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| Pioneering Early Online Communities |
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| By V. A. Shiva |
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In 1993, I was working at a CD-ROM data storage and search company known as Dataware Technologies. At that time, I had just completed my Masters at the MIT Media Laboratory in Visual Studies. My friends, artists, musicians, dancers all seemed to have a hell of a lot of problems getting gigs. The gatekeepers of the Arts, agents, gallery owners, etc., seemed to be their biggest obstacles. I saw an opportunity to break the barriers and enable artists to go direct. That resulted in Arts-Online.Com, the world's first community and database of nearly 5,000 artists: visual artists, photographers, dancers, musicians, actors, and much more.
We were too far ahead of our times --- pioneers, and we had no revenue model. So after five years of running it, going broke, we stopped. However, Arts-Online.Com was breakthrough --- we got a lot of press, a great article in the New York Times, ran the first on-line concert on a 9600 baud modem, broadcasting from the Middle East Cafe in Cambridge.
While we did Arts-Online, we also experimented with Harvard-Square.Com, and Shibuya.Org, two online communities, which we launched at CyberSmith on Church Street. Again, both of these were ahead of their times. We had a discussion forums, on-line coupons, got local business men to have their own webpages, that the maintained, all pre-saging facebook, myspace and other modern online communities.
I wrote two books memorializing the learnings form Arts-Online.Com, and Harvard-Square.Com. One was Arts and the Internet. The other was The Internet Guide to Publicity.
Check back soon and I'll give more history and details.
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| Medicine |
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| International Center for Integrative Systems |
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