jeff jarvis

Jeff Jarvis has a series of short notes that he's put together on "hard economic lessons" for the news business, but many of them apply to pretty much any industry -- and it seems worth pointing some of them out for discussion:

• Tradition is not a business model. The past is no longer a reliable guide to future success.
• "Should" is not a business model. You can say that people "should" pay for your product but they will only if they find value in it.
  

As you know, we talk an awful lot about understanding abundance and scarcity around here, and how that's really important if you want to understand what the future holds for a variety of different businesses.

Failing to understand abundance and scarcity is a recipe for disaster these days. And the more you look, the more you realize that technology is creating new abundances and new scarcities in all sorts of places.

We've written a few times about how ridiculous the FTC's proposals to "save journalism" are.

They're much more focused on saving newspapers, not journalism. And they seem to totally misunderstand the problem -- or to believe the problem is some amorphous threat from "internet aggregators," which is based on no actual evidence.

Podcast pioneer Leo Laporte gave a talk at the Online News Association Conference in San Francisco on Friday,

Jeff Jarvis is working on a book called What Would Google Do? Since Google just did something good for me — and for a market that needs help desperately — I thought I'd share my experience with Jeff and the rest of you.

What Google Did for me was radically improve one of the most annoying experiences in the Webbed world: registering a domain name.