For the past sev­eral months, while jug­gling the demands of client work, the con­fer­ence cir­cuit and writ­ing projects, I’ve also been hard at work plan­ning and build­ing out an impor­tant new site.

So I’m happy to announce the launch of Socialbrite.org.

While Socialmedia.biz remains focused on explor­ing the fast-changing medi­a­s­phere and help­ing busi­nesses suc­cess­fully add social media to their inter­nal and exter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Socialbrite has a dif­fer­ent mission:

To pro­vide a learn­ing hub and shar­ing com­mu­nity around all forms of social media, and to work with non­prof­its and social change orga­ni­za­tions to help them har­ness the power of the social Web.

Here are our key announce­ments about the launch:

• Intro­duc­ing Socialbrite: Why we’re here
• Non­prof­its get a social media men­tor in Socialbrite.org
• And this is how we’re get­ting out the word: Tweet our launch!

Scott Butki of Newsvine just pub­lished a Q&A with me — J.D. Lasica on his new joint web ven­ture Socialbrite.org — at Newsvine’s Good News Wednes­day group, and because I haven’t given many inter­views lately I thought I’d pub­lish an excerpt from it here:

Scott: What niche is this filling?

JD: Look, it’s not about niches. The whole world seems to be hurl­ing head­long into a world of nicheifi­ca­tion and frag­men­ta­tion. We’re say­ing some­thing else.

Non­prof­its, cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists and cause orga­ni­za­tions have a lot of things in com­mon, but we’re not talk­ing with each other. We’re hun­kered down in our silos, our bunkers. But we’re in a new world now where we’re all mak­ing media, we’re all con­nect­ing with each other to share sto­ries and ideas, and we need to get acquainted with this new landscape.

It’s hap­pen­ing slowly, but the evi­dence is clear: Tra­di­tional media is giv­ing way to social media, and that has impor­tant ram­i­fi­ca­tions for all kinds of orga­ni­za­tions and pri­vate and pub­lic institutions.

What sites might be hurt by your site’s start?

Our goal is not to dis­place any­one. Our mis­sion is to add to the media ecosys­tem, one Lego piece at a time, until we can stand back and say, Wow. Isn’t that something?

Net­squared and Tech­Soup are the big names in the non­profit tech space, but we’re strictly focused more on social media and social tools. Right now Mash­able is the site cov­er­ing this area the best. I admire the hell out of them. Mash­able rebranded itself ear­lier this year as “The Social Media Guide,” and that filled a gap in the mar­ket. We hope to work with them in shar­ing con­tent and spon­sor­ing fundrais­ers and events that sup­port social causes.

When hun­dreds of more news­pa­pers and print mag­a­zines go out of busi­ness, we think we’ll still be here, because we’re not count­ing on huge read­er­ship and adver­tis­ing dol­lars to keep us afloat. We’re count­ing on our skills and relationships.

Is this site intended to help peo­ple, or groups or both?

Def­i­nitely both. While a lot of Socialbrite.org’s busi­ness will come from non­prof­its and social change orga­ni­za­tions that want to fig­ure out how to nav­i­gate this new ter­rain, the fact is that we’re all in this together. And most of the really amaz­ing advances in Web 2.0 and social media have come from indi­vid­u­als, not organizations.

Just tak­ing your cam­era or video-enabled cell phone into a street scene, upload­ing to a media shar­ing site, report­ing on what’s hap­pen­ing on the ground in Bagh­dad while armed goon squads descend on your friends and neigh­bors — damn, that’s where the next-gen Pulitzers should be given out.

I think non­prof­its and foun­da­tions as a group tend to be con­ser­v­a­tive in nature, so we’re speak­ing to the thought lead­ers and early adopters who under­stand the dra­matic changes we’re going through as a soci­ety and are will­ing to embrace the shift to a more demo­c­ra­tic, decen­tral­ized, edges-based media reality.

That’s one rea­son we built the site on the open-source Word­Press plat­form and all of our con­tent is released under Cre­ative Com­mons licenses. We trust the blo­gos­phere and Twit­ter­verse to make use of these edu­ca­tional resources as they see fit.

- End of excerpt. See the rest of the inter­view on the Newsvine site. -

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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