Jeff Jarvis's Blog, page 57

Bad things could happen

Farhad Manjoo New York Times review of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus relies on the argument I hear a lot in privacy circles: Bad things could happen.

Shirky imagines what good things people could do if they watched less TV and created more stuff together (2,000 Wikipedias bloom). Manjoo yes-buts him:

Nearly every one of his examples of online collectivism is positive; everyone here seems to be using the Internet to do such good things.

Yet it seems obvious that not everything — and perhaps n...

Welcome, TBD.com

Listening in to most of TBD.com's press preview today, I was kvelling like a proud uncle. I'm so delighted to see Jim Brady and company create so many of the things I've wishing for in journalism. Ken Doctor beat me to a great list of many of those things.

What makes me happiest is that it recognizes that it's part of an ecosystem and a network and it benefits the more it helps the members of that cloud succeed.

It is for-profit. If journalism isn't profitable, it's sunk. So that is God's...

The price of privacy

I love it when economists and their ilk reduce a complicated issue in life to a simple line and chart (that's what makes Freakonomics so popular). At the latest New York Tech Meetup, Drop.io founder Sam Lessin did just that with my favorite topic: privacy and publicness. In a rebuttal to Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus he said:

"Privacy was once free. Publicity was once ridiculously expensive.

"Now the opposite is true: You have to pay in a mix of cash, time, social capital, etc. if you want...

Evil?

The report that Google is making a devil's pact with Verizon for tiered internet service is disturbing because I wonder whether people inside Google are still asking that vital question: "Is this evil?" I wonder whether Google is still Google.

I don't mean to come off like a high priest of the net neutrality church. But if ISPs like Verizon can charge tiered pricing for quality (vs. unquality?) service, then it's the consumers who'll get screwed because costs will be passed onto us. ISPs...

Whither magazines?

Three people I respect a great deal now lead the big magazine companies: David Carey (ex Condé) at Hearst, Bob Sauerberg at Condé, and now Jack Griffin at Time Inc. — and I'll add Justin Smith at Atlantic.

It's a big challenge to head a magazine company these days (witness the sales of Newsweek and TV Guide for a buck each). Circulation is plummeting; costs are soaring; advertising competition is killing.

But I still say that magazines have unique value in media as the centers of communities ...

Privacy paranoia dramatized

The German Consumers' Union—funded by the German government—has put out a video warning internet users about their privacy under a campaign called Surfers Have Rights. You don't need to speak a word of German to get the gist:

(At the end, the text says: "You do this every day … on the internet." And the shopper is asking simply, "Excuse me, where do I find…? The store clerk needs no translation.)

The German blog Netzpolitik thinks it's a nice video. But Martin Weigert at Netzwertig has real...

Cookie Madness!

I just don't understand Julia Angwin's scare story about cookies and ad targeting in the Wall Street Journal. That is, I don't understand how the journal could be so breathlessly naive, unsophisticated, and anachronistic about the basics of the modern media business. It is the Reefer Madness of the digital age: Oh my God, Mabel, they're watching us!

If I were a conspiracy theorist — and I'm not, because I've found the world is rarely organized enough to conspire (and I found this to be...

Crowdsource government work

One way to reset the relationship of government and the public — from constant complaint — is to make it collaborative — thus constructive.

In my pollyanna way, I imagine a day when citizens could take over some tasks of government to save money and do them better. How about this as a small pilot:

Politico reports today that Rupert Murdoch wants to charge the White House $600,000 a year for access to news clips. The White House now pays $100,000 a year to a clipping service and News Corp. want ...

Value-added journalism

I asked Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, whether his paper should have started Wikileaks. I wondered whether the Guardian was looking at WIkileaks the way it looked at HuffPo when it started (that is, 'darn, we should have thought of that, so we will' … and it started CommentIsFree). Is Wikileaks a tool for investigative journalism? Or is it better for Wikileaks to be separate? Would being associated with a news organization subject it to different standards of verification a...

What if there are no secrets?

Is no secret safe?

That's the moral to the Wikileaks war log story: you never know what might be leaked. Of course, that itself is nothing new: Whenever we reveal information to even one person, we risk it being spread. The ethic of confidentiality (and privacy) rests with the recipient of that information.

So what's new now? There are more means to get information since it is pooled and digital. There are more means to share information; Daniel Ellsberg had to go through media to spread his P...