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.

The Future of the Internet And How To Stop It-- Jonathan Zittrain-- Thoughts

The Future of the Internet And How To Stop It-- Jonathan Zittrain-- Thoughts



The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain is about the difference between generative or open technologies and tethered or controlled technologies. The author takes the position that free and open generative technologies are the best technologies for the internet.


The central thesis is that there is a conflict between having an open, disruptive, creative, often unsafe internet versus having a tightly controlled, monitored, and surveilled internet. Various connotations come to mind freedom versus safety, open access versus closed access.


The book also traces the origins of the internet starting with the Hollerith punch card machine, going through the early telelphone system, to the modern personal computer. Jonathan Zittrain talks about how the internet was created by academics and other professionals. It was based on rough consensus. He quotes the saying, "No presidents, no kings, no voting."


There is an unwritten vision of two different internets, one where we access the internet from dumb terminals through a router to a fixed access point with high security, and another where we have very powerful personal computers with firewalls, cloud computers, and a policy of open access and freedom of use.


The book brings up many more questions than it answers. The writing is complex, at times confusing, and often deeply interesting.


Jonathan Zittrain views the generative internet as the best possible world. He uses Wikipedia as an example of a superb invention created by the free exchange of ideas. He points out that it is often inaccurate, subject to scurilous content, and cannot be cited as an authoritative source most of the time. Still, his description of how Wikipedia is self correcting and employs many mechanisms to protect its data is very interesting.


In contrast, he describes what would be called, the situation of perfect enforcement, where everything is under universal monitoring. Your cell phone listens to your calls, your computer tracks which websites you visit, camera phones watch everything you do on the street, your tivo lets everyone know what you are watching, and everything you buy is tagged with RFID (radio frequency identification.) You are not the only one being watched. You are watching the police and bureaucrats with camcorders (a la Rodney King), reporting on your local politicians in blogs, and watching the police and bureacrats. In other words a totally monitored society. This is a very real potential future.


The author is arguing this may not just come about because of a police state, but because everything we do will become copyrightable media. This includes videos we place on youtube, personal songs, things downloaded from Ipods. There are already "black networks" of copyright infringers who share illegal downloads.


The book is very interesting. It is well worth reading. It will expand your horizons on issues that have to do with the internet. I enjoyed reading it a lot. I support the idea of a generative internet.


I personally don't like cell phones, ipods, and other tethered devices like xboxes which tie directly into large companies like Apple Computer, Sprint, and Microsoft. I do really enjoy my personal computer and would like to be able to be as creative as possible with it. I also like web suring and blogging as you can tell. Read this, it will keep you informed.

Afternoon Thoughts, Evening Thoughts

A copy of The Thinker by Auguste Rodin at Columbia University in New York.


Afternoon Thoughts

Tonight is my late night. It is a day for minor cleanup. I finished most of the ordering I plan on doing this week. Right now, I am sorting the boxes next to my desk to see what I will send to the recycling bins. I already sent several old phone books to the recycling boxes as well as some dated law material. We really can't save old phone books and legal materials because it ceases being accurate. Actually, this isn't quite true, we do keep a copy of the old phone book each year for the local history collection.

We have over fifty years worth of old phone books for our town. Occassionally people use this for genealogical purposes. Looking up old obituaries is also the main reason we keep the old newspapers on microfilm. People often send us letters requesting obituaries from the old papers. We search for them then print them up and send them out to requesters.

Someone wrote a review for this blog. I am posting a link to it here.


Evening Thoughts

I did some weeding of the business management and leadership sections the 650 dewey numbers. It looks like I'll have to replace a lot of the material on office automation. Most of the material was very outdated. I'll be ordering "administrative assistant" handbooks, office planning, home office books, keyboarding, and wordprocessing books.

I am looking at a copy of Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell. It comes before Ragamuffin in the series.

I have written a bit of the review for The Future of the Internet by Jonathan Zittrain. It has been a slow, but steady process.

Afternoon Thoughts

A little light reading.

Afternoon Thoughts

I read some more of The Future of the Internet on the train to work today. The book is quite complex. It may take me a couple more days to finish reading. One of the concepts in books is tethered appliances or computers specifically dedicated for unique purposes. Iphones, xboxes, and automatic teller machines are good examples of this kind of device. These devices are designed to be very secure and have limited purposes. They do not have open programming architectures.

When I got in to work, I focused on ordering business books. I basically plugged in the titles of the previous titles I had found from Barnes and Noble, Powells, and the Queens library. It really was mostly make work to finish compiling an order list.

Then I went through the last six months of monthly reports to compile program statistics for adult programs I had done. It was mainly attendance records with totals for programs done in the library and from outside agencies. We mainly brought in Service Corps of Retired Executives and the Womens Enterprise Development Center. In house, we had poetry readings and some films every month.

This afternoon, I also did some some more inserts of the law collection. Afterwards, I started on weeding the quarto or oversize graphic novels and comics. It is quite interesting looking at Fearless Fosdick, Little Nemo In Slumberland, Chas Addams, and Dick Tracy. We have a lot of anthologies of all the classic comics from yesteryear.

