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By Root 849 0

you or think of themselves as members of your community. Don’t think that you can create a community. They’re not yours. They’re not going to start wearing Target T-shirts or singing the Toyota song—not unless you have an extraordinary product and brand (such as an entertainment brand or a hot designer label or Apple). That’s about the silliest thing I hear from any company: They talk about their community. I have sat in meetings with major consumer brands—candies, soaps, stores—as they say that they have communities that will come to their sites and do what they think they should do. Remember Zuckerberg’s advice: Communities are already doing what they want to do. If you’re lucky, they’ll let you help them.

Once a community does gather around you, be aware that you don’t own it; the community owns itself. American Girl, the doll brand, started an online club as a safe place where young girls could communicate with each other and play games to earn points and gifts. The business wasn’t big enough for owner Mattel, so one day it up and killed the club, crushing my daughter, Julia, and cutting her off from the friends she had made there. Mattel should have learned who runs its town. It’s a lesson Barack Obama learned when his followers, disappointed with his stand on an issue, used his own campaign platform to organize a protest against him. Once you hand over control, you can’t take it back.

We no longer need companies, institutions, or government to organize us. We now have the tools to organize ourselves. We can find each other and coalesce around political causes or bad companies or talent or business or ideas. We can share and sort our knowledge and behavior. We can communicate and come together in an instant. We also have new ethics and attitudes that spring from this new organization and change society in ways we cannot yet see, with openness, generosity, collaboration, efficiency. We are using the internet’s connective tissue to leap over borders—whether they surround countries or companies or demographics. We are reorganizing society. This is Google’s—and Facebook’s and craigslist’s—new world order.

New Economy

Small is the new big

The post-scarcity economy

Join the open-source, gift economy

The mass market is dead—long live the mass of niches

Google commodifies everything

Welcome to the Google economy

Small is the new big

Mind you, big is still big. Wal-Mart is the largest company on earth. Bigbox stores such as Home Depot continue to drive mom-and-pop hardware shops out of business. Media companies are conglomerating. Airlines are merging. Even small churches are being turned into condos thanks to the rise of megachurches. The Super Bowl can still draw 97 million viewers. Hell, Google itself isn’t just big; it’s ginormous. No, big won’t go away.

But small is rising. A tiny start-up can become a manufacturing company using somebody else’s factory and distribution while selling to a worldwide market that can find its products via Google. Any of us can start a highly specialized and targeted media company using blog software and paying for it with Google ads. One person can plant a seed to start a political movement.

There won’t be a single new retail behemoth to battle Wal-Mart like Japanese monsters in Tokyo Bay. Instead, Wal-Mart and other big chains are getting nipped at their heels by a million tiny competitors—a half a million of them on eBay alone. In 2007 eBay sold $59.4 billion in merchandise from 547,000 online stores. It may be dwarfed by Wal-Mart’s $345 billion, but in 2007 eBay beat the sales of America’s largest department-store chain, Federated (aka Macy’s), with revenues of $26.3 billion in 853 stores.

Some weblogs now have more traffic and links than major media sites. Gawker Media, a gaggle of gossipy blogs started by Nick Denton, boasted in July 2008 that its dozen sites had double the web traffic of the Los Angeles Times online—254 million vs. 127 million page views in a month. All weblogs, as a group, now have an audience of readers (57 million as early as 2006, according