Salon buys The Well

caferace writes "More news about Salon... In what looks to me like a sharp bid to continue their move up the 'Net food-chain, Salon today announced they are purchasing The Well , the renowned Bay area BBS/Web community that started some 14 years ago. Wired has a story here. "

Next: Slashdot buys Salon

[drwiii]

Then Red Hat publically admits that they bought Slashdot last year

Hmmm.. not to add any fuel to the Red Hat/Slashdot Conspiracy fire, but.. LINK [min.net]

Next: Slashdot buys Salon

[Chris Johnson]

It's about being a fscking masterpiece ;) it's insanity blues, man, and totally authentic. And Marc Ribot's guitar solos bent my head into entirely new shapes- I'm _still_ trying to work out where that dude's coming from... I now have a note-for-weird-note Marc Ribot guitar solo and am trying to remember what Rain Dogs song it came from. Why, oh why, did I let a desperate and piteously begging Tom Waits fan trade that album away from me?

Sick of the WELL

[Chris Johnson]

Yes! Me too. I'd never heard of it until that appalling Wired article (one of the reasons I just stopped buying that mag eventually). Every time I see mention of this glorified BBS I can't help but think, "Oh, so pretending they invented rock music isn't enough for Boomer hippies, now they are going to claim they invented e-community too?" ;P
Maybe I'll give them credit for inventing flamers ;) seriously... the WELL is nothing. What went on there goes on everywhere there is a network, and it was going on all over the place. The WELL just happened to have Stewart Brand involved. Stewart Brant is pretty cool- he did a book on the MIT Media Lab that I thought was very good- but 'Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link'? You just knew it was going to be proclaimed the revolution and the standard setter for all e-communities, including the ones which had never even heard of it. By some mystical power it cast its influence across all subsequent communities, shaping them even though nobody knew or cared what a bunch of Deadheads were doing on computers in California. (trading tapes and flaming, from the accounts of it).
Feh! Thank you, Slashdot, for running this and illustrating to me that lots of Slashdotters and many _moderators_, even, are also going Feh! WELL? Feh! ;)

Next: Slashdot buys Salon

[zonker]

Ahhh! A fellow Wait's fan! Good to meet you :) There aren't as many of us you know...

Sick of the WELL

[Chris Parrinello]

Here here! As with typical Bay Area thinking, if it didn't happen inside the Valley, it never happened.

I think the worst thing I ever read about the WELL was the article in Wired awhile back detailing the oh so melodramatic events over the WELL's history.

Please. The article treated it like it was some unique thing. Many of the BBS of the 80's were a lot like this especially the ones that had a close nit group. The only thing that made the WELL special was the fact that isn't of ordinary people, it was famous people.

I find the fact that ordinary people form communities through BBSs in the past and chat rooms/web sites now a much more interesting story about human nature and society.

And the type of people who find the WELL influential and important are the same type of people who stand in line at the new trendy dance club trying to get in so they can hang with the "in" people. They need to define their own opinion over what is influential and important.

Could be worse...

[acb]

Could have been AOL or WorldCom or Time Warner or any one of a number of huge, soulless corporations concerned about nothing more than making a buck. At least Salon, while a for-profit company, comes from a Bay Area liberal intellectual mindset, and is in some kind of harmony with the WELL's values. We can probably rest assured that they won't strip-mine the WELL for maximum profit or dilute it into another middle-American chatroom system.

That could be a good thing.

[Nathaniel]

isn't it better to set things up so that cooperation leads to profit, instead of the historical alternative (competition leads to profit)?

Salon != AOL

[Andrew Leonard]

It's also worth noting that a number of Salon staffers are long time Well veterans, like myself, our VP for site development Scott Rosenberg, our Table Talk host Mary Beth Williams, and not least of all, our Table Talk conferencing director, Cliff Figallo, who for many years was one of the Well's top two hosts.

The Well's got a lot more than six months of a future.

Salon != AOL

[Rabid Wombat]

I've been reading Salon for some time now, and I think that they are quite a techno-savvy, sophisticated, and progressive bunch. While their lust for profit is definitely present ( the are a business,after all), they don't seem like the types that would butcher a community of people in the name of banner ads. If one thing about their site is consistent, it's that they cater to a _sophisticated_ bunch and desire readership loyalty more than anything else. To do that they have to get greater exposure.

