The Long Runway
Dec 11th, 2007 by sharbrough
If a discussion of Footnote business practices started and stopped with financial and content considerations, that might be enough. But the story isn’t complete without at least referring to the commitment that Footnote makes to Web 2.0 and social media. We’ve put over 20 million images on the site, but we believe that our customers want to do more than view the site as some big honking electronic Encyclopedia of History. They want to discuss it – to voice opinions and questions about the times, places, and people that came before. They want to connect their own first-hand knowledge of the lives of their relatives, friends, and acquaintances (little-”h” history) to the sweep of world events (big-”H” History). They want to annotate, spotlight, and share stories about the events described in these records. They want to upload the records found in shoeboxes and closets and attics that illuminate.
An explicit decision was made at Footnote to invest resources into building the infrastructure for community interaction as THE initial priority. We put some energy into a document viewer, but went live with minimal site features like Search and Browse compared to what might have been built if there was no emphasis on Social Media. We know that John Dvorak is skeptical about social media sites, and his reasons are sensible – in sites where the users are voicing their opinions about and preferences for particular commercial products. That’s not very similar to voicing your opinion about the quality of letters written by Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, or the emotion of the moment of emancipation when a slave was freed, or the gratitude on the faces of townspeople and villagers when Allied armies advanced across Europe in 1945. Footnote managers look forward to the day when user contributed content on the site exceeds the quantity of content contributed by Footnote’s production group.
