The Great Seduction

Keen on Jeff Jarvis

As the author of popular BuzzMachine blog and the 2009 hit What Would Google Do, CUNY Assistant Professor Jeff Jarvis has established himself as one of the liveliest and most incorrigibly optimistic new media pundits. If anything, Jarvis’ incorrigible optimism has grown since his book about Google.

Having lived through a prostate cancer scare, which he blogged about in intimate detail, he is now writing a new book a defense of publicness, entitled Public Parts which will be published next year. As Jarvis told me when we talked about the past, the present and the future of media last week, Public Parts will argue that our current obsession with defending privacy is counterproductive, both to us as individuals and as a society.....

Keen on Ron Conway

If Silicon Valley has an angel, it’s Ron Conway, the legendary early stage investor who has backed many of the greatest Internet start-ups including Google and Facebook. Last week at the Social Currency Crunchup at Stanford University, I had the good fortune to sit down with Conway for a few minutes
to talk about technology, entrepreneurs, investors and the next big thing in the Valley.

In his avuncular selflessness, in his apparent concern for everything and everyone but himself and in that reassuring thick shock of silver hair, there’s certainly something angelic about Conway. But dig a bit into Ron Conway and you get a sense that behind all that reasonableness there’s a remarkably shrewd operator who has minted a fortune for himself, his investors and his entrepreneurs. My sense – for what it’s worth – is that the guy has multi-million dollar eyes. He is a brilliant watcher, an acutely sophisticated observer of the tech space, a remarkably perceptive businessman who doesn’t miss a trick. That’s where his unique talent lies and that’s why he is amongst the greatest early stage investors of our times.....

Interview with Chris Sacca

The best investors are learners rather than teachers. Micro venture capitalist Chris Sacca is one of Silicon Valley’s most thoughtful learners – a former lawyer and failed entrepreneur, once Head of Special Initiatives at Google, an early investor in Twitter with his own 1.3 million person following, a 2009 TechCrunch Crunchie Award nomination for Best Angel Investor, an Obama insider and activist, a keen bicyclist and skier, and the owner of the most colorful collection of cowboy shirts in the Valley.

I first met Chris a couple of years ago at the Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford, an event in which the best minds of the Valley educate Oxford students about technology innovation and business creativity. What I liked about him then, as now, was his pugnacious humility, his very vivid memories of failure and poverty, his uniquely American optimism, and his unashamed commitment to global social justice.

The Wall Street Journal cited Sacca as “possibly the most influential businessman in America”. But what they forgot to add was that he’s also amongst the most provocative businessman in this country – a perennial start-up guy who can cram more ideas into a five minute interview than most corporate execs can come up with in a lifetime

For more, go to Techcrunch.tv

Public and Private: Hunger Artists

Words have once again become subversive. Last February, when Helene Hegemann, the 17-year-old German author of the sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll "novel" Axolotl Roadkill, was said to have plagiarized portions of this 2010 book from a blogger, she responded by hurling a grenade of a sentence back at her accusers.

"There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity," the Berlin-based writer said, ironically issuing this subversive statement through her venerable publisher Ullstein-Verlag, a business which, for nearly 140 years, has been predicated upon selling copies of its authors' original words. 

Note that Hegemann didn't just place authenticity above originality within her pantheon of creative values. The teenage writer's statement actually denies that originality—a central assumption of the creative economy for the past 150 years—exists.

 "There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity."

In Hegemann's creative universe, where it's impossible to be original because everything has been said before, all that is left for the author to cultivate is the virtue of individual authenticity by, it seems, transparently reorganizing other people's work. But in the shadow of the death sentence Hegemann imposes upon originality, what distinguishes authentic from inauthentic writing?....

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Copyrights and copywrongs on YouTube

Even in the digital world, standards are still necessary and some old rules deserve respect. Creators should still be fairly compensated for their work, and we shouldn't tolerate stealing as the road to profit. And, as much as we love YouTube, we shouldn't countenance the way its founders muscled their way to riches by enabling the online trafficking of stolen videos.

From garage entrepreneurs to mega-millionaires sounds like the quintessential American success story, except that e-mails released recently by a federal judge plainly show that YouTube's magic elixir was theft, not creativity.

Consider the "business strategy" discussions in which the YouTube co-founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, concede that drew the original traffic to their website largely through offering stolen property which, they well knew, radically inflated the value of their site before they flipped it to Google for $1.65 billion.

As Chen wrote in one e-mail: "if you remove the potential copyright infringements "... site traffic and virality will drop to maybe 20 percent of what it is."

In a discussion with co-founder Hurley about competing for content with a rival website, Chen advised: "steal it." And when Hurley demurred, Chen responded: "We have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. How much traffic will we get from personal videos? Remember, the only reason why our traffic surged was due to a video of this type [stolen] "...