This isn't like AOL buying out Netscape just to prey on the millions of Netscape users who won't change their default home page. They did that ( as well as the ICQ buyout) just to shovel poop down the throats of the ignorant. They aren't after loyalty, just forced page views and click-throughs.

If the Well had to get bought out, I could think of _much_ worse stewards than Salon.

Next: Slashdot buys Salon

[Si]

That's cos Waits is so hit-and-miss. He topped out with Blue Valentine. I mean, Rain Dogs? What's that all about?

RIP the Well

[Alex Zepeda]

Oh please, the Well was in the crapper ever since it was bought out by Hooked. Once Hooked got bought out for the first time and the long time prez. given the boot, everything got even worse (read: No more Hooked community). Alas there _are_ other places one can go...

The road to Hell is paved w/ good intentions.

[Venomous Louse]

Geocities

Didja ever notice how much "geocities" looks like "atrocities"? Just a thought.


Believe me, Salon will not make the same mistakes.

That's what they all say :)

Some companies don't make those mistakes, but simply knowing history is not enough to avoid repeating it. For example, everybody knows what happened in Germany in the thirties and forties, and you can bet your life that no western democracy will ever again elect an Austrian guy with a funny little mustache and an armband.

Good luck. I like Salon. I'm even optimistic about this.


-j

Oh it does, does it . . .

[Venomous Louse]

They hired a lot of programmers so as to make intelligent[???] ircbot like programs to respond to posts.

Uh . . .

I do believe that on some days they unleash a libertarianbot, though.


-j

Rain Dogs

[Venomous Louse]

Rain Dogs? What's that all about?

It didn't make sense to me for the first couple of years either, but now I can't live without it.

I agree that he sure has his off days. Actually, I don't like anything of his that I've heard from before Rain Dogs. Hmmm . . .


-j

Salon != AOL ... thank gopod!

[phred]

Actually Cliff Figallo was Director of the Well (and my boss, since I was a consultant working on the billing system) for about seven years.

His book, "Hosting Web Communities," published by John Wiley, has been out for a few months now.

--------

*sniff*

[Null_Packet]

my first e-mail/shell account after I left college was on the well. while i'm sure it will be taken care of ok over there with salon, the well was a big milestone in my life :)

Pretty Good News

[unhooked]

Luckily the Well was able to do something
Hooked could not.... survive katz.

Long live Hooked.

well engaged

[unhooked]

heh, looks like it crashed while I was loading
the news conference. sheesh

RIP the Well

[unhooked]

Actually Hooked never bought the Well, it's more like the other way around. Bruce Katz bought the Well, then some time later he bought Hooked and turned it into Whole earth networks (ruining it in the process). WEnet was then sold to an even worse
owner. At least the Well now has a chance to grow, or sink.

Communities for Sale

[Another Rare Leonard]

What a concept. What businessperson will take
that a step further, as they turn everything
into a commodity. How about cities! Let's
say Somecity, Colorado sells itself to the
highest bidder to substitute for tax revenues...

"Welcome to Somecity, an AOL Community"

Then they could have deals and mergers and all
that stuff...

"News bulletin: Disney Buys Orlando in Water
Stock Trade"

Oh, then people become advertising places, and
we get stickers on us like our fruit and
vegetables, right?

darn..

[drwiii]

-- For Sale --

One community, slightly used.
Contains lots of people that like interacting with each other..
Fun for all ages.
$99 OBO.

I'm not sure what it is, but community-oriented purchases are such a letdown. Like when Netscape bought that community-assembled directory, and when AOL bought ICQ (not that ICQ was worth anything to begin with, mind you), and when AOL bought Netscape (hmm).. It just seems like profiting from the cooperation of others.

Salon: Now that you have it, don't screw with it

[alumshubby]

One of the key phenomena about the Internet is the sense of community it fosters. I sure hope Salon's got this firmly in mind and recognizes it as an enduring virtue of the WELL.

