Jeff Jarvis' Public Parts, released September 27th and currently 12,098 in "books" on Amazon, has come under review by Evgeny Morozov. It is a rather singularly vicious review. From early on: "Why are we so obsessed with privacy? Jarvis blames rapacious privacy advocates—'there is money to be made in privacy'—who are paid to mislead the 'netizens,' that amorphous elite of cosmopolitan Internet users whom Jarvis regularly volunteers to represent in Davos. On Jarvis’s scale of evil, privacy advocates fall between Qaddafi’s African mercenaries and greedy investment bankers. All they do is 'howl, cry foul, sharpen arrows, get angry, get rankled, are incredulous, are concerned, watch, and fret.' [...]

Oh boy. A small New York Times column has dared to say that "For some blogs, rumors are their stock in trade." Now the usual suspects are freaking out! About.com consultant (and author!) Jeff Jarvis: "We who publish must learn how to say what we don't know at least as well as we say what we know." That part actually doesn't address the column at all, which is about people publishing things they don't believe to be true and never really saying so. (The two blogs in question, in this case, are Techcrunch and Valleywag, which have always been openly devoted to rumors and have often had unbelievably [...]

The New York Times takes some time out to haul out the always-salient question "What Is Wrong With People On The Internet?" today, this time in a Styles piece by Taffy Broedesser-Akner that looks at the more vicious reactions she received to a Salon article she had penned on the PTSD she dealt with after the particularly violent birth of her son. The Salon story eventually resulted in pseudonymous Internet people taking time out of their days to tell her things like "Do us all a favor — don't have any more kids." Yeesh. So much for The New Niceness!

Trevor Butterworth, of STATS, and Damien Cave, of the Times, today have suggested that full-time media consultant (including to the dangerously ill Newhouse Newspapers) and Google enthusiast Jeff Jarvis stop complaining and start doing, on the occasion of Jarvis' latest very angry rant about, yes, newspapers.

Jeff Jarvis and Rachel Sklar are now not friends. · Comment · LikeChoire likes this.