Posts from May 2009

Google Wave and news

May 31, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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Never underestimate Google. That should have been my 41st WWGD? rule. Just as I was thinking they were behind the curve on the live web – and argued they should buy Twitter - Google attacked it from the left flank with Wave.

In Wave, I see more than a new generation of email cum wikis cum Twitter cum groupware. Because it can feed blog and web pages and Twitter, I see a new way to create content, collaborative and live. I see a new way to make news.

Imagine a team of reporters – together with witnesses on the scene – able to contribute photos and news to the same Wave (formerly known as a story or a page). One can write up what is known; a witness can add facts from the scene and photos; an editor or reader can ask questions. And it is all contained under a single address – a permalink for the story – that is constantly updated from a collaborative team.

Here, I speculated about the topic becoming the new atomic unit of news, supplanting the article with wikis that contained a snapshot of what we know now, blogs that treat news as the process it is, links (do what you do best, link to the rest), discussion, and media of all types, some even live (Twitter, Qik.com). Marissa Mayer also gave journalists advice on the new form of news, telling them they needed to maintain updates under a permalink for the story so it could be searched and found.

Wave takes this to the next level. It combines the notions of a process as people add and subtract and update; it has the benefit of a wiki – a snapshot of current knowledge; it can be live; it can feed a blog page with the latest; it can feed Twitter with updates; it is itself the collaborative tool that lets participants question each other.

Wave isn’t just the email we’d invent if email were invented today, as was Google’s goal. Wave is what news can be if we invent it today, as we must.

Wave is the new news.

: LATER: I just got email from Jay Parkinson, who is remaking health care at Hello Health. He, too, was impressed with the opportunities in Wave.

Replace news story with “disease you suffer from” and reporter with primary care doc and editor with specialist and photos with lab results, etc, and you can see its potential.

What about your line of work?

The embeddable newspaper

May 31, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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About a week ago, I met with Tristan Harris, founder of Apture, which enables sites to create rich link boxes that display media of all sorts. As we talked, it occurred to me that he had something else in his hands, something I’d talked with the Guardian about over time: the ability to make a newspaper embeddable.

That is, imagine if any content in a paper or news site could be shared on this blog via YouTube-like players that could display not just video but also text, photos, audio, graphics, anything. Imagine if, rather than having to cut-and-paste a quote from a news story, I could quote it here in a box that also delivered the context of the entire story, along with the source’s branding, links, and even advertising.

I’ve argued that newspapers need to think distributed, that they need to go to where the readers are rather than expecting them to be attracted to news sites like magnets; this is a key lesson of What Would Google Do?.

And then I saw Google Web Elements, which lets me embed content like this:


It’s a start. Gillian Reagan in the NY Observer says that perhaps this is a way for newspapers to get distribution and branding from Google; PaidContent agrees.

But I hope for something broader, something any site (even BuzzMachine) could implement to make itself embeddable without having to go through Google’s funnel. That’s what I think Apture might be able to do.

The Guardian, NY Times, NPR, and BBC are on the right road, of course, with their APIs, which enable other sites to embed their content and enables the news organizations to, in the words of the Guardian, weave themselves into the fabric of the web. Daylife (where I’m a partner) also has an API. But the limitation of an API is that it needs developers and that means time. A toolset such as Elements (or Daylife’s new Select) enables mortals such as me to embed content or create pages.

Note well that this is the opposite of locking content behind pay walls. Becoming embeddable is a way for a site to act like Google and go with the flow of the internet, to be distributed by its readers, to take its content and branding and advertising out into the web.

WWGD? DC talk

May 30, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis

I didn’t even know that my Q&A at Google’s DC HQ was up on YouTube. Here it is:

Advertising as failure

May 30, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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At Burda’s DLD conference in Munich, talking with the Nokia Ideas Project, I first happened on the notion of advertising as failure. That is, the ideal relationship a company should have with its customer is that it produces a great product the customer loves and talks about and thus sells; there is no need for advertising there. It’s only in the case of failing at that idea that one needs to advertise. (And by the way, I hope there’s enough failure to continue to support media!)

This, then, is about the impact on the ad agency as a middleman:

At the Brite conference at Columbia, I expanded on the idea:

Jeff Jarvis at BRITE ’09 conference from BRITE Conference on Vimeo.

Link to the best

May 30, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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After we had breakfast a week ago and talked about possible new roles for wire services in the new world, Wolfgang Büchner, who’s soon to take the top edit position at the Deutsche Presse Agentur (the German Associated Press), send me a link to this example of the agency curating and pointing to journalism at its source, which should surely be its most important job in the link economy.

Health-insurance stagnation

May 30, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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America’s health care system – or lack of one – leads to a stifling of economic innovation and mobility. Consider:

* Daniel Taghioff argues that people are more likely to risk starting new enterprises – leading to economic growth – in countries that have health safety nets.

Turning to entrepreneurialism – would you rather risk all to start a new business in a place like the US where if you lose everything you may end up, literally, with nothing, no health-care, no decent schooling for your kids and so on? Or would you choose a society where, if all else fails, the state (or strong social networks) will take care of you? . . . The list of countries with the most new businesses per capita is full of small to medium sized countries with strong social safety nets, or small Asian countries with very high levels of social cohesion.

* I know I didn’t quit my job until I had new health care insurance lined up, for without an employer, I wouldn’t have gotten any (and in the interim had to pay $24,000 per year in COBRA). How many people are sticking with jobs, unhappily and thus probably unproductively, just because of insurance handcuffs? What if they were freed? It would be better for them and their employers.

* General Motors was brought down by more than its its health insurance obligations. Nonetheless, those obligations weighed heavily on the company as they do on many other companies with long legacies and large staffs.

* I was at a WEF event yesterday at which one of the wise counsels pointed to the exacerbation of the health-care crisis that is coming with so many Americans unemployed. This, I think, will force the political issue.

Rather than spending billions to bail out and now even buy crumbling legacy industries and crooked banks, how much more value would universal health insurance give to the economy?

What if, instead of bailing out the past and filling potholes, the government assured universal broadband access? What would that do to spur innovation and entrepreneurship and begin to reform education, which, in turn, would spur innovation? What if education were reformed to emphasis innovation over test-taking? What if investment in new companies were a high priority of the tax code?

We are not thinking strategically enough about these issues in the political debate. We complain about companies thinking short-term but so does the nation.

Forcing your own paper out of business?

May 27, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis
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Drivers at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune are threatening a strike.

I could see a few interesting unintended consequences for the drivers: (A) This forces the paper out of business. They lose their jobs. (B) This forces the paper to go online only and the company takes advantage of bankruptcy to kill contracts with not only drivers but also pressmen and everyone except journalists needed for online (not just fewer of the print staff but new jobs: blogging reporters and community organizers) and sales (not just the sales people you used to have, but people who can support networks of community sales). I’d also try to get out of my leases and every other cost burden and come out of the strike and bankruptcy as a newer and smaller but now profitable new kind of news organization.

If I were a manager at the Strib and had Plan B ready, I’d darned near hope the Teamsters go out on strike. Buh-bye now. Hello future.

: LATER: I just spoke with a media attorney to make sure I wasn’t nuts. It also occurs to me that The New York Times Company should force the Boston Globe – assuming they were smart enough to set it up as a separate entity – into bankruptcy. It’s losing $85 million a year. They saved only $20 with recent concessions. It could bring The New York Times down. Time for radical surgery.

Book talk in Jersey

May 26, 2009 by Jeff Jarvis

thanks to Baristanet, I’m giving a book talk & signing at the Montclair Library Thursday, 7p. Details here.