Ben Garrison’s WeSearchr launch cartoon. I love this.
I’m going to start blogging some of the links and press that WeSearchr gets, I need to compile them and why not do it here?
We launched ten days ago and it’s going amazingly well despite no press coverage… But one cannot expect the dinosaur to welcome the arrival of his comet.
Social Matter was the first blog to welcome us with a significant piece: WeSearchr And The Coming Information Wars by Mark Yuray. If you don’t understand what WeSearchr is yet and why it’s important, just go read this.
Briefly summarized, WeSearchr is an online information marketplace that crowdsources funds for desired information bounties. First, someone puts up a bounty for some information — say, evidence of wrongdoing by a politician. Then, the bounty gets funded according to how much money people are willing to pay to hear it. Someone else – a researcher, whistleblower or journalist – then has a serious and obvious incentive to acquire the information. If they do, they get paid and the desired information is released. Somebody out there hiding something gets skewered. The gory details can be read here.
There are a lot of start-ups with snappy slogans and big, pie-in-the-sky dreams, but WeSearchr is one that is, at best, understating its significance. The home page proclaims: “WeSearchr crowdfunds the truth.” That sounds innocuous enough to an honest man. Liars might take notice, however. There are a lot of them out there, and in a late-stage democracy such as ours, lying is something between a national pastime and the structural basis of society. Such a society ought to watch the truth warily.
To such a society, the truth might be positively explosive.
The other link I have is a short but highly interesting video segment. Top First Amendment lawyer Mark W. Bennett discussed WeSearchr during an appearance on the legal affairs show Reasonable Doubt. (WeSearchr is discussed at the 43 minute mark.)
That’s all for now but I know of some more press coverage coming and I’ll link them here.
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WeSearchr’s Nick Denton Criminal Acts bounty is over $50,000!
You could take down a $10,000 bounty for discovering significant Gawker plagiarism.
We have the original draft of Barack Obama’s first book. Questions have swirled around this since his first Presidential campaign. We need to raise the $7,500 it cost us to acquire and then we’ll publish it.
Pax Vobiscum 