Save Brijit
Jeremy Brosowsky, a tremendously creative entrepreneur, launched Brijit a few months back to great fanfare. Now Brijit is struggling to survive. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb eloquently explained why this Brijit was so appealing. I remember being very impressed by Jeremy when I met him, and nervous about how he would find enough people to write abstracts for the site. But as it turns out finding abstracts wasn’t the problem — a flourishing community developed around Brijit, and $5 was more than enough to incentivize some very incisive micro-form writing. The trouble was raising a second round of financing. Brijit is now trying to get back on its feet without the cash incentive. My sense is that the cash incentive was never essential to Brijit’s core concept, and we’ll see if Brijit can somehow get back on its feet without some deus ex machina.
I’d personally love to see some tool that integrated Instapaper with Brijit and with Twine. Some mammothly intelligent computer would index and summarize long-form content. For some slice of the content, humans would enter the picture — to maintain integrity, to control quality. When you save a particular article to read later, a la Instapaper, you would also generate an “executive summary.”
But this is obviously not possible right now. At the moment, Twine sucks.
My guess, by the way, is that Jeremy Brosowsky’s next venture will be a hit. Unlike most in the media business, he has tremendous optimism about the future of intellectual life. I’d love to see what he could do if he joined forces with, for example, Upendra Shardanand of Daylife or some other technology-driven enterprise.
I’ve never used Brijit, but I think it’s actually more valuable without the cash incentive than with. No cash means users will write for reputation, which will create a community around the site, which is what makes web startups valuable.
More thoughts on this on my blog.
— PEG · May 27, 07:39 PM · #
Thanks, Reihan. A quick thought here:
http://brijit.wordpress.com/2008/05/28/brijit-on-the-american-scene/
Best,
Jeremy
Jeremy Brosowsky
founder, Brijit
— JeremyB · May 28, 12:26 PM · #
I also wrote about the story – from the starting till the wrap up of the site. But, I personally believe that they should have have closed the site. Instead, they could have started the way you say, “grow a community so that people will write for reputation..”
http://bonchibuji.blogspot.com/2008/05/brijit-story-of-dead-startup.html
— bonchibuji · May 29, 03:48 AM · #
You have no idea the time it takes to write good abstracts. I feel that freelance writers should be paid for their time and effort. I spent a great deal of time writing for Brijit, and giving them my best possible work. The competition was strong, but they were a great company to write for. The communication was wonderful, and the pay adequate, though very necessary, to keep the motivation going, in my opinion. I write because I enjoy it immensely, but also because I need some extra cash. There is no shame in that. We were giving a tremendous amount of time to Brijit, reading articles, watching video, and listening to audio programs. Then we were required to compete and write the best abstract possible. This took a great deal of work. When our abstract was not chosen, we forfeited all that time-(except I always said that I was getting the equivalent of a college education from what I was learning.) I love Brijit and the staff, but I believe the pay incentive is important.
— Lonnette · Jun 2, 02:14 AM · #