Many people have applauded the launch of the Corante Hubs, with some asking what our business model looks like.

Here is an attempt at demystifying that question without being overly committed to the answer - as we have embarked on a "sense and response" strategy that does not just involve ourselves but also our contributors and our readers. At the risk of sounding too theoretical, in many ways what we're trying to do is to push the envelope in search of the next generation publishing model that might be a better fit for this new social medium - and we are co-developing that model with the market.

Our first and most important goal is to provide value to our readers. By teaming up with the Corante Network of expert contributors and by enhancing their writings, opinions, or other content at the hub level with both technology components and add-on editorialized content - which acts as a second layer of human "filtering" - we feel like we can provide a truly rich topic-specific destination for our readers, the innovators and early adopters in their space.

Our second important goal: to provide value to our contributors. And by doing that, we further enhance the value that we deliver to our readers - making for a nice "increasing returns" relationship between Corante, our readers and our contributors. Two of the services that fall into that category - and which are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we're planning on doing - are the Corante Symposia and the Corante Seminars.

Corante Symposia are face-to-face events that are being put together in partnership with our contributors. The first one - the Symposium on Social Architecture, produced in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, as a great success (as well as a super learning experience). In the planning pipeline we have Symposia on Marketing, Media, Future of Software and many others. The idea is to create opportunities for our audiences and our contributors to meet face-to-face in the context of topic-specific discussions that are a few steps ahead of where you might find the discussion at more traditional events. Those events also produce a wealth of new insights and intelligence that will find their way back to the hubs and the network and may be packaged in other forms.

The Corante Seminars - which are planned for launch early next year - enable some of the Corante contributors to deliver high quality workshops, seminars and training sessions to our audiences online and on a semi-regular basis. Again - this will result in a symbiotic relationship between readers and contributors that will eventually benefit everyone.

The business model for this part of our business? It's a bit like politics: if we can create that many touch-points between market innovators and influencers and those following them across that many different channels, that has a a lot of value to companies trying to reach the and develop relationships with audience in an age of severe attention scarcity.

Oh - and did we mention that we're not averse to embracing those aspects of the traditional publishing models that work? We'll of course be selling ad placement on Corante.com but also on the hundreds of blogs with which we'll eventually partner and believe that to be a very compelling value proposition to marketers looking to get premium placement in front of an extremely engaged, influential, affluent audience. In that vein, we'll be continuing the work Corante has done to date in helping marketers to understand this new landscape and be working with them to fashion packages and messages that provide maximum impact across our blogs, hubs, and partner sites but also our events, seminars, and other info-products.

Let us know what you think...we're interested in your feedback!

- The Corante Team!

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