Rants on Interactivity

Blog daddy Jeff Jarvis unloads on some arrogant 'pro' journalists who think interactivity is a matter of getting readers to click on buttons so they can led by the nose through the 'news', meanwhile dismissing blogging as "Drivel passed off as journalism. The ramblings of someone somewhere passed off as news." Here's a clue for you folks: We get to decide what's news now, and who's worth reading.

Jeff gets to work with such wingnuts daily, so I can well understand his vehemence. But I'll toss in a hearty cheer of support from this direction. I've been bumping into this kind of arrogance since the early days of CD-ROM multimedia in the '80s, up through the $0 billion interactive TV market of the early 90s, and well into the Internet age when they should have started knowing better. Trying to 'compel' your readers to waste their time dealing with your user interface has never been a value proposition. The information throttling, non-dare-call-it-bias intermediary and aggregation position is a wasting business model, wiggle how you may. As for real, two-way conversational interactivity, you might be able to change a civilization with it, given luck and a tail wind. [Due Diligence]

7:33:14 PM