Monthly Archives: September 2009

There’s a Reason They Don’t Call It Mobsourcing

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An article published today by Michael Masnick on his Techdirt blog takes on a Forbe’s opinion piece that tries to debunk the “myth” of crowdsourcing. The Forbes contributor, Dan Woods, claims that the commonly cited triumphs of crowdsourcing like Wikipedia (the supplier of this definition of crowdsourcing) are in fact the products largely of individuals, not groups.

Masnick’s reaction is basically, “Well, duh!” As he says, “of course there are individuals, and the point of crowdsourcing isn’t that everyone in the crowd is equal, but that they each get to contribute their own special talents, and something better comes out of it.”

The mistake Woods makes in his Forbes piece is in confusing the prolific diversity of crowds with the monolithic single-mindedness of mobs. The one is productive, the other, destructive. Woods’s error is one publishers climbing up the new-media learning curve should strive to avoid.

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Information Also Wants to Be Expensive

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Editors are rarely comfortable using the word content to describe their line of business, given that it suggests a kind of “undifferentiated slurry,” to borrow a phrase to be discussed below. They might prefer instead to substitute the word information, but they would be well advised to resist the temptation. There is a not-so-obvious but critical distinction between the two words that is worth preserving.

This topic came up in a sidelong way on the Web over the last week or so, in a flurry of blog postings and tweets about a new essay by Paul Graham called “Post-Medium Publishing.” The number of posts and their level of enthusiasm suggests that Graham’s essay may be close to meme-level status. Jeff Jarvis, for one, thinks Graham’s piece may rank near a “seminal” essay by Clay Shirky on the “demise of news on paper.”

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Interviews: Confrontation or Critical Collaboration?

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Lessons from David Pogue, Steve Jobs, and Leo Laporte

Was David Pogue too easy on Steve Jobs?

Was David Pogue too easy on Steve Jobs?

A recent kerfuffle in the blogosphere/podosphere involving New York Times tech columnist David Pogue offers B2B journalists and editors some interesting ethical issues to mull over. Pogue has been under attack for supposed conflicts of interest, first in an August 26 review of Apple’s Snow Leopard OS upgrade, then in his short interview with Steve Jobs following Apple’s announcement of new iPods.

Despite his affable personality, Pogue is a lightning rod for criticism, thanks to his reputation, fair or not, as an Apple fanboy and his privileged position as a popular Times columnist. The stage for this most recent imbroglio was set when Pogue published his mostly positive review of Snow Leopard. The review evidently irritated podcaster Leo Laporte, who had a largely negative opinion of the upgrade. It probably didn’t help that Pogue seemed to suggest in his review that Snow Leopard detractors were just “haters.” That implication provoked Laporte, on an episode of his flagship podcast, “This Week in Tech” (TWiT), to sarcastically proclaim “I am a hater; come and get me, David Pogue.”

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What B2B Can Learn from Jeff Jarvis, Part 4

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Turning Cash Cows into Mini-Moos

What Would Google Do? By Jeff Jarvis. HarperBusiness, 2009.

In the previous three parts of this review of What Would Google Do?, I’ve looked at how Jarvis’s ideas apply to B2B in terms of its relation to readers, the impact of hyperlinks, and the shift from product journalism to process journalism. The last subject I’ll address is in some ways the most obvious and dramatic: the impact of these areas on the way we do business.

To begin with the most obvious point, as succinctly phrased by Jarvis, “print sucks.” He’s talking here not about the usability of print—give me a hardback over my Kindle in terms of sheer reading ease and pleasure—but about the burden it places on a print-based publisher. “It’s expensive to produce content for print, expensive to manufacture, and expensive to deliver. Print limits your space and your ability to give readers all they want. It restricts your timing and ability to keep readers up-to-the-minute. Print is already stale when its fresh.” And so on. Sure, there will always be a role for print—but it will a very small role indeed. So to the extent that you’re still in print, you need to think carefully about whether you should be.

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What B2B Can Learn from Jeff Jarvis, Part 3

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How the Shift to Process Journalism Affects Ethics

What Would Google Do? By Jeff Jarvis. HarperBusiness, 2009.

Scenes from an editor’s desk, circa 1989:

Copy arrives in the mail. You do a first read-through, do some fact checking, call the writer for clarifications, edit, and send it off to the type setter.

Galleys come back from type. You read through quickly for major errors and send it off to proofreading.

Galleys come back from proofreaders with changes. You send marked galleys back to type setter for corrections.

Corrected galleys come back. You check the changes. If copy is clean enough, you send it to production for layout; if not, it goes back to type for another round.

Boards with layouts come from production. You check them over and send to proofreading for a final read.

Corrections to boards come from proofreaders. You type up a list of line changes and send to type setting.

Line changes come back from type; if correct, you send to production for line stripping; if not, you send back to type.

You get the line-stripped boards back from production, review them, and sign them off for printing. You’re done (except for the blueline, but enough of all this. . .).

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