney or MSN would try to be on the Web. That's not what we're looking for.
What we're doing needs to have a certain scale, so it can have an impact even for people who never go there. My experience with P.O.V. is that that's possible. A show on P.O.V. would never have more than a few million viewers. We never got anything like the blockbuster show, the Seinfeld, that would be on other networks. But we know that P.O.V. shows had a ripple effect. There are a lot more people who know about P.O.V. shows than actually watched P.O.V.. The reason for that is the quality of the experience of really good independent film is different from anything else that's happening in the culture. That's the goal of what we're doing with Web Lab and the Web Development Fund.
WN: Because content developers come to you for support, you have a unique overview of Web development in New York. What's your sense of the state of Silicon Alley?
Weiss: Two currents going at once. One very visible current is money flying in all directions: acquisitions, mergers, mega-agencies. A second current, really invisible, is that a whole lot of people in Silicon Alley are still very idealistic about the Web, even though it looks as if it's a totally money-driven industry. In the work we do, we actually get to talk to those folks on a regular basis -- the people who are trying to create their business models on the one hand, but who really want the Web to be more than the next gold rush.
The winner of last year's GII Award for ecommerce was Charles Schwab for their etrading site. The guy who accepted the award was the president and co-CEO of Schwab, and he said, "I'm really happy to be receiving this award, it's a great honor, but let's not lose sight of the real value of the Web, which is that it makes possible communication between people that is unprecedented in human history."
And he went on to talk about what I thought was a fairly visionary idea of the promise that the Internet holds on the level of relationships. "Yes, it's great that we can do transactions and make money -- but relationships between people, that's what's really important."
We're in this place where people are actually still able to make social decisions without compromising their business decisions. You can make a really good case that that the people who are doing the experimental work on the Web are moving the medium forward for everyone.
I heard a great story a couple of weeks ago about the history of anesthesia. Before they figured out how to use drugs to put people to sleep during an operation, they had to basically hold people down while they removed bullets. The idea of anesthesia came from poets and visionaries writing in the middle and late 1800s about the idea that people shouldn't have to experience pain. They started writing about this as a social vision, and then doctors started reading that stuff and saying, "Maybe we ought to put this into practice in a scientific way."
For me, that's a really simple and elegant way of talking about the role that poets and prophets can play in the everyday world. They had a vision, very much ahead of the rest of society, and then other people figured out how to make those visions practical.
