All posts tagged ‘Jeff Jarvis’
by Jeff Jarvis, Blogger, BuzzMachine
When I saw Edward Roussel, head of digital for the Telegraph, on my last trip to London, he said over breakfast that he’d been thinking about my book title’s question—”What Would Google Do?”—in relation to newspapers and he came up with a radical notion:
What if newspapers handed over much of their work to Google? Edward reasoned that Google already is the key distributor online. He said that Google is great at technology and newspapers aren’t, and for the future, where are the best technologists going to go? Google. Google is also brilliant at selling ads, and Edward even wondered where the best sales talent would go in the future: there or to a newspaper? So why not hand over those segments of the business to Google and concentrate on what a newspaper should do: journalism?
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by Jeff Jarvis, Blogger, BuzzMachine
One problem I’ve had with much discussion about the future of news lately is that it’s too press-centric. It focuses on the press as if it were at the center of the world, as if it owned news, as if news depended on it, as if solving the press’s problems solves news. That’s not the ecosystem of news now. There’s a fundamentally new structure to media, and there are many different ways to look at it. And until we realize that, I don’t think we’ll begin to create successful new models for news. So pardon my simplistic drawings, but here’s an attempt to begin to illustrate that new ecosystem of news and media.
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by Jeff Jarvis, Blogger, BuzzMachine
The biggest news of the week–well, besides the governor-erect (hat tip to the New York Post)–was not AOL’s purchase of Bebo or Yahoo’s embrace of the semantic Web (about which I remain skeptical) or certainly Lacygate. No, the biggest, most game-changing news went by without a great deal of notice, and that was Google’s announcement of a free ad-serving platform.
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by Jeff Jarvis, Blogger, BuzzMachine
Poor Bebo. I feel for the residents of their hip and convivial apartment block. It has just been bought by a slumlord.
AOL–which is paying $850 million for the social-networking site, the other Facebook–is where innovations go to die. Remember Netscape? Bought for $4.2 billion and now dead. AOL bought a mess of advertising platforms–Advertising.com, Quigo, Tacoda–and can’t make them to get along.
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by Jeff Jarvis, Blogger, BuzzMachine
When I first used the microblogging platform Twitter–which enables users to publish 140-character-long messages via the Web and mobile phones–I thought it was silly. Or rather, the uses to which it was being put were silly: people announcing that they’d just woken up or what they’d had for breakfast. I couldn’t have cared less. But then I should confess that when I first used blogs and podcasts, I didn’t fully comprehend their impact either. So, when my son and Webmaster told me I should take another stab at Twitter, I did. And I now see it is an important evolutionary step in the rise of blogging.
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by Jeff Jarvis, Blogger, BuzzMachine
There’s nothing new at all in today’s New York Times story about the failing newspaper industry. It’s a basic roundup with a few more depressing quotes from the likes of Brian Tierney, who surely must regret his purchase of the Philadelphia Inquirer now.
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by Jeff Jarvis, Blogger, BuzzMachine
Yahoo, I’ve long argued, is the last old media company, for it operates on the old-media model: It owns or controls content, markets to bring audience in, then bombards us with ads until we leave. Contrast that with Google, which comes to us with its ads and content and tools, all of which I can distribute on my blog. Yahoo, like media before it, is centralized. Google is distributed.
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by Jeff Jarvis, Contributor, The Guardian; Blogger, BuzzMachine
We natter on these days about how people are becoming social online. But we have always been social; the Internet merely provides more ways for us to connect with each other. What’s truly new is the opportunity for companies, especially media companies, to be social.
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by Jeff Jarvis, Blogger, BuzzMachine
I never cease to be amazed anew at how cable companies think it is their job to make their customers’ lives difficult.
I challenge any cable executive to publicly go through the experience of being a customer at their own companies and tell me straight-faced that it’s pleasant and efficient and worth the money and effort.
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by Jeff Jarvis, Blogger, BuzzMachine
Polls are as discredited as they should be. So I’m thinking about writing my Guardian column next week about all the new metrics we have to take the pulse of the nation on the Internet. Please help me out with numbers you follow.
None of these is representative or certainly scientific. And many of them can be manipulated–which is just the point of them; they put metrics in the hands of movements that use them to make themselves known: witness Ron Paul’s devoted cult and how they played YouTube like an organ. I speculated after Iowa that one reason for Obama’s success there was the campaign’s ability to organize a critical mass of young supporters in the social services.
The new Internet campaign metrics also let us sense trends that aren’t so manipulable, if we know where to look.
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by Jeff Jarvis, Blogger, BuzzMachine
What if a plane flight were networked and became a social experience with its own economy?
For part of a book I’m finally starting to work on, I’ve been thinking about how companies and industries can be remade with Googlethink and social smarts (note how I’m not saying Web 2.0). It’s harder to re-imagine some than others. The benefits of tearing apart and rebuilding cable companies are obvious. But I just about gave up on airlines, dooming them to their status as the new buses. What can one do with such a commodity service, and one that has deteriorated so badly?
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