Digital Universe: Will It Be Internet’s PBS, BBC?
Larry Sanger, co founder of Wikipedia, is helping build the Digital Universe, which, he says in a CNET News.com interview, will:
be a non-commercial, free or open content authoritative information resource that mirrors reality. You can think of the Digital Universe as a set of portals, each defined by a topic, such as the planet Mars. And from each portal, there will be links to the best resources on the Web, including a lot of resources of different kinds that are prepared by experts and the general public under the management of experts. This will include an encyclopedia, as well as public domain books, participatory journalism, forums of various kinds and so forth. We’ll build a community of experts and an online collaborative network of independent organizations, each of which has authority over its own discipline to select material and to build resources that are together displayed through a single free-information platform.
He adds:
The idea is that it is a single reliable source of noncommercial and ad-free information. Obviously, we don’t mean that it’s merely a broadcast medium, but if you can think of Yahoo, Google and MSN as equivalent to the big three broadcast networks of ABC, NBC and CBS, isn’t it odd that there doesn’t exist anything like the equivalent of a Web PBS or BBC?
The Digital Universe resonates with PBS’s recently released Digital Future Initiative, which inspired my interview with Jacoba “Coby” Atlas, PBS’s Co-Chief Program Executive. After reading the Sanger and Atlas interviews, it seems to me that PBS has come catching up to do.
Sanger says unlike Wikipedia:
the Digital Universe will be more attractive to those members of the public who actually want to work with and under the direction of experts.
