Jeff Jarvis's Blog, page 62

Two dinosaurs fighting over a dodo bird

David Carr has a characteristically wry-on-rye view of the Wall Street Journal's launch of a New York edition today and the newspaper war that supposedly ensues.

We're supposed to celebrate newspaper wars. Good ol' days, remember? But I think this one could be deadly.

These two former giants are fighting over a shrinking pie with no filling. The Times is third in the New York area — much of that in the tri-state suburbs — with 406k daily circulation. The Journal has 294k in the same region...

Murdoch: The Dirty Dumper

Rupert Murdoch, known as the Dirty Digger, is more like the Dirty Dumper as he drops ad prices in New York (and he's known for dropping cover prices in London) — because he apparently doesn't really give a damn about making money with his newspapers, he cares about influence and killing his ideological enemies. The New York Times vows not to drop to his level — and rates — as Murdoch starts his New York would-be Times killer. We'll see. Keep that in mind when you hear about Murdoch pushing...

Bizarro identity

I'm still trying to get my head around Facebook's moves to become the king of identity online. Hell, if Leo Laporte couldn't quite figure it out on yesterday's taping of This Week in Google, then I'm not capable. But here's where I am. Help me advance this….

I think my problem is this: I want the exact opposite of what Facebook did. I want the Bizarro Facebook. Instead of Facebook controlling my identity, I want to be able to control and publish and set access to and rules for the use of my i...

Privacy, publicness & penises

Here is video of the talk I gave at re:publica 2010 in Berlin on The German Paradox: Privacy, publicness, and penises. (Don't be frightened by the first moments in German; it's just an introduction and a joke — with fire extinguisher — about how I had threatened to Hendrix my iPad on the stage in Berlin.)

My subject is all the more relevant given this week's letter to Google with privacy czars in a handful of countries trying to argue that Google Streetview taking pictures in public violates p...

After comments

Here's my talk to Jeff Pulver's 140Conf today on comments and interactivity, in which I argue that comments are an insult because they come only after media think they're done creating a product, which they then allow the public to react to.

I defended comments on news sites for many years. But I think we have to move past them to true collaboration, which is more respectful and productive. There is no easy solution for civility, not identity or rating systems.

By coincidence, this appears...

This is bullshit: My TEDxNYED talk

Here is video of my TEDxNYED lecture about lectures as an outmoded form of education and news, in which I tweak TED.

Here are my notes (which won't match my talk exactly). All the videos are now up at the TEDxNYED site.

From a cloud to the cloud: How ash kills airmail

The ash cloud over Europe will kill airmail and with it paper documents around the world. It will hasten the decline and death of postal delivery that I foresaw here. It will have an equally profound and permanent impact on other sectors of the economy and society. But let's just look at the post office.

Right now, it is impossible to get a document to or around Europe with speed. People can't fly. Mail can't fly. Even when the air clears, there'll be diminished faith in the ability of the...

The cloud crisis

The ash cloud is on my mind more than yours, I'll bet, because I outran it and because I'm concerned for my friends at re:publica and elsewhere who are still trying to get home by tortured combinations of planes, trains, and automobiles (and boats). It's a big deal, a profound crisis with profound implications.

But I don't see government, the airline industry, and media responding that way. They can't see past their noses and the ashes right ahead of them.

In media, I've seen next to no...

Ashes and zen: My volcanic story

I lucked out. I was almost stuck (if that's the right verb) in Europe under its cloud of Icelandic ash. But thanks to the help of many strangers and much good fortune and speed, I made it out on one of the last flights from Germany before all its airports were shut down.

I was at the re:publica conference this week giving a talk on publicness and privacy (and penises … more on that when the video is available) and was scheduled to leave Friday morning, before it ended.

Last night, friends...

News(paper) in the cloud

I think it's possible today to run a news organization — up to the point of publishing — from the cloud, changing not only the production process of news but also its culture. John Paton, CEO of Journal Register, is about to prove it with his Ben Franklin Project.

John and I were sitting in my CUNY office as he told me about the technology he's saddled with at this orphaned newspaper company where he just took the helm. He used a term I swear I hadn't heard in well more than a decade: "VDT." T...