Jeff Jarvis's Blog, page 56

Content I will pay for: farts

"The internet needs you," I said to Howard Stern when I called into the show this morning as he was ranting about his contract negotiations with Sirius XM and the possibility that he could take his show and more to the net.

[image error]Do it, Howard.

"You made satellite radio," I told him. "You will make the internet." For Stern is the one media entity who can absolutely, positively get people to pay online — even me, the alleged opponent of all things paid. Today I pay $12 a month for Stern — more...

Regulating sex and speech

Let me start with a disclosure: I hope to think that Craig Newmark is a friend. He can be as hard for me to read as James Joyce or C++. But I know him as a decent and genuine man who believes that he is bringing a service to millions of people, saving them billions of dollars that used to go to overpriced, monopolistic middlemen. He doesn't do it to get rich (I've driven by his office and home and they ain't palaces), which is precisely what bedevils those old middlemen; I've watched them...

The birth of TBD?

Jim Brady, daddy of metro/hyperlocal startup TBD.com, sent me pictures Tim Windsor sent him from our summit on new business models for news at CUNY two years ago. In the session on the new newsroom, Jim got up and started sketching the structure and size — little knowing, as he said in testimony before the FTC a while ago, that he'd end up building it at TBD.com. Jim at the whiteboard:

The detail. Note the reference to a blog network of experts — which TBD wisely built.

For the history books. ...

Press as Facebook & Foursquare

As research for Public Parts, I've been reading Jay Rosen's doctoral dissertation about the creation of publics and the press. As in other research, I'm finding so many wonderful parallels between the changes in society caused by technology today and that which came earlier. Jay writes that "in 1784 William Bradford, a Philadelphia printer and the proprietor of the Merchants' Coffee-House, announced that his establishment would provide a new service":

To prevent the many disappointments that...

Want to join my entrepreneurial journalism class?

I have a little room in my entrepreneurial journalism class at CUNY.

I'd especially like a few under- or unemployed journalists looking to start businesses in the class to add to the mix of experience among the students. I've also had students from other schools in the past. Tuition is about $1k (sorry; I'm looking for scholarship money for various categories — such as unemployed, career-shifting, journalists and ethnic and community journalists — but don't have it yet).

In the class, you...

Wiki life

"Everyone brings their crumbs of knowledge to the task and if they don't, we're the lesser for it." I love that line about encouraging more people to bring more knowledge to Wikipedia, from a conversation yesterday with Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Gardner had just presented the results of a gargantuan, one-year-long strategy project made with about 1k Wikipedians in a few dozen languages producing 26k pages and a lot of good ideas, including expert review of a...

Publicness at SXSW

Please vote for my session at South by Southwest; I'd be most honored if you do. Here's the description:

In our current cultural obsession with privacy, we risk losing the benefits of publicness—of the connections the internet enables.

So, in a discussion, we will consider the value of publicness in our lives and communities, in transparent government, and in truly public companies. We will ask what privacy really means and examine its brief history (it was born out of fear of new...

The German paradox, continued

The hard-on Germany has for Street View gets more ironic and amusing by the day. @larsan sent me a link to German newspaper story that points to all the others who open up even more data than Google. As best as I can translate, that includes:

* Deutsche Telekom's online phone book let you search on someone and find an aerial view of the house from four angles and a view of the backyard — with, note well, personally identifiable information attached: name and phone number.

* The site

Transparent inventory & the rebirth/death of retail

The Times reports this morning on smart retailer Nordstrom making its inventory in warehouses and in stores transparent so a buyer who's dying for a purse can find it nearby (for immediate gratification), or from the warehouse (for convenience), or at the last store that has it (which will ship to her).

The earlier rendition of this was BestBuy or B&N making it possible for customers to find whether an individual store had an individual item via their web sites; that's not quite as easy as...

Internet, schminternet

I am baffled by the Google-Verizon agreement on nonnet-nonneutrality. I'm mostly baffled by why Google would put its name to this. What does it gain?

As I see it, the agreement makes two huge carve-outs to neutrality and regulation of the internet: mobile and anything new.

So ol, grandpa internet may chug along giving us YouTube videos of flaming cats, but you want to get that while you're out of your house? Well, that's the nonnet. I can hear the customer "service" rep explaining this to...