Gloating

Ron Rosenbaum on Jeff Jarvis: I used to like Jeff Jarvis: I've never met him, but I felt I knew him from his blog, which I've read fairly regularly since he began blogging eloquently about 9/11. I've often enjoyed his opinions and, especially, his crankiness. I loved what he did to Dell when the company failed to fix his computer: He called it "Dell-Hell" and used his blog to mobilize the Dell-discontented multitudes to make the company pay attention to their "service" pledges. (He must have had flawless service in the Emirates lounge.)

What I liked about his blog was that it was personal and immediate. He's a natural at the form, with an ability to entwine his life and those of the rest of us in his musings. Here is a guy who literally took 9/11 to heart: He was on a PATH train near Ground Zero that morning and developed atrial fibrillation in the aftermath, a problem that still afflicts him.* He has been outspoken on the issue of anti-Semitism. And I never had a problem with his championing the idea of taking bloggers seriously and using the Web to find a new way of making journalism viable in the 21st century. He was right about the potential of the Net when I was still being a Luddite about it. (After all, I'm a blogger, too, these days.)

But something has changed in the last year or two: He's now visibly running for New Media! Pontificator in Chief. He began treating his own thoughts as profound and epigrammatic, PowerPoint-paradoxical, new-media-mystical. He acquired the habit of proclaiming "Jarvis' Laws" of new media, acting like a prophet, a John the Baptist if not the messiah. (Although he knows who the messiah is. He's about to publish a book of Google worship—What Would Google Do?—that makes that clear.)