Jeff Jarvis Explains It All!

At long last, here is that Jeff Jarvis lecture in the spirit of TED.

As noted a several weeks ago ... it's an interesting speech on education, media, innovation, Google, collaboration ... and it starts with the "What Would Google Do?" author declaring, "This is bullshit."

Here's a couple excerpts from the rest:

I tell media that they must become collaborative, because the public knows much, because people want to create, not just consume, because collaboration is a way to expand news, because it is a way to save expenses. I argue that news is a process, not a product. Indeed, I say that communities can now share information freely – the marginal cost of their news is zero. We in journalism should ask where we can add value. But note that that in this new ecosystem, the news doesn’t start with us. It starts with the community.

And...

We must stop our culture of standardized testing and standardized teaching. ... In the Google age, what is the point of teaching memorization?

We must stop looking at education as a product – in which we turn out every student giving the same answer – to a process, in which every student looks for new answers. Life is a beta.

Why shouldn’t every university – every school – copy Google’s 20% rule, encouraging and enabling creation and experimentation, every student expected to make a book or an opera or an algorithm or a company. Rather than showing our diplomas, shouldn’t we show our portfolios of work as a far better expression of our thinking and capability? The school becomes not a factory but an incubator.

It's a good speech that picks up on many of the concepts Jarvis continues to tout on BuzzMachine, his various talks and, of course, in "WWGD?"

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Newspapers Add Value with "Unexpected Relevance"

When we get to the newspaper unit in LBCC's Media and Society class, one aspect of newspapers we agree that we like is how you happen upon stories, photos and other items that catch your interest as you turn the pages. You learn about things that you weren't necessarily looking for. You become engaged with something you didn't expect.

In a new blog post, new media expert Jeff Jarvis discusses this phenomenon: "Serendipity is not randomness. It is unexpected relevance."

He goes on to explain:

There’s a reason we find value in the supposedly serendipitous. ... When we read a paper and find a good story that we couldn’t have predicted we’d have liked, we think that is serendipity. But there’s some reason we like it, that we find it relevant to us.

Maybe that relevance is the unknown but now fed curiosity, maybe it’s enjoyment of good writing or a certain kind of tale, maybe the gift of some interesting fact we want to share and gain social equity for, maybe it’s a challenge to our ideas, maybe an answer to a question that has bugged us. In the end, it has value to us; it’s relevant.

To me, this discovery of something new waiting within the pages is one of the top reasons I keep buying and reading newspapers, and why we will always need editors and others to bring these gems to our attention.

As Jarvis notes, this wondrous sense of serendipity is one of the things that many media observers believe will be lost with the decline of newspapers. I agree when he suggests a somewhat similar sensation occurs through the use of Facebook and Twitter, where we're constantly discovering something new.

But it just doesn't feel the same as that comfortable encounter with the inky printed medium.

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(Photo credit: "Surprise from above" by zetson, courtesy of Flickr.com/Creative Commons)

Jeff's TED Talk: This Is Bullshit

Fellow TED fans ...

Another one of our favorites, "What Would Google Do?" author Jeff Jarvis, just made his debut talk to TED. (He said the video will be posted in a week or so.)

Based on Jarvis' notes posted on BuzzMachine, it's an interesting speech on education, media, innovation, Google, collaboration ... and it starts by saying, "This is bullshit."

Here's a couple excerpts from the rest:

I tell media that they must become collaborative, because the public knows much, because people want to create, not just consume, because collaboration is a way to expand news, because it is a way to save expenses. I argue that news is a process, not a product. Indeed, I say that communities can now share information freely – the marginal cost of their news is zero. We in journalism should ask where we can add value. But note that that in this new ecosystem, the news doesn’t start with us. It starts with the community.

And...

We must stop our culture of standardized testing and standardized teaching. ... In the Google age, what is the point of teaching memorization?

We must stop looking at education as a product – in which we turn out every student giving the same answer – to a process, in which every student looks for new answers. Life is a beta.

Why shouldn’t every university – every school – copy Google’s 20% rule, encouraging and enabling creation and experimentation, every student expected to make a book or an opera or an algorithm or a company. Rather than showing our diplomas, shouldn’t we show our portfolios of work as a far better expression of our thinking and capability? The school becomes not a factory but an incubator.

It's a good speech that picks up on many of the concepts Jarvis continues to tout on BuzzMachine, his various talks and, of course, "WWGD?"

I'm looking forward to adding the video version to my media curriculum at LBCC.

p.s. The BuzzMachine comments are interesting too...

