The Associated Press has sent new signals in recent days of its intention to protect its content and deal harshly with those who use it extensively. It has proposed a news registry to tag and track its content as it's being used, with the intention of working through arrangements with users to pay for that content.

Setting aside the technical questions about such an approach --- most bloggers and aggregators find it simple to cut and paste content in such a way as to bypass something like AP is proposing --- the larger question of the inherent approach has touched off some extreme criticism of the venerable news agency.

Jeff Jarvis, one of the more notable critics of AP's approach in recent months, is arguing that the assets inside the Internet offer more than AP could --- thus, individuals and organizations should mass and replace it.

In Techdirt, Mike Masnick implies (but doesn't provide clear sourcing) that insiders are critical of AP's approach. He is suggesting Reuters step in and pick up the ball. It should encourage bloggers to link to them instead, he argues.

Jeff Jarvis' Buzzmachine is required reading in the digital age, but if you're going to understand something new today, it should be his evaluation of how Twitter's open publishing system --- its API --- has particular value.

For a few days the Twitterverse has been alight with praise of the efforts by many people to employ Twitter's open system to help thwart efforts to curtail commentary coming from an Iran in political turmoil.

Jarvis articulates nicely the technical enabling of the Iran dissidents through Twitterphiles that employ its open-sourced publishing. In some ways people are pointing to this juncture as the time Twitter became of global value --- especially in view of restrictions on mainstream coverage --- but Jarvis is the first to put it smartly into sentences.

Jeff Jarvis has one of his more pointed posts today in asserting that journalists need to create value in an era of abundance and waste.

That's right, waste. Jarvis sees a lot of inefficiency, even in challenging economic times --- reporters performing roles others are, providing content others are, going through the motions instead of going through a process of considering how to be different.

He extends his argument to bloggers --- and I feel a little tweaked by the critique --- in asserting that just providing links without adding value isn't sufficient. Point taken.

What he's noticing is what happens when resources are challenged: Quite naturally some newsrooms focus on what has worked in the past. He shouldn't be surprised to see a CNN correspondent doing the same type of story over and over. Human instincts don't necessarily lead to bravery in challenging circumstances. But he's not wrong: Newsrooms will thrive if they find more interesting ways to provide content and fewer ways to duplicate what others are providing.

In his latest Buzzmachine post, Jeff Jarvis minces nothing on the Associated Press' attempts to fend off use of its material online by others: You're the problem, you homogenized the content, and now that you can't take advantage of the link economy, you're suggesting you're Don Quixote.

He ridicules the AP's plan to establish a portal. He suggests that, rather than attack bloggers who repurpose its content, AP should be part of a solution that links to original content --- as should aggregators and search engines. Rather than fight the Internet, why not use technology to feature the original work most prominently?

He goes on at length and suggest the AP is the enemy of the newspaper, which offers original work and watches it rewritten and redistributed.

I would suggest that AP was the original participant in a link economy in a pre-Internet age, in that it worked as a cooperative to do what Jarvis suggests: do what you do best, link to the rest. Only, in the AP era, it wasn't a link, but a throw --- a technical distribution of that content to some paper far away that couldn't gather the information for itself. It's a different era now.

The Washington Post's Paul Farhi asserts in the American Journalism Review that newspapers were harmed irrevocably by the Associated Press' decision to sell its content to such portals as AOL and Yahoo (then, presumably, to the newspapers' own sites).

He suggests that, if the genie were kept in the bottle and only the AP's family had access to the content, newspaper sites would not have found themselves competing against other information providers in the digital space so severely and rapidly. It would have bought time.

He dismisses the notion that Reuters or Agence France Presse would have been adequate substitutes.

Jeff Jarvis took him up on this argument and, while getting more than a little personal, suggested that it's AP's reluctance to link back to the original content that is most hurting the papers that own it.

If you haven't had a chance to absorb Jeff Jarvis' What Would Google Do?, take a moment and go through the attached PowerPoint presentation as a taste of the book.

I reviewed the book recently for The Vancouver Sun and some of our chain's newspapers distributed the review, but I recently re-read parts of it and came away further impressed with its foresight.

While Jarvis can be a bit over-certain of his position on the newspaper industry --- I just don't think things are as grim as he portrays --- many of his approaches to open-sourcing content and the link economy are vital elements of any discussion today on digital media. All of us can learn from him.

Jarvis has been taking a bit of a ribbing on charging for the book and not making a free version available. He's been pulling bits of it into his Buzzmachine blog, but this is a better representation of the ideas. Essentially here he's doing what Google would do.

WWGD? - The PowerPoint

View more presentations from jeffjarvis.

The Los Angeles Times and latimes.com are staging a three-day point-counterpoint on the future of newspapers, with Buzzmachine's Jeff Jarvis and Reflections of a Newsosaur's Alan Mutter providing their views.

Judging from day one, the two top journalists are keeping their A games in their backpockets. It's pretty much a sense of rehash for them, with Mutter noting that print media will need to get niche-oriented and innovate, and Jarvis suggesting that he doesn't care about the future of the paper but the future of journalism.

One presumes Day Two and Day Three will be livelier and give the audience something more than what they've given their online audiences earlier.

I had a breezy walk-through in reviewing the new Jeff Jarvis book, What Would Google Do?, in Saturday's Vancouver Sun.
Here's the link.