Finally, The Internet As Intended.

What I like about Jeff Jarvis is his unbridled enthusiasm of the principles behind Web 2.0 - participation, network effects, and collaborative value. What I hate about Jeff Jarvis is his unbridled enthusiasm - he’s over-the-top most of the time. I love this recent exchange between he and Nicholas Carr:

Jarvis hype for the power of the consumer as producer in today’s markets:

Forget consumerism. We’re not just consumers anymore, as Doc Searls has taught me well. We are customers with our money in our fists, spending it wisely and joining together to spend it more wisely. And we are producers who can compete with the companies that thought of us as mere consumers [emphasis mine].

And Nicholas Carr calling him on it - priceless:

Hey, Mr. Producer, can you build me a computer for $399 and ship it over to my house? Throw in a self-fabricated printer for $49, too. And make it snappy.

As usual, Jarvis speaks in hyberbole - but there is truth there. Benefits are gained from the empowered consumer and the sites and apps making them a reality - think Google and eBay, duh. But as of now consumer-producers live in the long tail - producing amatuer products for niches. In aggregate, we’ve learned that inhabitors of the long tail do indeed compete with the head of the tail - particularly in the media market for content. But do they compete anywhere else? Can they?

Its funny to me that someone as steeped in this stuff as Jarvis would miss the big point - that the story of the future isn’t consumer-producers competing with traditional producers, its traditional producers embracing and enabling the consumer-producer that will make tomorrow’s markets so interesting. What Jarvis is seeing, correctly I think, is not real competition with traditional producers it is simply the threat of this competition that is getting the attention of traditional producers.