Posts from July 2005

Community policing: a business somebody should start (hint, hint)

July 28, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis

I know many sites that need community policing — responding to alerts of bad posts, getting rid of the bozos who forgot to take their meds, cleaning the racist/sexist/xist graffiti from forums.

They are all dying to outsource this — not forum hosting but community policing. Somebody should start a company to do that. Has somebody?

When we started forums at Advance.net, my last employer, we thought we needed moderators in each forum to spark conversation and slap the misbehavers. But that was the old-media way to think, the controlling way to think. We hired an expert who quickly taught us that we didn’t need moderators — people are perfectly capable of deciding what they want to talk about, thank you — but we did need people to arrest and try the bozos. He also taught us that if users saw results from sending in alerts to bad stuff — to snitching, in short — they would do it. And he was way right. Advance has 100 million page views a month of happy community campers’ chatter. At first, he hired people who were homebound to do the work (including one woman who was legally blind and used what sight she had to ferret out references to “poop,” which always struck me as, well, sad).

I tell this story to others who know the value of interactivity and they want to have that service without having to do it on staff. They want to hire it out. And there’s no reason that wouldn’t work. I’m not sure you could outsource it to Bangalore, given that cultural knowledge and sensitives are needed, but it’s possible to document and train that. (For a brief while, Advance’s community cops handled the forums for Conde Net’s and the background material explaining what was a no-no regarding fashion or Vogue or Paris Hilton was great reading; oh, if I’d only saved that memo!).

So does anybody know a company that does this? Anybody want to start one?

In memory

July 28, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis
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Egyptian bloggers — a new and already vibrant community — have organized a candlelight vigil for the victims of the Sharm El Sheikh terrorists.

Don’t do it, George

July 28, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis

I’m not the only guy who thinks George Pataki shouldn’t run for President. John Podhoretz thinks that, too.

Certainly, the answer is no when it comes to the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. No, not just no. More like: No No No No No No.

He does say that Pataki should run for the Senate if Hillary tries to move back into the White House.

Reporting too much?

July 28, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis

I’m fairly fanatic about transparency in news and government: They should share what they know when they know it. But when it comes to security and terrorism, of course, the rules are different. And I think ABC probably went over the line when it aired pictures of the London terrorists’ bombs and the damage they caused over the strong objections of British authorities. What was the public good that was served? How was seeing the bombs more important than catching the bombers?

No cigar

July 28, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis

I got all excited that Palm was coming out with a traffic ap for major cities on its Treo phones. Just downloaded it and it took a minute to see that it’s awkward and won’t work. The application is map-based and hard to see on a small screen and requires all kinds of zooming and scrolling and clicking…

And you thought talking on the phone was dangerous.

This is simple, folks: Every morning, I drive I-78 east and then 1&9 north and then every night I reverse it. I want someone to tell me what’s happening on my highways. And I’d be happy to contribute my knowledge if you’d make it easy for me.

The first company that captures the community of commuters will win.

This is another silly, graphical content service that wants to charge me $5 a month and it’s a loser. Damn.

Search me

July 27, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis

Yesterday, when I came down to the PATH station, I saw cops performing their random searches. I wasn’t picked. But I walked up to a couple of them and said, “I don’t know whether you’re getting crap for doing this but I’m glad you are.” They nodded thanks.

Well, it turns out, they’re not getting crap. They’re getting volunteers.

It’s a joke, right? Tell me it’s a joke….

July 27, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis

George Pataki running for President? There isn’t a duller politician in America, not even in Indiana. He drones. He pisses off the people who should be his friends. He makes decisions like a wishy-washy pol. President? Ha!

No more AO-Hell

July 27, 2005 by Jeff Jarvis
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I canceled my AOL subscription last night. And they were a pain in the ass to the very end, keeping me on hold; delivering wordy, touchy-feely, insincere phone scripts; trying to rope/fool me into a continuing $9.95/month subscription.

No, cancel me. Just cancel me. Let go. I mean it.

After 12 years, I’m history. And so is what we used to call “online,” the era of closed subscription services, the world of walls.

Before AOL, I used CompuServe and also tried The Source and tried to avoid Prodigy. And I worked at Delphi very briefly 11 years ago. They were all part of a world that is over but is taking as long to die as TV Guide.

Gather ’round, young’uns, and I’ll tell you about them olden days:

Way back in 1974, I started working on my first newsroom computer (because I was bored on the midnight shift on the Chicago Tribune, waiting for someone to die a horrible death so I could call cops and their relatives and then write about it; that’s what we called journalism back then). I was the only guy who dared touch the computers sitting there, waiting to be used, and so I became the guy in the newsroom who wasn’t scared of the damned things.

I was newsgeek. Computers changed the way I wrote and I was soon silicon-dependent; I was an obnoxious evangelist for that strange thing called “the cursor” (a concept that wasn’t easy to explain to grumpy editors who always hate change). When I headed out of town for stories, I still had to haul along a portable typewriter (this was our laptop, I told my kids) and a mojo wire (as Hunter Thompson dubbed the early fax machines, which took something like six minutes a page to transmit onto smelly, chemicaly, unreadable paper around a fussy and noisy rotating drum using a 300 baud acoustic coupler). I was so relieved when I got to take a TRS-80 Model 100 and transmit directly with that. I was so addicted to portability that I spent a fortune of my own to buy the first full portable computer, the precursor to the Kaypro and the Compaq, my beloved Osborne 1. But it wasn’t portable enough, so I bought the first battery-operated fully functional (kind of) PC, the Morrow Pivot.

But what really changed my life was not the machines but what I got to do with them when I moved to New York and went online for the first time with that damned accoustic coupler. It was slow, ugly, all-text, geeky. I could ^h in my sleep.

But I quickly saw that I wasn’t just communicating. I wasn’t just reading. I was joining something.

Back then, you had to pay to join and the companies that enabled us to do this made all the same mistakes big companies still make today: They thought it was about content. They thought it was about communication. They thought it was about owning the consumer. They thought it was about walls. They didn’t really understand that it was just about people.

And, of course, the internet replaced them all. When I went to work for Delphi Internet Services as editor in chief in 1994, Murdoch had just bought them (I worked for his TV Guide then) because they were the first service to take consumers to this future-shocky thing called the internet (I heard a sleezy stockbroker on a train one night tell a chump that he should buy News Corp. stock because, “You’ve heard of this internet thing? Well, Murdoch just bought it”). They were text-only and were trying to invent their graphical user interface to compete with Prodigy et al, but I was one of the guys who said nevermind that, try this Mosaic thing. I left Delphi (passing that IQ test) before it essentially imploded under millions of Murdoch’s misspent dollars and came to Advance, where they were debating between AOL and Prodigy for their newspapers. Try this browser thing, I said, and we went onto the internet and never looked back.

I got AOL then and kept it this long only because (a) I needed to keep tabs on them for work — and work paid and (b) I used them rarely for dial-up from bad hotels. But now I’m unself-employed and paying the bills. And I have my Verizon EVDO card, which works even from the wilds of the Poconos.

So I have no earthly need for AOL. I certainly have no need for its content. I don’t need it to communicate. I don’t need it to make a community for me; I can find my own here.

At long last, I canceled AOL. And it feels so good.

So spammers: I now hand jeffjarvis@aol.com over to you. It’s all yours. It has been for the last five years. You made that address utterly useless. You didn’t even know I wasn’t there. But I’m gone now. Just thought I’d let you know.