Mathew Ingram writes:

For journalists who are also into new technology, Jarrod Dicker has a pretty compelling CV: He was the head of product management at Huffington Post, director of digital products at Time Inc., helped run operations at online-publishing startup RebelMouse, and ran a digital-research lab at The Washington Post. With a career like that, lots of people in media pay attention when Dicker calls something interesting, and so many heads turned when he said he was leaving the Post for a blockchain startup called Po.et.

For many people, “blockchain” is just the latest buzzword to infect internet-focused discussion and, more recently, media futurism. There’s no question the topic is surrounded by almost unprecedented levels of hype, in part because it provides the foundation for crypto-currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which have ballooned in value over the past year due to what many see as speculative hysteria.

That isn’t why Dicker is interested in it, however. Much like Civil, a blockchain-based media platform that wants to use the technology for journalism, Dicker sees Po.et as a way of using blockchain to empower individual content creators—not just journalists or news organizations, but anyone who creates words or images or music or video for almost any purpose, including advertisers and brands. In effect, he says Po.et is trying to build an open-source, blockchain-based licensing system for content. [Continue reading…]

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