Sick of the WELL

[IntlHarvester]

Whole Earth, which started the WELL, was extremely influential in the early personal computer movement. The catalog was a major outlet for 8080 machines and early Apples, and the whole earth folks were involved the "community computing" projects in the 70s.

As for Chicago getting dissed, that's understandable, considering most the PC industry was in the Bay Area, and the folks here were familiar with the Well.

As for being on the WELL, I was never cool enough to be invited into Jerry Garcia's private love chamber, so it seemed like a normal BBS to me. Later on they became about the worst ISP you could imagine.
--

Next: Slashdot buys Salon

[Venomous Louse]

heh.

Then Red Hat publically admits that they bought Slashdot last year (the truth is that all the anti-Red Hat zealots on Slashdot are actually Red Hat employees making their valid critics look like silly, paranoid buttheads due to the association with the great mass of, well . . . silly, paranoid buttheads).

Then we find out who's really behind all of this -- the secret Dark Lord pulling the strings at Red Hat, Slashdot, and the WELL -- could it be . . . yes, it could! But . . . could it really be . . .

Cher?!?!

Yep.

You heard it here first.


-j

Pretty Good News

[phred]

I've been on the Well since January 1987, and it changed my life, simple as that. Been a consultant there, still co-host of the News conference and a couple others, including the renowned zipper.ind discussion on all the Clinton hoo-hah over the last year and more.

The Well has always been a place where ideas and opinions get a real airing; it's also a place where people have grudges and get off track and make mistakes. In other words, it's a lively and real "place" that for all its faults is essential to many of its users' lives.

It's also staggered through a rather odd history as an organization, but still has managed to survive. Bruce Katz, the outgoing owner, took an equity position early in the 1990s when a cash infusion was desperately needed. He then took over ownership and had big ideas, unfortunately I'd have to say "pipe dreams," at a time when the net was starting to grow rapidly and the Web was just taking off. I first saw Mosaic on a machine in the Well office in June 1993. It's not like we didn't see what was coming, but adapting to it was a real challenge.

Fortunately, Bruce was smart enough to back off his big plans and just let the Well be what it was best at. In the meantime he tried to rationalize the business structure, merging the struggling proto-ISP part of the Well (oh, that modem rack, you don't even want to know!) with the newly acquired Hooked to create WENET, Whole Earth Networks. At the same time he spun off Well Engaged as a Web-based analogue to the conversation model of the command-line Picospan program (which is still used on the Well).

None of these ventures have exactly been wildly successful. The Well has been more or less stable, though membership has been stagnant. Engaged made some early sales but is hampered by the same problem as every other Web-based discussion system, namely the stateless nature of http. In addition there is a ton of commercial competition in that "space," not to mention things like, uh, Slash. And after Bruce fired David Holub, founder of Hooked and WENET's manager, over David's refusal to knuckle under to UUnet's bullying tactics, WENET kind of floundered and he sold it off to GST, another falling-apart operation (at least he got good money for the sale, though).

Many buyers have sniffed around the Well over the last couple of years, so I'm quite happy that Salon gave the nod. I knew David Talbot in DC two decades ago, and his integrity and smarts show in how Salon has developed and survived. It's too early to say we have a happy ending, but I'm hopeful.

I hope some of you will come by and check out both the Well and Salon, if you're not familiar with them. In their own ways they have the same distinctive character that /. does. (No ACs on the Well, though; no anonymous accounts there though we did try a no-holds-barred anonymous 'conference' once!)

You can get a look at the Well (using the Engaged GUI system) here [well.com], this is the inkwell.vue 'conference' or discussion area focusing on book authors.

[e-mail]

-------

Sick of the WELL

[phred]

I'm not sure I understand this comment. The Well never claimed to be the "first" or "best" at anything (like the Grateful Dead who drew in a lot of Well users in the early years, we aren't the best at what we do, we're the only ones who do what we do).

I remember CBBS and I was on a Northwest variant of that here in Portland in early 1984 (it started in about 1979, I think). I used to dial up the Capitol PC Users BBS in DC back then because they had the best collection of PC shareware and utilities. That's how I discovered RBBS, one of the first "bazaar" open source programs (which was to BBS software what Apache is to Web servers). But I digress.

