Thanks to the readers who pointed me to the Business 2.0 article in which Palo Alto venture capitalist Jim Lussier offered up to $3 million to fund a media startup based on a super-local premise. I’m not ready to accept, nor solicit money at this point. But I am slowly scaling up to move this blog into a larger undertaking.

Toward that end I achieved a personal milestone today — I’m blogging on a new platform and a hosted site (courtesy of Scot Hacker of Birdhouse Arts in Berkeley). I have another site under construction. It is called minimedia.org. I hope to turn minimedia.org into a trade organization of sorts. I wrote a business plan for this last year and tried to get funding. Some VCs took an interest but they deemed the plan unworkable, at least as a for-profit undertaking. I have to agree. I do, however, think an association could come together as an open source effort. In the coming weeks I’ll put my original, for-profit proposal up on the minimedia.org site along with some ideas about how to transform it into a non-profit venue, and generally try to stir things up.

Meanwhile, in looking around for more about Lussier’s offer, I visited a very interesting local site called BlufftonToday.com. It is the work of former newspaperman Steve Yelvington, and it appears to be a group blog that is also associated with a freely-distributed printed paper. I’m bookmarking this for further research. Thanks to Tim Porter for the pointer.

I also noticed that Lussier’s offer was linked to on CivicSpace, a non-profit community to help people learn how to use the Drupal open source community-building tool.

Finally, let me also thank Tim Bishop for sending me to the Business 2.0 link. Tim has posted a note on Bayosphere and other places suggesting a number of ways that people could volunteer typing, marketing or other skills to help create people locator pages for Katrina victims.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media