The Cable Gamer has come to like The Daily Beast, which is a lively alternative to The Huffington Post. The politics of DB tend to be similar to that of Huffpo, which is to say, liberal and snarky--except, of course, when both are being reverential to Barack Obama. But that's OK; neither site pretends to be unbiased, the way that the broadcast TV networks pretended to be, or the big daily newspapers. There's nothing wrong with opinion, so long as it's clearly labeled as opinion.
Like Huffpo, DB has a good attitude toward technology. And so TCG read, with interest, this interview with Jeff Jarvis, the well-known blogger/proprietor of Buzz Machine, and now author of a new book, What Would Google Do?
As the title suggests, Jarvis is a fan of Google, and so the book is advice to companies to be more like Google. OK, I am not entirely persuaded, but what argument, ever, is entirely persuasive? DB's Dave Kansas conducted this interview with Jarvis, in which he laid out five ways that other companies could learn from Google. Here was one way, which struck TCG as persuasive, in helping media companies figure out their own plans for community:
Get out of the way. This is actually Craig Newmark's law. As Google built the most powerful tool imaginable—the entire world of digital knowledge revealed behind a simple search box—so did Craig build a simple tool that changed society (and newspapers and real estate and more) without prescribing how we should use it. They create platforms to enable us to do what we want to do and then, instead of giving us rules about their use, then they stand back and put us in charge.
