This is a great blog post by Jeff Jarvis, someone I got to meet in person on February 3 at the Diller building. (NY Tech MeetUp: 02/03/09)
Davos 09: Open Bank full disclosure of performance and compensation. ...... a means to confirm that customers understood what they were buying ...... Bankers are in fortress mode ...... eimagined retail, education, and government. ....... obert Scoble, who has been arguing that the way out of our mess is to start a million companies ....... Shimon Peres, who made a forceful argument that the future will be secured with investment in technology (including biotechnology) and education (which he as much as said was the next thing to come after the internet wave). ........ giving trillions of dollars to the incumbents, to people like that sneering banker ....... We should, instead, be investing our money in entrepreneurs and technologists, the people who will change old industries, reimagining them under new rules with new people ..... need to look at replacing rather than just repairing these broken institutions .... We are bailing out the past. Instead, we must bail out the future.
Scenario For News news - on both the content and business side - will no longer be controlled by a single company but will be collaborative. ....... provide platforms that enable communities to do what they want to do, share what they want to share, know what they need to know together ........ open the process of news in blogs ...... Editors will become more curators, aggregators, organizers, educators. ....... less about controlling a flow than encouraging and improving creation. ....... nvestigations matter more than ever ....... Do what you do best and link to the rest ........ covering a niche deeply ....... The old syndication model will die ..... he wire-service model is in jeopardy ..... any media, wiki snapshots of knowledge, live reports, crowd reports, aggregation, curation, data bases, and other forms ........ EveryBlock will organize data; Outside.in will organize geo content; Daylife will organize news; Publish2 will organize links; Digg will help the crowd curate; Clickable will help sell ads; Google will serve ads; YouTube and Brightcove will serve videos ......... algorithms mining newly transparent government documents ........ Seth Godin’s prescription for The New York Times ..... Why doesn’t the paper have 10,000 stringers, each with a blog, each angling to be picked up by the central site?
The Link Changes Everything The more your customers take ownership of your brand, the less you will spend annoying people with your ads.
Job Losses Hint at Vast Remaking of Economy
Jarvis is an imaginative optimist.
Instead of seeing job losses and folding companies and wrecked futures and dislocations he sees capitalism's creative destructions. Historic parallels still apply. What is happening right now to the economy seems to happen once every 70 years, has happened four times in a row now. After each such crisis the economy has come out better than ever before. Jarvis is suggesting the same is about to happen all over again. He is focused on the impending good news.
Not all the observations are his, he borrows as freely as he expounds. But they together are a great narrative to these wildly depressing times for the most. Many jobs are lost forever. But new, better jobs have to be created, and people need to be helped to transition to those new jobs.
What are some of his observations, and that of others he mentions?
- The market is rightly bringing down the artificially high prices on a host of things.
- An old building is being brought down so a new building can take its place.
- This fundamental restructuring is to the economy but also to society. How we relate to each other is changing.
- Many jobs lost now will never return. "In key industries — manufacturing, financial services and retail — layoffs have accelerated so quickly in recent months as to suggest that many companies are abandoning whole areas of business." (New York Times)
- Not just jobs, entire sectors of the US economy might disappear.
- Newspapers, magazines, books, broadcast media, all are experiencing upheavals.
- A lot of retail is going online.
- Business travel will for the large part be replaced by more efficient communications.
- Dirty energy will "shrivel."
- Real estate construction will decline.
- Health care and education will see reinvention and growth.
- Ditto government.
- This is a great time to launch startups.
- "Microsoft, MTV, CNN, FedEx, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Burger King. Each opened during a period of economic downturn."
- Jarvis emphasizes creating platforms and networks. He talks of "a network of spaces for independent work (the inverse of Starbucks: good with space and services, OK with coffee). Add payroll, insurance, hosting, and all sorts of services."
- "Radical transparency" for banks.
- He wants to "rethink the auto industry in the image of the computer industry: disaggregating the car so we can reaggregate it from many new suppliers."
- There's "new scenarios for news."
- There is "rethinking and remaking advertising."
The promise is a new economy, a new society, a new world. Help people see through the transition.
Credit will have to flow again, spending will have to grow again. But they will go in new directions.
But right now we are in the destruction part of the cycle. Let the creation begin as soon as possible.
Jarvis has done a good job of describing where we are now and we are or should be going, but he has not done a good job of connecting the two. How do we help people with the transition? How to minimize disruptions? How to move people from lost jobs to better paying jobs?
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