In fact, the Well's roots predate even CBBS, since its early development was substantially influenced by the Community Memory system started by Lee Felstenstein and others in Berkeley and San Francisco in 1973. The history of that is one of the chapters in Steven Levy's book Hackers. Lee has been on the Well since the beginning, by the way.

The Well never developed according to any grand plan, so it's kind of hard to say where things will go from here. But I certainly wouldn't say the history is all behind us now. We keep kicking over rocks and finding interesting new things . . .

-------

Buyout can work - example from history

[janelle]

As a current Salon employee, I can assure you that Salon cares *most deeply* about community. Unlike big fat cat sites (like, say, Geocities or Lycos), Salon actually works really hard to foster beneficial communication and develop friendships.

Matter of fact, one of *my* personal issues at Salon has been writing about how other companies destroy their online communities. To wit: a recent story on the demise of Netscape's community [salonmagazine.com] and a scathing critique [salon.com] of Geocities. Believe me, Salon will not make the same mistakes. Just check out our Table Talk areas.

Buyout can work - example from history

[Erbo]

It's possible that this buyout could actually be a good, or at least non-disatrous, thing for the Well. It might be helpful if I mention here the history of a similar online community, Electric Minds. [minds.com] (Disclaimer: I am a part of this story, but I don't speak officially for the company I work for.)

Electric Minds was kind of a "spinoff" of the Well, created by noted online community guru Howard Rheingold after he had been a Well user for some time and written a book, The Virtual Community, which dealt in large part with the Well and his experiences there. Electric Minds was intended to be very Well-like in its operation, and, indeed, used the WellEngaged conferencing system on its server. Unfortunately, they couldn't make any money at it, and their principal financing partner (SoftBank) didn't come up with the cash they needed to keep their doors open.

At that point, the company I work for, Durand Communications [durand.com] (now owned by Online System Services Inc. [ossinc.net]) stepped in and bought Electric Minds. We worked hard to integrate the Electric Minds conferencing system with our existing online community-building server, CommunityWare, [communityware.com] including the implementation of a conferencing system that mirrored the WellEngaged one. (I personally wrote a big chunk of that code.) The community members, in large part, were supportive of the move, as they had been expecting Electric Minds to completely shut down, and had been making plans to keep the community together.

Since that time, there have been problems, a number of them related to a "self-governance" movement for the community that never really panned out. There have been a number of server crashes and screw-ups, too. Yet, to this day, the Electric Minds community is still large and thriving, if somewhat altered in its makeup over time. (Rheingold left as community host some time back over internal divisions, and another longtime EMinds conference host is now running the community.) True, we never made any money from it, either, but we are now applying the lessons learned from Electric Minds in a whole series of new directions that do have revenue-generating potential.

So what was my point here? From what Salon has already done with their "Table Talk" conferencing system, I can see that they, too, understand the idea of "community." I'm not saying that the Well acquisition will be trouble-free for them or for the Well, but my expectation would be that the Well will survive at least as well as its offshoot has, because its new owners do understand "community," as well as the nature and "quirks" of the community they're buying into. (Those are important; you need to keep from alienating the longtime users if you want the community to survive. It's why we bent over backwards to essentially clone WellEngaged on our own software platform. Similarly, I wouldn't expect Salon to drop the old text-mode Well interface anytime soon.)

If they're smart, they won't concentrate on revenue right away, but they'll certainly apply what they learn from the Well to help make their site, and their business, even better.

Eric ("erbo" on EMinds)
--

Sick of the WELL

[Aaron M. Renn]

I must say that I am sick of hearing about the WELL and how long it has been around and how influential it is. The very first BBS in the world was CBBS (now chinet [chinet.com]) in Chicago. Ward Christiansen of CBBS wrote XMODEM. Almost everybody who's been on the Internet more than 4 years in Chicago is a former chinet user. (Rumor has it Randy Suess ran the thing out of his studio apartment with racks of modems everywhere). Very few people seem to know about CBBS though. I guess it is because the magazines that write about this stuff are concentrated in the Bay Area and thus focus on it.