David Axe … is a 30-year-old freelance war correspondent. On Saturday, he'll be getting on a plane and flying to Chad, where refugees from the Darfur genocide in neighbouring Sudan have been streaming across the border. His reporting will wind up in a handful of major news outlets, as well as on his blog. And he'd like you to help pay for his trip.

"As attention gets diverted elsewhere, you have to scream a little bit louder," he tells me from Columbia, S.C. "So I'm just going to go and scream."

To get that scream out, Axe has partnered with an online news outlet called the Guerrilla News Network (guerrillanews.com) to try Web-based fundraising for his online reporting. The word for it these days is "crowdfunding." He's looking for $2,000 (U.S.) in donations to help offset the cost.

If these truly are the "creators of tomorrow," then the aesthetic of tomorrow is collaboration and open-source creativity. Nowhere is this clearer than in the work of Hanson, a noted author, filmmaker and "film futurist" whose latest project, A Swarm Of Angels, is a crowdfunded, open-source feature film that will be made collaboratively with an international community of online participants.

Many things are important factors, but funding from the 'crowd' is the base of which all else depends on and is built on. So, Crowdfunding is an accurate term to help me explain this core element of fundavlog.