Jeff Jarvis's Blog, page 60

Oversharing on oversharing

After reading Steven Johnson's wonderful essay on publicness, Mark Dery came to the conclusion that I should not talk about my cancer and my penis. He says I and so-called oversharers like me have a "disease of the psyche." He says we are "redrawing the boundaries of publicly acceptable behavior." That is to say, he doesn't deem it acceptable.

But in this, Dery reveals far more about himself than I reveal about me. All you know about me is that my penis doesn't work well. What we know about D...

On the media

A few radio appearances. First, on On the Media about AT&T killing its unlimited data plans:

And here's Peter Day's BBC World of Business show about travails of journalism:

AT&T's cynical act

AT&T's service sucks. Just listen to our most trusted newsman on the topic. But AT&T response to this core business problem is not to improve its service, to invest in better ways to handle more customers.

No, AT&T's response is to change its pricing to make us use its service less.

That's cynical. It's evil.

AT&T got rid of unlimited data (except for grandfathered accounts … else those changed accounts could all cancel without paying AT&T's just-increased cancellation fee). They paint it as ...

FTC protects journalism's past

The Federal Trade Commission has been nosing around how to save journalism and in its just-posted "staff discussion draft" on "potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism," it makes its bias clear: The FTC defines journalism as what newspapers do and aligns itself with protecting the old power structure of media.

If the FTC truly wanted to reinvent journalism, the agency would instead align itself with journalism's disruptors. But there's none of that here. The...

Google finally reveals AdSense cut: 68% on content

At last, Google is revealing its split on AdSense: 68% to publishers for content ads, 51% for search ads.

I had two primary complaints about Google in my otherwise admittedly and obviously wet-kiss book, What Would Google Do?: Google's policy aiding government censorship in China and its opacity on advertising relationships. The first is pretty much fixed and this morning, Google is addressing teh second. so is the second. (Uh-oh, now I have fewer excuses not to be a fanboy.)

At a press...

Google's AdSense cut

At last, Google is revealing its split on AdSense: 68% to publishers for content ads, 51% for search ads.

I had two primary complaints about Google in my otherwise admittedly and obviously wet-kiss book, What Would Google Do?: Google's policy aiding government censorship in China and its opacity on advertising relationships. The first is pretty much fixed and this morning, Google is addressing teh second. so is the second. (Uh-oh, now I have fewer excuses not to be a fanboy.)

At a press...

WWZD?

Zappos division 6pm.com screwed up and then manned up, making a mistake that capped all prices at $50 but honoring the sales and losing $1.6 million. The company blogged about it — apologizing, even — and then Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh tweeted about it. The king of customer service — whose book, Delivering Happiness, is coming out in only two weeks — set the bar high for screwing up publicly.

Next for media

Here's video of my talk to the Nordic Media Festival on what I think comes next in media:

Public Parts

That's the title of my next book about the end of privacy and the benefits of publicness. I'm delighted to tell you that I've just agreed to write it for HarperCollins, my publisher for What Would Google Do? , working again with my brilliant editor there, Ben Loehnen. It will come out, muses willing, next year.

In Public Parts, I'll argue, as I have here, that in our current privacy mania we are not talking enough about the value of publicness. If we default to private, we risk losing the...

Human in the throne?

In March, 2007, for a Guardian column, I asked the then-head of now-PM David Cameron's web strategy whether the man would continues making his personal, folksy videos if he moved into No. 10. Sam Roake replied: "If it suddenly stopped, that would be seen as a very cynical move . . . You can't stop communicating." This, he argued, is "a new stage of politics" that is about "sustained dialogue with the public."

We shall see.

The new No. 10 moved to new YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter addresses...