What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [10]
You may extend this new relationship in many ways, such as inviting your customers to provide support, even marketing, and perhaps enabling customers to use your company as a platform to build their own companies. Through the rest of this book, we will return to the theme of this chapter—relationships—often. That is because the single greatest transformative power of the internet and Google has little to do with technology or media or even business. It’s about people and making new connections among them. It all comes back to relationships.
New Architecture
The link changes everything
Do what you do best and link to the rest
Join a network
Be a platform
Think distributed
The link changes everything
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was on the last train into the World Trade Center from New Jersey, arriving just as the first of the terrorists’ jets hit the north tower. Though I hadn’t worked as a reporter for years, I was still a journalist and worked for a news company, so I decided to stay at what was clearly a big story—I didn’t yet realize how big or how dangerous. I gathered notes on the scene and talked with survivors, calling my reports into my employer’s news sites and newspapers. An hour later, I stood about a block from the edge of the World Trade Center site as the south tower collapsed. The cloud of destruction outran me. Blinded by the debris and covered in it, I was blessed to find refuge in a bank building. I then made my way on foot to Times Square, where I wrote my news story and finally, thank God, found my way home.
The next day, I had more to say about what I had seen and felt and the news around it, so I decided to start a blog. I had read blogs. I had also arranged my employer’s investment in the company that started Blogger and popularized the form (it was bought by Google in 2003). I hadn’t blogged myself, because I thought I had nothing to say. After 9/11, I did. So I planned to write the blog for a few weeks, until I ran out of memories.
But after writing my first posts, I learned a lesson that would change forever my view of media and my career; it would eventually lead to this book. A few bloggers in Los Angeles read what I had written, wrote about it on their blogs, and linked to me. I responded and linked to them. At that moment, a gong clanged over my head. I realized we were having a conversation—a distributed conversation, happening in different places at different times, which was made possible by the link. Soon enough, through Google’s search, I could find other threads of the discussion around 9/11 and what I was writing. I saw a new structure of media: two-way and collaborative. I realized that this structure would redefine commerce, marketing, politics, government, education—the world. The link and search created the means to find anything and connect anyone. Now everyone could speak and all could hear. It enabled people to organize around any interest, task, need, market, or cause. The link and search started a revolution, and the revolution had only just begun.
Meg Hourihan, one of the creators of Blogger, wrote a groundbreaking essay in 2002, explaining the building blocks of this new system. (You can find it by searching Google for the title, “What We’re Doing When We Blog.”) Hourihan argued that the atomic unit of media online was no longer the publication or the page, with their old-media presumptions, but the blog post, which usually contains a discrete idea. Each post has a permalink, an address where it should be found forever so it can be linked to from anywhere. Hourihan realized that the permalink was both a means of organizing information and a way to build social networks on top of our distributed conversations. That is what happened when those bloggers in Los Angeles linked to my posts. We had a conversation, became friends, and even ended up doing business together. Our links connected us. “As with free speech itself,” Hourihan wrote, “what we say isn’t as important