Bringing all the tools of the intertubes into play, NYU journo prof and social capitalist Jay Rosen presents yet another beta:

Oddly enough for a fellow teaching at a school best remembered as the fall back school for kids from New York who didn’t get into their fall back school, Jay has raised a healthy sum to spend on his beta effort. He says,

We need $1.5 million over two years; we’ve raised about $450,000 of that. Take a look at who’s supporting us— MacArthur Foundation, Craig Newmark, Reuters among them. Do contact me if you can assist.

Meanwhile, on another planet, a similar collaborative effort is spreading its wings… Bob’s Yer Uncle. Perhaps a bit less organized, and certainly less boring, the Avunculists selected the free version of WordPress.com to launch their effort. Rosen’s Zeroids are flogging away with Drupal.

The Avunculists do it for love. The Zeroids do it for money.

The Avunculists seem to be boogie boarding in the general direction of millennial dada. Rosen’s effort has already degenerated to mere wikilalia. Built on a neologism seeking a meme, Assignment Zero is a threshing floor for last year’s pop cultural insights. Contrast any of the Zeroids’ journo-mob efforts with this insightful posting on “Interent [sick] Entrepreneurship 101″ by the Avunculists.

The Zeroids will undoubtedly produce lavish copy, exploring some of the less important stories of our time and keeping the funding flowing. The Avunculists will likely careen into the future, either to crash and burn or to jump the track and head off in new directions. The world needs the likes of Jay Rosen, but more it needs art and literature, truth and beauty and graphic representations of horrible reality and bats with baby faces in the violet light whistling and beating their wings and crawling head downward down a blackened wall…