"Something has changed in the last year or two," Slate's Ron Rosenbaum says of Entertainment Weekly founder turned professional conference-goer Jeff Jarvis. "It's the callous contempt for working journalists that grates. It's a contempt for the beautiful losers." True, it's puzzling to watch new media pundits spit in the faces of all the sad, doomed newspaper reporters whose careers are being eroded by the Internet. Rosenbaum goes way longer than Slate ever lets me write, so I've pull-quoted his best 100 words:
More »
I blame Guy Kawasaki. Ten days after the relentless listmaker joined the advisory board of Vancouver-based citizen journalism hub NowPublic, the site published a link-baiting "The 50 most influential people in New York." We've had this piece in our inboxes since Friday morning, but we couldn't figure out how to get anyone in the Valley to care about a list topped by Noah Brier and Jeff Jarvis. More interesting is me-blogger Anil Dash's take on the genre: "First and foremost, organizations create these lists to promote their own authority." Exactly. We've been pitched to do a Valleywag 100 or Valleywag 40 or whatever by consultants who crank out marketing events for a living. But they balk when we ask for a deck of playing cards emblazoned with the faces of 52 People We Want Gone.
Writes Jeff Jarvis, the magazine veteran who turned blogger a few years ago:
When it became obvious that the audience was hostile to her — cheering Zuckerberg when he told her to ask a question — she acted hurt, as if this hour was about her. Worse, she told us how tough her job was. It wasn't tough. It was a privilege and she was blowing it. And at the end, when she said that people should send her an email telling her what went wrong, she was so 1994; she didn't understand that the people in the crowd were already coalescing in Twitter and blogs into an instant consensus. Oh, if only there'd been a back-channel chat projected on the screen beside her. Then, she could have seen.
I was cruising youTube looking for clips of Jason Calacanis' keynote speech today at the Blog Business Summit. Some of the blogs covering the talk had mentioned Jason was filmed and hoped it would be posted online in the near future. I didn't find JC at the BBS, I found something much better, 1938 Media going off on Netscape's Jason Calacanis, Buzz Machine's Jeff Jarvis collectively call them both a-holes for going after PayPerPost. I don't know who 1938 Media is, but he's my new hero.
More »
Just like Christmas in July, New Year predictions deserve a mid-year refresher — especially since Valleywag wasn't here for New Year's. Valleywag predicts that by the end of 2006:
More »
Dell loses at the Internet again today, as the much-maligned computer maker launches a corporate blog full of first-person press releases and in-house videos. (One clip shows how with Dell's revolutionary Remote Support, customers can get frustrated at customer service technicians on their own screen in real-time.) The tech blogging crowd are rolling their eyes.
More »
Batting .000 on his New Year's predictions, Firefox developer Blake Ross rushes out a second batch:
Citizen journalism will finally topple Old Media, ushering in a remarkable new age of incisive journalism—"That Dude Across the Street Walks His Dog;" "Local Mail Arrives Ten Minutes Past 4." Illegal immigrants will protest the discriminatory name, forcing the blogosphere to rechristen the new model "Asscasting," short for "Broadcasting while sitting on my ass, which will never leave this chair."
Backfence, the community journo site where every writer's a "neighbor" — I think that translates as "comrade" — broke out of its Maryland and Virginia circuit to buy the Bay Area's news-by-the-people site, Bayosphere.
More »
Valleywag
jeff jarvis
the 250
rocketboom
dell
digg
bayosphere
