Global Culture

Erick Schonfeld writes in B2Day about a new tool that will leverage the culture of participation to showcase the best of each neighborhood around the world by paying freelance filmmakers to upload short videos.

TurnHere is truly a remarkable initiative in that it is not only set to become a popular destination on the web by taking advantage of the latest technologies, it proposes a viable business model and manages to make local cultures more relevant.

It will be interesting to see how this tool evolves from a place where producers can showcase their local communities to a research tool for those embarking in a journey across the globe. Some ideas on how to make this happen:

• allow filmmakers to submit videos in their original languages, opening the initiative for a far larger group of content producers.
• allow other users to act as “bridges”, either translating or tagging the content in a meaningful way
• allow for a folksonomy to emerge from common tags across videos. I’m sure people have their favourite markets in each city.