From: listown@mail.gnn.com Sender: gnn-announce@mail.gnn.com Reply-to: listown@mail.gnn.com To: gnn-announce@mail.gnn.com (Multiple recipients of list) A Letter to Our Subscribers By now, many of you may have heard that we recently made a decision to sell GNN to America Online's Internet Services Company, and to form a new company in partnership with them, called Songline Studios, that will be a creative studio for the design and development of innovative online applications, inventing new forms as well as developing original content on the Internet. As you can imagine, this was a momentous decision for us. We are very proud of what we've created in GNN; we feel it is one of the pre-eminent online guides to what's up on the Internet, and a prototype for a kind of navigational framework that will become increasingly important as the number of servers on the Internet continues to grow. At the same time, we came to feel that in order to really do justice to the information problem GNN was created to solve, GNN would have to be scaled up beyond our ability to fund it on our own. With many large players entering the Internet information services market, the best way to keep our lead was to team up with one of them. We talked with a lot of possible partners. Why did we choose AOL? At bottom, many of the large players are entering the Internet market reluctantly, for fear that if they don't move, they'll get left behind. At worst, they are trying to "co opt" the Internet enthusiasm and divert it into a proprietary service that they can control. In our estimation, AOL shares our enthusiasm for the truly amazing possibilities represented by the Internet. They are eager to continue the work we began with GNN, of creating businesses and business models that don't try to control or limit the freewheeling nature of the Internet, but instead build on it. We're very excited about the possibilities going forward. We'll be creating new online publications that will be hosted within the GNN framework, as well as on other Internet services. We believe that we'll be able to make these new publications even more widely accessible and useful because of AOL's ability to fund a broader online publishing infrastructure that hosts not only our new publications but those of many other new Internet publishers. And that, in essence, has been the GNN dream all along. Tim O'Reilly and the GNN team
Tim and the GNN Team: As a relative newbie to the Web, and also one who is now staking out his own piece of territory on the Web, I have mixed feelings about your new association. I can see that you could not refuse the infusion of capital into your organization. I also understand that the major players are trying to gain large chunks of the Web in the competitive spirit. However, what is occurring on the 'net is contrary to the freedom of expression. First, large corporations move into an area of enterprise. What follows is lobbying by those same corporations in D.C. to pass legislation to control that area of enterprise. Who loses? You and me. I have admired your organization, a small company who has done quite well with your quality services and products, and I hope you do well in your new enterprises. But every once in a while take a good, hard look at who you just crawled into bed with. Tom Most (within spittin' distance of Sebastapol) Sonoma County Online: http://www.wco.com/~themost/
