What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

The message is that Google is wonderful, even a bit divine, and I want to tell you the many ways this is so. Not only is Google wonderful, but all the companies surrounding Google are wonderful too; Zipcar, Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, and others.

This book talks about the strategies which Google uses to be competitive in glowing ways. The one he brings most to the fore is "don't be evil." It reminds us with truisms that the customer can ruin your day with access to blogs and forums, the best advertising is a great product, simple and clear are best, measure everything, free is a business model, and ephemeral online sales are cheaper then the physical world of atoms.

There are points where the book seems to be a bit overstated. Jeff Jarvis uses the word Googley to describe things in a positive way as well as Googlejuice for companies like about.com who benefit from partaking in Google's success.

He also asks hypothetical questions about what if Google entered the telephone market, the car market, the airlines market, the alternative energy market, or the healthcare market. Google is heavily invested in the alternative energy market, he does bring this up, but I wish he had covered this aspect a little deeper. There is a lot of speculation involved in parts of this book. Also Sergey Brin is an investor in the electric car company, Tesla Motors.

The book is very entertaining and quite relevant. Many issues are brought up about how the world is being changed by the explosion of broadband. The newspaper industry is moving online, giving away free content generates advertising revenue (this is why we will see more and more books being brought into the public domain), pixels are cheaper than paper, and business is becoming an open conversation.

There are numerous links to interesting websites, suggested articles to read, and titles of books to check out throughout this book. Also, there is a lot of name dropping. Many prominent figures in the internet industry are named; Chris Anderson who wrote The Long Tail, Seth Godin marketer extraordinaire, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and many others.

There is nothing academic about the writing in this book. It is very populist in style, he even lauds Howard Stern. He seems to be aiming to talk to the reader directly. There are no pictures in this book. It might have been a little better with some color pictures. However, there is a blog which goes with this book, http://www.buzzmachine.com

If you want an evangelistic, positive, praising book to read about Google and what they do, read this book.

Morning Thoughts

A visitor at Googleplex in Mountainview, California signing in.

Right now, I am reading Sunshine by Robin McKinley, it is a Mythopoeic award winner. I am enjoying it tremendously. I am waiting for Stardust by Neil Gaiman. I was hoping that I could get the movie and the book so I could compare them. I will probably have to wait a couple months, I am number 142 for the waiting list on the film. Neil Gaiman is very popular.

He is so popular that people will treasure his signature on paper napkins and wait hours in line to see him read his book. I think he is one of those people who also conserves his signature, not giving it to anyone and everyone.

I have stacks of books at home waiting to be returned to the library. I have to be careful that I return everything. While fines sometimes are excused for people who work in the library, lost books are still charged to library workers. So, we do have to return books or end up paying for them eventually.

I read two professional journals online in addition to the ones in print. Reading Library Journal online lead me to this blog entry. Apparently it is not allowed to lend out Kindle ebook readers. I can't imagine we' ll have any reason to get kindle ebook readers. But, we do have laptops.
http://rochellejustrochelle.typepad.com/copilot/2008/01/loaning-kindle.html#comment-98970820

I also sometimes read Bookselling This Week, mainly for the book reviews.
http://news.bookweb.org/

I am looking for a good excuse to get away from my library for a day. I looked at Metro, the Metropolitan Library Council for New York and they have a really interesting one day conference next month called "Google & Libraries", I think it will be both entertaining and on some levels very useful. I am going to try and go there. It may take some doing for me to convince them to let me go to this thing. On Monday, I am going to ask my supervisor if I can go to this thing. I hope they give me a badge so I can add it to my badge collection when I go.
http://www.metro.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=215&Itemid=424

Cartoon History of the Universe And Link Dropping

Right now, I just finished looking at a book which I received as a present, The Cartoon History of the Universe III From The Rise of Arabia to the Renaissance by Larry Gonick. This is a long running "graphic novel" which is about history. What is nice about these cartoons is that they are very open ended and try be comprehensive on which people they cover. The section on Islam for example covers the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Eurasia like Turkey. The humor is slightly irreverent throughout the comic and draws you in well. The history seems to be accurate. The cartoon book has an extensive bibliography, a list of names from history, and an index. I remember reading the smaller comic books when I was a child of six years old. They were were my fathers comics.

Apparently, what I am doing is link dropping, which is the thruth. It has been a more effective strategy than using search engines. I got exactly two hits from Google Blog Search, one was for the book Un Lun Dun, the other was for the Wizard of the Crow. When I look at the free hit counter I am using from hitcounterguru, there is no activity from keywords, just forums and usenet groups. I would have to add my site to a spam style free search engine to get better results from keywords. I would rather be labelled a link dropper than a spammer. On that thought, I looked at the requirements for being listed in DMOZ, a nonprofit directory. One of the requirements is that you not have too many external links, so I think I'll pass with this one.





I was looking at the top ten keyword sets on searchenginewatch, it is quite funny. Almost everything is commercial, the word book or literature isn't even on the site list. Maybe if I talked about myspace.com, cnn, pizza hut, or yahoo 360, I would be on the list of interesting sites.





So I guess I must mention that I like CNN, it is the most read news site. I read it sometimes in the morning along with Yahoo News, something which isn't even mentioned. The only time I watch the news is when I am at the laundromat, I would much rather read it online just when it has come off the wire. If you wait even a single day, the news article gets objected to by some group or other and gets homogenized. It takes about a day from when something is released to the Associated Press to reach the print newspapers. This gives plenty of times for the editors to change the news so it doesn't offend anyone. We don't have a liberal media or a conservative media we have a homogenized media.





Now the second thing I should mention is myspace.com, it is a ubiquitous web site, one of the top ten in use in the United States. I was looking at the Philip Jose Farmer, http://www.pjfarmer.com/ website, one of the truly great science fiction writers, he has a http://www.myspace.com/pjfarmer link which has his personal information and links to him. Philip Jose Farmer is well worth reading. I was actually looking for what his signature looked like on the site.

Myspace.com is probably a site traffic magnet. Somehow, I think I'll take a pass. Although, I am wondering if I posted myself as an African Bull Elephant it might attract attention to this site in a kind of Barnum and Bailey style.
http://www.myspace.com/bullelephant

Now that I have added a link to an important Myspace site, I will further my keyword research by adding a string of the most used keywords in the Label for this Post.

I went and found some more blog search engines to add my site to: myblog2u.com, blogsearch.com, icerocket.com, boingboing.net, Read A Blog, Blog Pulse, and Blog Rolling.com. Boing Boing. net is a truly wonderful site with lots of strange things on it like collapsible paper rocket ships and other oddities. Cory Doctorow, the science fiction writer, is the main editor and poster for the site.

I also took some time to go back through search engine watch and find some more places to apply for a URL entry. These were MSN Live, Search King, and Best of the Web Blogs. I am not really that much of a technical person. Some places gave me the option of pinging my site to other blog search engines. I must have done it from three different places.

It is really up to the editors to decide whether they like what I wrote. This is a really unpredictable thing in my opinion. A lot of writers and editors are really quirky and interesting people. Every editor is looking for slightly different things depending on the guidelines which are presented to them by their employers.

Something you may consider if you are planning a book talk is to have an editor talk instead. Authors are very interested in hearing what it takes to get published, or how people choose which books to publish. Sometimes, if you are very lucky, you can get an editor who also has written a number of books.