FOR MORE GO TO SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS

On Public and Private

Jerome David (J. D.) Salinger died late last month and the Internet was instantly struck with grief for this intimately unfamiliar writer. As the B&N Review noted:"his death at 91 has lit up the online world of literary blogs and Twitter feeds with quotations, tributes, and a collective attempt to mark what felt like the epochal passing of the author of The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey.

 On the micro-blogging network Twitter, the science-fiction writer William Gibson, who tweets intimately to over 19,000 of his closest friends as @GreatDismal, offered a more cosmic observation about the deceased unknown celebrity:

GreatDismal: Salinger and the Streisand Effect: the singular potency of utter reclusivity. Black holes in the field of celebrity, their constant pull.11:49 AM Jan 28th from Brizzly

The "Streisand Effect" is a term invented by Mike Masnick, the founder of the technology website called Techdirt. Referring to the much-derided attempts in 2003 by Barbara Streisand to have photographs of her Californian house taken down from the Internet, Masnick described the "Streisand Effect" as the inevitable publicity associated with attempts to keep public information private....

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A hunch about Hunch

Decision, decisions: What do I fancy for lunch today? Do I want a girlfriend? What should I do with my life? Too many questions and not enough time for me to resolve them. So what if there were a Website that knew me well enough to automatically answer all my questions? Wouldn’t that be the next big Internet thing, the definitive answer to all our questions?

Divining intent has always been the Holy Grail of academics, doctors, marketers, and snake-oil salesmen. At the beginning of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud founded the school of psychoanalysis, a science of intentionality based on interpretation of dreams. And today, 100 years later, a new generation of quacks has founded a school of crowd-sourced intentionality.

The father of this digital school of intentionality might be Eric Schmidt, the CEO of search engine Google. Back in 2006, when asked by a Financial Times reporter where he wanted Google to be in five years, he answered that he imagined the search engine would become so intelligent that it would know not only what its user wanted to do that afternoon, but also what career they wanted to pursue.

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Review of John Lanchester's I.O.U

A couple of years ago, while doing background research for a novel, the British writer John Lanchester discovered the global economic crisis. Realizing that he'd "stumbled across the most interesting story I've ever found," Lanchester began to follow the crisis closely. I.O.U: Why Everyone Owes Everyone And No One Can Pay is the result of his observations. We all owe Lanchester a nonquantitative debt of gratitude for this lovely little book: I.O.U is a must-read for anyone with even a cursory interest in the reasons for the most serious global economic downturn since the Great Depression.

As the author of works such as The Debt To Pleasure, his Whitbread and Hawthornden prize-winning debut, Lanchester brings a novelist's wit, narrative skills, and appreciation for the absurdity of the human condition to today's financial crisis. While a 19^th-century novelist like Balzac spent his creative energy writing fictional accounts of systemic financial impropriety, a 21^st-century novelist like Lanchester finds himself composing a factual account of a story so unbelievable that, were it presented as a novel or movie script, would be dismissed by critics as ludicrously far-fetched.

Yes, Lanchester tells a truly tall tale....

READ ON AT BNREVIEW

Internet Freedoms and Internet Radicals

Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made a commendable speech about Internet freedom at the Newseum journalism museum in Washington, shifting the focus of American foreign policy from the analog certainties of the 20th century to the digital confusion of the 21st century. Clinton laid out a new focus of American foreign policy, prioritizing the open digital network, what she called “the freedom to connect,” as a central value in determining the credibility of overseas regimes.

While Clinton spoke optimistically about the power of the Internet to create an open society, she also recognized the profound economic and political problems created by the digital revolution, acknowledging that “those who use the Internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities” and that “governments and citizens must have confidence that the networks at the core of their national security and economic prosperity are safe and resilient. … Our ability to bank online, use electronic commerce, and safeguard billions of dollars in intellectual property are all at stake if we cannot rely on the security of our information networks.”.....

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On Amazon versus Macmillan

The problem with much analysis of the old-versus-new media wars (including some of my own, I confess) is that we always assume that there’s a moral struggle going on, that the real battle is between fairness and injustice, and that, in the best Hollywood tradition, good will eventually triumph over evil.

Take, for example, last weekend’s battle between Macmillan and Amazon over e-book pricing. The real story is amorally simple: Macmillan, one of the world’s big six publishing multinationals (and, full disclosure, the publisher of my next book), wanted Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) to conform to Macmillan’s so-called “agency model” arrangement for selling electronic books, which involves Macmillan determining e-book prices (from $5.99 to $14.99) and giving Amazon a 30 percent commission on each sale.

Amazon, which currently sells all e-books at $9.99 and pays a 50 percent of the list hardcover price commission on each sale, refused. So Macmillan threatened to pull its e-books out of the store, which, in turn, resulted in Amazon pulling all Macmillan’s physical books from Amazon’s entire book store. After some obligatory huffing and puffing over the weekend, Amazon eventually backed down and put Macmillan’s physical books back into its e-commerce store......

READ ON AT INTERNETEVOLUTION