Tangent Thought Gallery

Welcome back “The Industry Standard”

Don’t know how many industry/trade magazines I’ve subscribed to over the years. There are some I definitely pick up and read or scan regularly and then there are the others that I wish did not have my contact info. There’s yet another category that can evoke varying emotions among us—those no longer in publication.

Among that last group there are a small subset that I miss; those which were stellar in their markets (e.g., “Business 2.0”, which bit the dust in October just last year), had consistently great article/authors, excelled at segment coverage, or maybe I just liked the way they made me think. The Industry Standard was one such mag; it did a phenomenal job of covering online business. Liked it so much I kept the final issue as a memento when it ceased publication some years back.

I was really pleased to get an email this week that the pub was back online as a beta. Here’s the mag’s elevator pitch:

“The Industry Standard features news and analysis that covers emerging technologies and companies, venture funding, acquisitions, site launches, and other developments in the internet space. Additionally, The Standard aggregates community knowledge in a quantified fashion, thereby ranking both the knowledge of the individual community members themselves, as well as the value of the information the community provides as a whole. This system is built as a prediction market, intersected with a reputation-based social network.”

So it looks like the new, web 2.0 incarnation will build more on the strength of its readership. It’s not the first community based prediction engine out there, but, if the caliber of readership is like it used to be, it has potential to be one of the best. This could be good.

http://www.theindustrystandard.com/