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.