What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [12]
In retail, media, education, government, and health—everything—the link drives specialization, quality, and collaboration, and it changes old roles and creates new ones. The link changes the fundamental architecture of societies and industries the way steel girders and rails changed how cities and nations were built and how they operated. Google makes links work. Google is the U.S. Steel of our age.
Join a network
Industries and institutions, in their most messianic moments, tend to view the internet in their own image: Retailers think of the internet as a store—a catalog and a checkout. Marketers see it as their means to deliver a brand message. Media companies see it as a medium, assuming that online is about content and distribution. Politicians think it is conduit for their campaign messages and fundraising (and a new way to deliver junk mail). Cable and phone companies hope the internet is just their next pipe to own.
They all want to control the internet because that is how they view their worlds. Listen to the rhetoric of corporate value: Companies own customers, control distribution, make exclusive deals, lock out competitors, keep trade secrets. The internet explodes all those points of control. It abhors centralization. It loves sea level and tears down barriers to entry. It despises secrecy and rewards openness. It favors collaboration over ownership. The once-powerful approach the internet with dread when they realize they cannot control it.
The internet adds networks of links over society, connecting people with information, action, and each other. It is in those connections that value is created, efficiency is found, knowledge is grown, and relationships are formed. Every link and every click is a connection, and with every connection, a network is born or grows stronger. That’s how the internet spun its web, as the network of networks.
The more connections there are, the greater the value. You’ve certainly heard the old saw of network theory: One fax machine is worth nothing as it can talk to nothing, two are worth twice as much, and connecting millions of fax machines makes each one worth exponentially more (while the economies of scale—and the market for overpriced ink cartridges—also make each one cheaper to buy). The network is greater than the sum of its machines, but that’s just a one-dimensional network: one machine talks to one machine one-way and once. The internet is a three-dimensional space of reciprocal links whose value multiplies with use and time. Google is the chief agent of that value creation.
Google performs this alchemy via search, of course: Seek and ye shall find anything you want in fractions of a second. Each time that happens—4.4 billion times a month in 2008 in the United States alone, according to Nielsen—another connection is made between a person and information or another person. Google creates a virtuous circle: The more we click on search results, the smarter Google gets; the smarter it gets, the better its results are, and the more we use Google.
Google supports its economy of clicks and links with ads, which appear on sites as small as my blog and as mighty as NYTimes.com; almost anyone can join its ad network. If Google thought like an old-media company—like, say, Time Inc. or Yahoo—it would have controlled content, built a wall around it, and tried to keep us inside. Instead, it opened up and put its ads anywhere, building an advertising network so vast and powerful that it is overtaking both the media and advertising industries even as it collaborates with and powers them online. There’s Google’s next virtuous circle: The more Google sends traffic to sites with its ads, the more money it makes; the more money those sites make, the more content they can create for Google to organize. Google also helps those sites by giving them content and functionality: maps, widgets, search pages, YouTube videos. Google feeds the network to make the network grow.
I am surprised that old media companies have not tried to copy Google’s model