In Los Angeles for Siggraph, where I'm chairing a panel with Kathy Rae
Huffman (pop~TARTS), Armin Medosch (Telepolis), Lev Manovich (UCSD) and
Gary Wolf (Hotwired) called "community/content/interface: creative
online journalism." It's 100 degrees in the shade outside the convention
center.

One topic that's bound to come up is the problem of funding. How do
projects like RHIZOME and Telepolis generate the revenues necessary to
survive?

Initially, the plan at RHIZOME INTERNET was to sell ads. We tried to
argue that the RHIZOME community was a "focused global niche of opinion
leaders and purchase decision makers," but the ad buyers weren't
convinced. Nobody wanted to buy space on a platform that reaches a few
thousand esoteric eyeballs.

So we looked for another model, and found it in the photo stock library.
Like the RHIZOME CONTENTBASE, StockObjects is an online database of
community generated content. Like a photo stock library, it contains
things that commercial designers, advertisers and publishers are ready
to buy.

StockObjects makes sense as a business. Not only does it support
RHIZOME, it also provides a valuable alternative source of revenue for
the community RHIZOME serves. StockObjects is about creating a market
for the work that we do, both in the studio and on the job. It's about
finding a way to pay the rent in a world that is reluctant to pay for
art.

We hope you'll support RHIZOME by submitting your images, animations,
Shockwaves, 3D models, QTVR movies and Java applets to
http://www.stockobjects.com. Not only will you make money when we sell
your work, you'll also help ensure that RHIZOME survives as a platform
for community and communication in the field of new media art.