"The greatest thing about the Net is that it's anything goes," says Scott Kurnit, the CEO of The Mining Company. "That's also its biggest problem."
Starting Monday, Kurnit will attempt to reinvent the way people surf for infotainment with the launch of his free Web-based service, employing nearly 1,000 international "guides" to create a human-filtered network of special-interest links, feature stories, and chat events.
The guides have established 13 central content areas, like Arts/Entertainment, Business, Sports, and Travel. A quick drill down takes users to pages with their own domain names (such as skiing.miningco.com), organized by particular interest, that are built, monitored, and updated by the guides. There will be about 500 interest pages prepared for Monday's launch.
A search on "toadstools" on The Mining Company will point to a page by the resident mycophile, and from there, visitors can surf onward to a live fauna chat, a weekly column, and a host of dependable links and a friendly adviser. "I want [the guide] to say, 'Go here, we have a good relationship. Trust me, this is good,'" Kurnit says. Guides produce a feature section and newsletter for their site, for which they retain the copyright. Kurnit's company owns the rest.
Since February, the company has been soliciting guides through newsgroups and an aggressive email campaign. Guides must apply to get into a two-week boot camp, called MiningPrep, that trains them how to create and maintain their Mining Company sites.
Guides are assigned to virtual classes of 20 students. With guides in Tokyo and Australia, and Europe, the orientation is run entirely on the Net, with chats, bulletin boards, and an email mentoring program. Each guide is assigned a personal instructor, with whom they correspond twice a week. Upon graduation, the guide receives his or her only nonvirtual delivery - a Mining Company welcome basket, complete with some your-name-here business cards, and letterhead stationery.
The guides work for US$250 per month for at least 10 hours of Web work each week, but that figure can rise considerably if the guide's site takes off. The real rewards for guides are not monetary. "Some of the motivation is ego," says Paula Eisenberg, who became a skiing guide after a Mining Company representative contacted her through her Paula's Ski Lovers personal homepage. "It's an honor to be asked to do this," she says. "It's the kind of thing I'm already doing anyway."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
