Jeff Jarvis's Blog, page 63

Reboxing

So I reboxed the iPad so I can return it to Apple. As I say in the video, it's not out of dogmatism but because I simply don't see a good use for the machine and don't want to spend $500 on something I'm not going to use. As I also said on This Week in Google tonight, if killer apps come out, I could end up buying it again and I'll say so eating any necessary crow. But for now, it's going back…

What is content, then?

In the discussion about the iPad, much has been made of its nature as a content consumption — versus creation — device. I lament its limitations as a tool of creation. Howard Owens, speaking for many, tells me that most people don't want to create content.

But what's content?

We in media have a bad habit of viewing the world in our image. We think the internet is a medium (I say instead it's a place; this Cisco post says it is a language). We in media also think we get to define what content ...

Bill of Rights in Cyberspace, amended

I've amended my proposed Bill of Rights in Cyberspace thanks to a suggestion in the comments from Jeff Sonderman: All data are created equal. I made that all bits are created equal, which broadens it somewhat and is quite relevant today in the discussion of net neutrality that will explode because of an Appeals Court decision in Washington that told the FCC it did not have jurisdiction to tell Comcast to stop discriminating on bits.

Here's the rub: On the one hand, I do not want government...

Studying the web

At the end of this video from this year's Davos (at 2:30), Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposes the need to create an academic discipline — cutting across technology, psychology, anthropology, and other fields — to study and understand the web:

Now Rensellaer Polytechnic announces that it is creating the first undergraduate degree in web science. (I found out about through an email to my son, who was accepted there and is now deciding among the University of Rochester, NYU, George Washington...

iPad danger: app v. web, consumer v. creator

I tweeted earlier that after having slept with her (Ms. iPad), I woke up with morning-after regrets. She's sweet and pretty but shallow and vapid.

Cute line, appropriate for retweets. But as my hangover settles in, I realize that there's something much more basic and profound that worries me about the iPad — and not just the iPad but the architecture upon which it is built. I see danger in moving from the web to apps.

The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again...

Mobile=local

At the Brite conference, I talked about mobile coming to be synonymous with local. Here are a few paragraphs I wrote on the topic for an essay in a German book about the future of the net:

The biggest battlefield is local and mobile (I combine them because soon, local will mean simply wherever you are now). That's why Google is in the phone business and the mapping business and why it is working hard to let us search by speaking or even by taking pictures so we don't have to type while...

The hunt for the elusive influencer

Maybe there is no such thing as an influencer.

We keep hunting the elusive influencer because marketing people, especially, but also politicians (marketers in bad suits) and media people (marketers in denial) think that if they can find and convince or brainwash that one influencer, he or she will spread their word like Jesus and their work will be done. But I think this quest is starting to look like a snipe hunt.

At this week's very good Brite marketing conference at Columbia, Duncan...

Serendipity is unexpected relevance

Serendipity is not randomness. It is unexpected relevance.

I constantly hear the fear that serendipity is among the many things we're supposedly set to lose as news moves out of newsrooms and off print to online. Serendipity, says The New York Times, is lost in the digital age. Serendipity, it is said, is something we get from that story we happen upon as we flip pages, the story we never would have searched for but find only or best in print. Serendipity, it is also said, is the province...

Guardian column: Google is our ambassador

Here's my Guardian column this week on Google and China. See also this post proposing a Bill of Rights in Cyberspace.

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This year at Davos, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told a room of journalists that his company is not a country, does not set laws, and does not have a police force. Yet in its showdown with China, Google is acting as the ambassador for the internet. Well, somebody has to.

Next to no one has been willing to stand up to China's suppression of speech online. Other companies—

A Bill of Rights in Cyberspace

In my Media Guardian column this Monday, I will suggest that we need a Bill of Rights in Cyberspace as a set of amendments to John Perry Barlow's 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Note that I do not suggest the establishment a Constitution of the Internet; I think that would violate the tenets Barlow so eloquently if grandiosely sets forth. We don't need government in cyberspace; we need freedom.

This Bill of Rights attempts to establish the fundamental freedoms of our...