Jeff Jarvis

The JOBS bill being signed by President Obama today is critical to the emergence and growth of the next generation of industries as ecosystems.

Those ecosystems are made up of three layers: Platforms (Google, Amazon, Salesforce, Facebook, Kickstarter, Federal Express, Foxconn), which make it possible for...

The Internet's not broken.

So then why are there so many attempts to regulate it? Under the guises of piracy, privacy, pornography, predators, indecency, and security, not to mention censorship, tyranny, and civilization, governments from the U.S. to France to Germany...

Consider the similarities between piracy and do not track. They're greater than you think, for both reduce value for content creators. And both are excuses for internet regulation.

In piracy, a content company sets business rules: You must pay for my product; if you take it without paying for it,...

The Internet has helped untold publics to form. Yesterday, the Internet became a public.

Or rather, millions of people who care about Internet freedom used the net to organize and defend it against efforts to control and harm it.

The SOPA-PIPA blackout got attention in media...

Email and communication are badly broken and the solution isn't so much new technology as new norms. We need to redefine "rude."

The problem is clear: If you're like me, you get so much email that you can't possibly answer it promptly if it all, and messages that do...

Wednesday, I redeemed the greatest Christmas present from my son, Jake: tickets to see The Daily Show taping with him. It was fun and funny. But even better, it inspired me as a journalist.

I left the studio determined to teach a course in journalism via jokes. (I'd...

Got to see The Daily Show Wednesday night and in the pre-show conversation with Jon Stewart, an audience member said he was sent by The Internet to ask about SOPA. Stewart professed (not feigned, I think) ignorance, asking whether that was net neutrality, and excusing himself, what with their "heads...

The New York Times raised its daily price to $2.50 today. I thought back to the penny press at the turn of the last century and wondered what such a paper would cost today, inflation adjusted. Answer: a quarter.

Watching the remarkable Xeni Jardin tweet her mammogram and cancer diagnosis, then blog eloquently about it, then crowdsource opening up her own MRI data makes me ask: Why are we so secretive about sickness and health? And what do we lose because we are?

The answers...

WASHINGTON -- Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz today announced a record fine against Santa Claus for violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

"Mr. Claus has flagrantly violated children's privacy, collecting their consumer preferences for toys and also tracking their behavior so as to judge and maintain...

Penis, penis, penis. Breast, breast, breast. Vagina, vagina, vagina. Buttock, buttock, buttock. We all got 'em.

New rule: Censorship can only get more absurd the more you practice it.

First, China continues to harass artist Ai Weiwei, investigating him for pornography for being in a picture with nude women....

Sunday's New York Times editorializes in favor of Do Not Track and other privacy legislation going through Congress and the Federal Trade Commission. Yet the New York Times itself makes much use of personal, private, and tracking information itself. Indeed, it requires tracking.

The editorial (my emphasis):

"Congress should...

Consider: In a matter of a year, the leaders of Italy, Greece, Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia have all been ousted not in the normal course of governance and not at the polls. Who's in charge there? In the Middle East, it's the people, at last (but can they retain power?)....

Two good, anecdotal illustrations of the power that our tools of publicness give to us, the public.

- Bank of America customer Molly Katchpole collected 300,000 names in an online petition against the bank's ripoff $5 debit card charge and beat down the behemoth. True, the banks...

Nieman Lab's Megan Garber wrote a brilliant post about the nature of books and conversation using as illustration a conversation about my book. It is, as Jay Rosen said, too good to summarize. So please do go read it.

I love Garber's piece not just because...

There are three things profoundly wrong with a U.S. government panel's recommendation to end blood tests for prostate cancer.

First, what does stopping the test do for a man? It makes him ignorant of what is happening in his own body. It makes him incapable of making a...

Here is a snippet from What Would Google Do? about Apple as the grand exception to every rule I put forth there:

How does Apple do it? How does it get away with operating this way even as every other company and industry is forced to redefine itself? It's just...

#OccupyWallStreet has been drawing complaints that it doesn't have a demand and a goal. But I say that is precisely its significance.

#OccupyWallStreet is a hashtag revolt. As I learned with...

I wasn't sure I could watch 50/50, but I'm glad I did ... just as I wasn't sure I could watch The Big C, but I'm glad I get to see that, too.

I've merely had cancer lite (twice: prostate and thyroid). Not having had...

The Google/Motorola deal is lawyer repellent. Or rat poison, if you prefer. It is a tragic and wasteful byproduct of our screwed-up patent system. Just this year, $18 billion is being spent not on innovation and invested not in entrepreneurship and growth but instead in fending off lawsuits. Damn straight,...