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Web
Lab Sites Produce
Extra-Corporate Content
By Pamela
Parker
The
absolute Shock of Silence, the lack of her presence, was
my only companion for weeks, then months, then...it's
been over 17 years," writes one man on the Living with Suicide Web site, sharing the aftermath of his wife's fatal
overdose on sleeping pills. Another woman writes of
coming home to find her husband gone. "I figured at
first he was out picking up a pizza or something,"
she says, "but he was actually out killing
himself."
On the Working Stiff site, a woman shares her frustrations with customer
service work at a mail-order clothing maker, where she
had recently received a meager pay raise. "To add
injury to insult my boss calls me into the office to tell
me she'd monitored my last 5 phone calls."
Both sites, designed to be forums for people to
communicate about personal issues, are products of the
Web Lab, the non-profit incubator of innovative ideas on
the Internet founded by New Yorker Marc Weiss. "It
was kind of a strategy to get people thinking about
innovation on the web," said Weiss, who also started
the Emmy-award winning documentary film project P.O.V. in
the mid-eighties. The Web Lab grew out of Weiss's work on
Web sites to accompany the films -- sites about
controversial and divisive subjects like the Vietnam war,
violence against gays, and attitudes toward death and
dying.
Weiss noticed the proliferation of personal homepages and
mega corporate sites, but thought there weren't nearly
enough places that fit in the middle -- well-crafted
creative Web spaces with substance. So he created the Web
Lab, with financial help from a private family
foundation, the Ford Foundation, and PBS. The
organization is currently accepting applications for
round two. The deadline is September 13, and final
decisions are expected by February 1999. Web Lab is still
raising money, but hopes to have $200,000 available for
the second round of sites.
The Web Lab awards aren't grants, though, and it isn't
itself a foundation. Instead, it's more like an incubator
for innovative ideas, offering guidance all through the
development process and hosting the finished site.
"It's much more of a hand-on relationship. They want
to be involved and they are involved," said John
Keefe, a Brooklyn-based developer who created the Living
with Suicide site along with Peter Esmonde, Mary
Esselman, Britt Funderburk, and the Web Lab. "For me
it was a very productive experience," said Keefe,
"and it continues to be."
Keefe, who was working at Discovery Channel Online at the
time of his proposal, conceived of the idea because of
his experience after his father's suicide. "It
really struck me that so many people are effected by
suicide," said Keefe, "and no one was really
talking about it. It just didn't seem like a healthy
thing."
People are certainly talking on Keefe's site. Visitors
contribute their personal stories to be randomly served
on the pages, and they have begun 26 different threads of
discussion.
"Some threads are very active where there's a lot of
exchange," said Marc Weiss. "There's a real
community forming there. That's not automatic. That takes
a certain combination of factors that I don't think we
really understand at this point. We've tried a number of
ways. Sometimes they've worked and sometimes they
haven't, and I can't tell what the magic ingredients
are."
Experiments like these are what Weiss perceives as the
value of the Web Lab. Although none of the sites are
designed to be commercially viable, Weiss hopes that the
lessons learned can help people doing business on the
Internet.
"We're looking to create sites that are beyond
entertainment, that are a little more substantive, and
thought-provoking," said Weiss. "If someone can
do that and make a little money, well, that's
great."
Keefe believes the financial pressures under which
Websites operate make it difficult to innovate, though,
and he welcomed the opportunity to set aside concerns
about pageviews. "It's a chance to experiment with
new approaches to using the Internet and ways of
exploiting what is so good about the Internet," he
said, "without the fear of those commercial
pressures."
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