I handed over the reins of thestandard.com domain to my former colleagues this week.  I'm not sure what they plan to do with it now.  The brand may be worthless at this point, but no doubt there's a need for something similar to what that brand once stood for.

Now, I can't tell you how to re-launch a nearly dead media brand, but I can share a few things that I now know don't work:
1) mornings and weekends aren't enough.  reviving a brand is a full-time job.
2) volunteer participation must have rewards.  a big thanks to the 21 bloggers who contributed content for a week or so each, including Denise Howell, Doc Searls, Scott Rafer, Mark Glaser, JD Lasica, Rafat Ali, Thomas Goetz, Jimmy Guterman and Mike Butcher to name a few.  I wish I could have offered you all more than just another page on the web with your byline.
3) if $0 gets you a working web site with ok traffic, then anything > $0 should buy significant growth.  I should have pushed harder on getting my plan approved.

There were a few things attempted during this effort that I think made some sense, though.  Online media brands can serve an important role in framing up a conversation or defining the parameters of dialog.  With the onslaught of content out there, there's a lot of room for media brands to digest and present a nice package of important information for a particular audience segment.  I think I made a little progress toward that end by selecting the right kinds of bloggers and the right kinds of stories from a feed to offer a clear picture of the important stories in the Internet business each day.  The tagging and aggregation experiments and the explorations with del.icio.us and RSS could have then woven a more sophisticated view of the Internet business with some more time and focus.  With the addition of original content and some audience participation, this property would have been close to serving a very important role in the market it served.  It would have been a nice mix of news, commentary, aggregated information, and community-contributed services.

I wish somebody would launch a media brand that covered the Internet business for people in the Internet business.  I've bet my career on this industry, and it would be really nice if there was a brand that stood independently in the middle of it, reported on it with intelligence and depth and integrity, and helped facilitate dialog amongst us all.

Now, the game isn't entirely over for an Internet business media brand, as I left behind a few ideas for IDG to pursue if it so chooses.  And the InfoWorld technology group has some interesting ideas they spoke of exploring on the aggregation front. 

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who finds the Internet business fascinating.  Somebody, please, figure this out and make it happen.