John Coate

Summary

Website: http://johncoate.com Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coate As Marketing Director and Conferencing Manager of the WELL for its first six years (1986-1991), I was instrumental in creating the online community that Wired! magazine called, "the world's most influential."​ In this role I was the first of what is now called an 'online community manager.'​ In 1994 The WELL received the EFF Pioneer Award that came with this statement, "Although many commercial systems are far larger, the WELL is the fulfillment of the vision that Turoff and Hiltz articulated in “The Network Nation... the WELL continues to be the most influential example of "virtual community."(Cliff) igallo, together with John Coate, is commonly regarded as a chief architect of the WELL's implementation of virtual community." I co-founded and managed SF Gate (sfgate.com) from January 1995 through January 2001. Owned by the San Francisco Chronicle, it was the first big city news website in the world. While there, my crew and I pioneered a number of innovations, many of which are now standard features at most news web sites. We used existing material from the Chronicle, Examiner, KRON TV, AP and other places, and we had our own news and editorial staff creating original material for the web. I was the GM of KZYX radio in Mendocino County and the Executive Director of Mendocino County Public Broadcasting from 2008 until mid-2015. KZYX is listener-supported public radio. It serves a wide geographic area that is quite rural. When I arrived the station was mired in debt. Most of that debt is paid off and the station is better than it ever was with a strong local news team, an iOS app with streaming archives, high quality programs both old and new, and a well-functioning business office. I was on the cover of the May 1997 issue of Wired!. I'm the one on the left. The others are Larry Brilliant, Stewart Brand and Cliff Figallo. I am prominent in Howard Rheingold's classic, The Virtual Community. I am profiled (with a full page picture of Cliff and me) in Fred Turner's 2006 book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. 2022: I am featured prominently in the Cyberspace chapter of The Quiet Before: the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas by Gal Beckerman. In a review of the book in The Economist I was called the "godfather of social media." 2002-3: Development Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org). 2004-5: Set up the US version of Habbo Hotel - an online virtual world for teens, owned by Sulake, a Finnish Company.