Mitch Ratcliffe

For more than 15 years I have chronicled and participated in the development of the Internet. I spent my early days on The W.E.L.L. In the 1990s, I was covering networking, privacy and cryptography for MacWEEK, and was the editor of Digital Media, the first publication to really explain how the Internet would really work (we were right, and the evidence is on this site). By 1996, I'd launched Internet/Media Strategiesand was starting and investing in companies for SoftBank, consulting to leaders like America Online, Audible, EarthWeb, Time Warner, Personify, and many others. ZD Net brought me on to lead their Year 2000 coverage for the two years leading up to Y2K, a time when I made many enemies, though my only fault seems to have been being virtually dead-on in predicting the actual scope of the computer problems that occurred.

In 1999, I took on the content development for ON24, the financial news network-where I co-authored the business plans and built the editorial and content teams from their launch. I left in 2001, when I/MS partnered with The Petkevich Group, a San Francisco merchant bank focusing on healthcare and information technology to launch a research publishing effort. Talk about bad timing.

Today, I am editorial director of InnovationWORLD, a leading source of information and analysis about companies expanding globally. Additionally, I've helped to launch Correspondence.org, a civic journalism site where people write the news as they experience it and talk about the solutions to social and political issues in the world today. I'm writing a book about new democratic organizational models and doing some consulting, as well.

Peter Shaplen and I produce video and other rich media programming. For more information, contact me.

You'll also find links to previously published articles and columns that are still available on the Web (it's surprising how little content survives over even a few years in this medium).