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(Photo credit: "Jeff Jarvis" by Robert Scoble, courtesy of Flickr.com/Creative Commons)

What Will Google Do in China?

Recently, students in my Media & Society class talked about the challenges Google faces in China: namely, subjecting the Google search function to censors in exchange for access to a huge online market.

Now that it appears Chinese authorities are tracking down activists by monitoring Google searches, the company is re-evaluating its business in China and whether is goes against the company credo: "Don't be evil."

Jeff Jarvis, author of one of our class textbooks ("What Would Google Do?"), updated the company's status in China after an interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Here's an excerpt from Jarvis' latest post on BuzzMachine:

“We made a decision that was consistent with our values,” Schmidt said. “We’re not going to operate differently in China as opposed to the rest of the world,” said (David) Drummond.

When is Gooogle going to do something? “It should happen soon,” Drummond said.

Was Google’s original stance on China — making it an exception to its own rules — a mistake? “We said consistently we would evaluate the position,” said Schmidt, “and people didn’t believe us.”

On the attacks, Schmidt said the company had a moral need to “make sure our systems are safe from attack anywhere.”

Check out the rest of Jarvis' post, which also covers transparency in Google advertising, hassles in Europe, as well as Android and the company's phone strategy.

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See also:
Google reconsiders China policy

Bankrupt Newspapers Get Golden Opportunity

New media guy Jeff Jarvis puts forth an interesting proposition: Bankrupt newspaper companies should use their bleak financial condition as an opportunity to take a bold step into the future. Ditch the presses and all the rest of their "old media" overhead and become entrepreneurial, going all-in online and better serving readers:

Bankruptcy enables a newspaper company to shed its past. It can get out of contracts and leases for paper, printing plants, delivery, trucks. ... It offers a one-time chance to rethink, reinvent, and rebuild the company for the future. Is it better to stretch out the pain and never get anywhere? And if tough decisions and actions are not made, the likelihood that the company will die and all will be lost only increases.

It's like they say about insanity: Why should bankrupt newspapers reorganize a broken media business model and expect different results?

Part of their new strategy has to be a streamlined staff and a focus on "hyperlocal" journalism that gets down to the neighborhood level. They need to partner with readers, encouraging content contributions and collaboration.

Hyperlocal also means dropping national and international news that readers already get elsewhere. A good example of this local focus is The Daily Record in Dunn, N.C., which has been the subject of various stories touting its intense commitment to "getting names into the paper."

For more on this topic, see:

• Jarvis on "The Opportunity of Bankruptcy"
• Corvallis businessman Chris Nordyke on the "hyperlocal" newspaper
• Jarvis video on hyperlocal journalism
  
• The Daily Record in Dunn, N.C.

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Photo credit: "Slush Paper" by Pete ツ, courtesy of Flickr/Creative Commons

"Googled" -- A Good Read on an Icy Day

Now that Fall term is officially completed at LBCC, I'm doing some "research" over the break, beginning with reading Ken Auletta's new book, "Googled: The End of the World as We Know It." (I already have my students read Jeff Jarvis' book, "What Would Google Do?" for Media & Society.)

Twenty-four pages into "Googled" and I can see I might blast through it in a few days (especially if the ice outside continues to hold the family hostage...). As other reviewers have noted, it's a fast read that covers a lot of ground that's already appeared in a lot of stories about the fabled company.

While many readers already know the story behind the company's beginnings and its geeky founders, the strength of the book so far is Auletta's insider access to Google as well as key media and advertising industry players. So he can observe: "Google engineers don't make gut decisions. They have no way to quantify relationships or judgment. They value efficiency more than experience. They require facts, beta testing, mathematical logic. Google fervently believes it is shaping a new and better media world..."

Auletta discusses some of the issues highlighted in his book and more up-to-date information (e.g. Chrome and the Google Phone) in Friday's online Q&A in the Washington Post. Asked about his access to Google execs, including the founders, while writing the book, he says: "(Larry) Page and (Sergey) Brin are not garrulous executives, like many corporate types. They are not consumed by their wealth, which now hovers around $15 billion each. But they each have a jet airplane, and new families, and at 36 are spending a bit more time smelling the roses."

Other links:

• Auletta talks to Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air."
• Auletta on C-SPAN's "Q&A."

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Revolution in the Twittersphere

Fascinated by what's going on in Iran? BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times offer a pair of useful commentaries on social networking vs. despotism.

