Howard Rheingold interviewed by Michael Agger on September 7, 1996 Related Links Inaugurating the Social Web: read the press release that announced Howard Rheingold's new venture. Rheingoldland: Howard posts his latest "Brainstorms" on his personal web page. Electric Minds: the future site of Electric Minds. Virtual Community: the online version of Howard Rheingold's book.	"We hope not to just compete in the marketplace of virtual communities, but to drive that marketplace." Howard Rheingold is the author of "Virtual Community," editor of "The Whole Earth Review" and a core member of The WELL. His newest venture is a company called Electric Minds, an attempt to create a large-scale electronic community devoted to science, technology and their future effects on global society. Tripod: Where did the idea for Electric Minds originate? Howard Rheingold: Well if you look at my book, "Virtual Community," it talks about how people actually use the Internet as a means of communicating with each other -- something we have not been hearing too much about in all this Web hoopla. In that book, I outlined how human communication has driven the growth of the Internet. Things like e-mail, Usenet newsgroups, listservs, MUDs, and IRC channels are really the foundation of this medium. Tripod: Why do you see a need for a Web-based online community like Electric Minds? HR: Right now the Web is mostly publication; it is not communication. You may have tens of thousands of people hitting a site at the same time who all share an interest in that subject, but they have no way of communicating with each other. When I had an opportunity to start up HotWired in 1994, I really wanted to combine a lot of community with content. Back then, just proving that you could put cultural material on the Web and sell ads was radical. HotWired proved you could do that, but it has never moved beyond a magazine model. I wanted to let the audience in on the content. Tripod: How is this going to be a successful business model? HR: Although there is a limited number of advertising dollars for Internet publications, and a lot of people trying to get at them, we have a strong foot in the door with Bill Peck as our ad sales director. He sold the first ads for HotWired and he also setup the advertising department at Infoseek. We also hope to aggregate interesting minds who are articulate and have something to say, and from that stream of content we are going to repurpose it into books, videos, cable, etc. We are in serious discussions with book publishers and cable producers around the world right now. Electric Minds will be a showcase for intelligent people, and from that showcase, our editors will refine the material into a number of different media. Our goal is to build a media content company that is centered around a community Web site. Tripod: Your business model offers tremendous opportunity for the amateur thinker or writer to give input on Electric Minds and possible see their ideas reach a very wide audience. HR: That's right. We want to build a platform that a lot of people can innovate on and we hope they profit from that exposure and that we will profit from providing the platform.
This is not a "slam-dunk, let's go public in six months" business idea. This is an experiment.	Tripod: How did you pitch this essentially "cultural" idea to venture capitalists? HR: Well, we had to kiss a lot of frogs before we found our prince. This is not a "slam-dunk, let's go public in six months" business idea. This is an experiment. Our lead investor is SoftBank. They have taken the long view and are willing to spend money on an experiment. We have other sponsors who are believers in the vision. If potential sponsors did not believe in vision, we did not want them involved, because they would have been disappointed. Tripod: How do you know that there is a need for this kind of business? HR: I get e-mail everyday from around the world. Since we put up the sign-up for our mailing list, we have got a couple of thousand people who have joined on in the last couple of weeks. I sense a lot of untapped enthusiasm out there for doing what we want to do. Tripod: Are there any places on the Internet right now where you see content and community being successfully integrated? HR: Certainly HotWired's Threads has audience participation, but it is not central to their philosophy. "Utne Reader" has a little community based on conferencing, but it does not combine content and community the way we intend to. Salon does combine content and community but it is about literature, not technology.
The sad fact is that people will not support culture through subscriptions.	Tripod: Did you think of launching Electric Minds as a non-profit? The idea of creating a for-profit community might strike some as smacking of hucksterism. HR:Having been the editor of the "Whole Earth Review," which is a non-profit that accepted no advertising, paid its staff very little, paid its contributors very little, I was not wild about the non-profit idea. I am more interested in paying staff well and that means you must make a profit. I would not be adverse to a non-profit, but it is very hard to find support for that. Tripod: Would Electric Minds be able to support itself with a subscription base? HR: The sad fact is that people will not support culture through subscriptions. I know from experience as a magazine editor that it just doesn't happen. If you have got a business model based on subscriptions and you're not "The New York Times" or the "Wall Street Journal," you are not going to get any investment because you are not going to get any business. I would like to believe that a couple of years from now, Web sites like ours could be supported by subscriptions. I would prefer to get a couple of dollars from a hundred thousand people every month and not have to go out and sell ads. Tripod: If the subscription model will not work, what is the answer? HR: The sites that are out there right now will have to subsist on advertising. Maybe a few years from now the audience will be large enough, and the premium of getting really good material instead of crap will be high enough, that you will be able to sell subscriptions, but not right now. The key is to survive for the next eighteen months while the medium matures.
We hope to drive the social web.	Tripod: How will it "mature"? HR: Higher bandwith, less waiting, more of an understanding of what works and what doesn't for a larger amount of people. Tripod: Do you think Electric Minds is a model that others will emulate? HR: We hope to drive the social Web. We've got something called the "Virtual Community Center" where we point people to other virtual communities. So we hope not to just compete in the marketplace of virtual communities, but to drive that marketplace. There are all kinds of interest groups out there, all kinds of communities forming, and we want to point people towards them.