Big Mother Is Watching
What happens when people stop watching Survivor and start getting real? Steve Rosenbaum, the brains behind MTV News: Unfiltered, is betting that a different brand of real stories, shot by real people, is what viewers want. Enter CameraPlanet.com, a Web-based video network where the audience is also the storyteller. Each week CameraPlanet sifts through its in-box and chooses a handful of story concepts to produce. The DIY directors submit raw videos, based on these ideas, which are then edited, and background music and narration are patched in. The finished product is streamed online. Recent tales include interracial dating, teen witches, and one person dedicated to setting zoo monkeys free. "I'm telling you," says Rosenbaum, "you can't write stuff this good."
Ask Not What the Net Can Do for You
Forty years after its founding, the Peace Corps (www.peacecorps.gov) aims to leverage the Web to bridge the worldwide digital divide. Mark Schneider, who took the helm as agency director last winter, is ramping up the Corps' information technology program to teach people in developing countries to use and maintain PCs and networks, and to navigate the Internet. Some early goals include enabling health clinic workers to track immunization programs more effectively and helping small businesses to go global.
With the start of the fall semester, Schneider hopes to use the new IT program to generate interest in the Corps among college students. "People have trouble conceptualizing what they could do in a place like Kazakhstan," he says. "But when you tell them they can help people with PCs or the Internet, they say, 'Yeah, I could do that.'"
The Searcher
Call it the search engine for the meaning of life. Noesis, created by Tony Beavers, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Evansville in Indiana, is a fully searchable online library dedicated to philosophy. Named for the Greek word meaning "processes of thought," Noesis (noesis.evansville.edu) contains 30,000 resources, ranging from Plato's Republic to academic papers on the ethics of genomics. Beavers plans to expand the site to include other academic disciplines, and sees the day when peer review becomes part of a larger peer-to-peer network. "Academic journals tend to be buried in libraries," says Beavers. "This is a way that scholars can freely give their ideas to the global community."
Critical Path
Research hospitals, pharmcos, and biotech firms conduct about 5,000 clinical trials annually, yet only 5 percent of eligible patients take part in them. Why? Despite the existence of hundreds of medical-trial Web sites, there's no central resource. This is what Kathryn Tunstall, the founder and CEO of a contraceptive-device company called Conceptus, discovered in 1998 when she was diagnosed with stage-two breast cancer: "When I searched online, useful information on new therapies was virtually impossible to find." Using that frustration to her advantage,Tunstall partnered with two Valley execs to found HopeLink (www.hopelink.com).
Slated to launch this fall, HopeLink aims to be the clearinghouse for clinical trials, matching up tests and test-takers - and saving billions for trial sponsors, who traditionally spend up to $10,000 per person in recruitment costs alone. "For me, Hopelink was part of the recovery process," says Tunstall, who is now cancer-free. "Some women see therapists, some join support groups. I founded a company."
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