In "The Virtual Mosque," Friedman writes:

What is fascinating to me is the degree to which in Iran today — and in Lebanon — the more secular forces of moderation have used technologies like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, blogging and text-messaging as their virtual mosque, as the place they can now gather, mobilize, plan, inform and energize their supporters, outside the grip of the state.

For the first time, the moderates, who were always stranded between authoritarian regimes that had all the powers of the state and Islamists who had all the powers of the mosque, now have their own place to come together and project power: the network. The Times reported that Moussavi’s fan group on Facebook alone has grown to more than 50,000 members. That’s surely more than any mosque could hold — which is why the government is now trying to block these sites.

Adds Jarvis:

Of course, Twitter - and Facebook and blogs and camera phones - alone cannot win a revolution. They cannot protect their users from government’s bullets and jails, as we have seen all to tragically in Iran. ... Fighting for freedom requires courage and risk we must not underestimate. But at least these tools allow allies to find each other and to let the world know of their plight. For thanks to the fact that anyone in the world - outside of North Korea - now has a printing press and a broadcast tower, they can be assured that the whole world is watching.

Also see:

• "How Twitter Creates Social Bonds with the Iranian Protesters" on Reportr.net.
• New York Times slide show
• Twitter Lessons on Revolution
• MediaShift on Iran's Citizen Journalists
  
• Twitter and Personal Branding
  

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(Photo credit: "Iran Protests for 5th Straight Day" by .faramarz, courtesy of Flickr.com)

First Twitter, Now Flutter

Be the first on your block to get in on Flutter, the "nanoblogging" ap that's sure to sweep the nation.

... and then there's ...

Watch Real Life Twitter on CollegeHumor

... and Twitter unites strangers on a train ...

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Jarvis to Newspapers: You Blew It!

New media advocate and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis has three words for the newspaper industry: You blew it.

In one of the better rants laying out the ineptitude of the industry to adapt in the new millennium, Jarvis comments on the state of newspapers in this BuzzMachine missive in connection with the Newspaper Association of America meeting in San Diego last week:

You’ve had 20 years since the start of the web, 15 years since the creation of the commercial browser and craigslist, a decade since the birth of blogs and Google to understand the changes in the media economy and the new behaviors of the next generation of - as you call them, Mr. Murdoch - net natives. You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to retrain not only your staff but your readers and advertisers, to use the power of your megaphones while you still had it to build what would come next. But you didn’t.

You blew it.

Jarvis, author of the book "What Would Google Do?" and a professor at City University of New York, chronicles all the opportunities missed by the newspaper industry, which was too busy protecting its own turf, ignoring customers and resisting change while Google and others recognized the digital revolution and ate their lunch.

Jarvis has little sympathy for newspaper publishers who have only themselves to blame for their industry's demise. He concludes:

So now, for many of you, there isn’t time. It’s simply too late. The best thing some of you can do is get out of the way and make room for the next generation of net natives who understand this new economy and society and care about news and will reinvent it, building what comes after you from the ground up. There’s huge opportunity there, for them.

Take that!

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(Photo credit: "Jeff Jarvis" by eirikso, courtesy of Flickr.com)

Jeff Jarvis: The Great Restructuring

It's a sobering glimpse of reality and what may be in our future, but it's also a compelling new post on Jeff Jarvis' Buzz Machine.

As the author of "What Would Google Do?" points out:

I try to argue in my book that what we’re living through is instead a great restructuring of the economy and society, starting with a fundamental change in our relationships - how we are linked and intertwined and how we act, nothing less than that. ... Yes, entire swaths and even sectors of the economy will disappear or will change so much they might as well disappear.

Jarvis isn't very optimistic about industries that once produced what seemed like limitless quantities of cars, newspapers, advertising, business travel...

Some pretty bleak stuff. But that doesn't mean Jarvis isn't optimistic about the future. He sees big-time opportunities for entrepreneurs, new services and education. I've got his book on my list of things to do over spring break.

Along the same line, check out Eric Ulken's column: "Newspapers' Supply-and-demand Problem (Why You Should Quit Doing What Everyone Else Is)" on the Knight Digital Media Center.

(Note: YouTube video is Jarvis speaking at a conference earlier this year.)

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Free Speech and the Internet

Jeff Jarvis, the one behind BuzzMachine, makes a compelling case for free speech on the Internet in this interview. As you'll see, he's an eloquent advocate of the First Amendment and why those who want to censor the Internet need to rethink their position.

Watch and appreciate.

Note: This video, an interview on the CBS program "Eye to Eye," is kind of dated, but you never know where or when you are going to stumble upon a gem.