Today was a day for everyday activities that go with the job.

Morning Thoughts

Morning Thoughts

I have not been doing anything too exciting this morning. I took a few minutes to look at Amazon and Barnes and Noble online for business management book titles. I read some more of The Future of the Internet.

I read a little bit of the documentation for Opera. I also looked at Entrecard for a little bit. It has been a slow but steady morning. I even took a short walk around the neighborhood and bought a cup of coffee from the local deli. The coffee woke me up quite nicely.

Because everything is pretty quiet today, I went through and made sure all my links in my sidebar are still working. It is good to do this occassionally. Websites and blogs have a tendency to evaporate unexplicably. No dead links here if possible.

I also checked my Sitemeter to see where my web traffic was coming from. Most of it is coming from Google Blogsearch and Entrecard. There is a smattering of hits from Twitter, Yahoo, and Fuelmyblog, as well as a few individual websites.

I am doing housecleaning for the blog. If you want to, feel free to make any suggestions you think might help to improve this blog.

Morning Thoughts, A Word Quiz

O is for Opera, the browsing software.

Morning Thoughts

I am quite happy to say, my car passed inspection so I don't have to worry about this for another year.  I tried to drive over to the Queens main library, but there was a giant street fair and all the parking was taken.  I ended up driving for a little while, then heading home.

I am finding the Opera browser to be most satisfying.  It is even faster than I thought.  Browsing and loading websites happens very quickly.  It makes Entrecard dropping go fast.  I still haven't looked through all the features but I like it better than Internet Explorer.

I read a bit more of The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It.  I am up to page 88.  At this point in the book, the author is talking about innovation.  It is much harder for large companies to innovate because it requires them to focus on things which are not necessarily their major selling points.  There is also a bit on how customers create innovations with existing products.  For example, 20% of mountain bikers are likely to modify their bikes to make them easier to ride.   The author uses many general ideas in this work as well as ideas on the internet.

Just as an aside.  I've noticed that there are not as many Star Trek books as used to be put out.  I guess this is because the show is no longer on television.  In fact, I see no star trek books as part of the Locus bestsller list.  Star Wars seems to be a lot more prominent lately.  Dark Horse comics has been producing a lot of Star Wars comics, and Pocket Books has been producing a lot of Star Wars paperbacks.  There are a few series which I have not ordered a lot of which seem to be at a lot of libraries.  These are Warhammer 40K and Forgotten Realms.  Maybe, I like to have my science fiction paperbacks to have original stories.  I might order a few of these just to show we have them.  Also Halo is another popular series that is being put out as paperback books.

A Word Quiz

This was a nice little entertaining quiz which I found while looking at the Oxford University Press Blog. http://www.oup-concisequiz.co.uk/  

Morning Thoughts, Evening Thoughts

Hollerith Card

Morning Thoughts

I think I finally got up on the right side of the bed today. I took the train in to work this morning. I napped most of the way in. But, towards the end, I started reading The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain. He has licensed it for free over the internet under Creative Commons license. http://futureoftheinternet.org/download

I think this is kind of interesting. It means you can look it over on the computer then see if you want to buy it in print. The book so far focuses on the difference between generative technologies like the internet and tethered technologies like mainframes. Generative technologies are open to use and programming by everyone, and tethered technologies are designed to be used for specific purposes. An xbox game console or an ipod would be a good example of a tethered technology. A personal computer would be an example of a generative technology.

I have various things piled up which I need to do. I have two copies of the New York Times Book Review to look through and a variety of legal material to process.

I think today should be interesting. I have to return all the numerous books, dvds and graphic novels which I took out for the weekend.

Several books have come in for me to read. By Schism Rent Asunder by David Weber, Kellory The Warlock by Lin Carter, and The Post American World by Fareed Zakaria. One of the people who reads this site asked me to review The Post American World. I am going to read this after I finish reading The Future of the Internet.

Right now, I am just catching up on things. Doing things like writing monthly reports and checking how my work is going.

I worked some more on ordering for the graphic novels section. This of course includes newspaper comic strips. I went and picked up the Daily News and tried to order books on the comic strips that are in one of the local papers. I ordered books based on several comic strips including Zits, Pearls Before Swine, Sherman's Lagoon, Dilbert, Mother Goose and Grimm, and Rose is Rose.

I also ordered a few science fiction and fantasy titles.

As part of the process, I put a few titles on hold for myself to read, Slanted Jack by Mark L. Van Name which is the author's second book, Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson which is the seventh book in an excellent fantasy series, and Saturn's Children by Charles Stross. Saturn's Children by Charles Stross is supposed to be a tribute to Robert Heinlein's Friday. Saturn's Children is a tale for adults.

Evening Thoughts

I took the car out for a short drive in preparation for my road test tomorrow.  I drove around the neighborhood as well as down to the mall and stopped at Barnes and Noble.  I hope my car passes the state inspection tomorrow.  I have put over a hundred miles on it.

This evening, Internet Explorer was not working correctly.  I download Opera 9.51 and found it worked fine for my site.  Internet Explorer was not working with Entrecard or this blog.  It was also giving me errors with several other sites.  So far Opera has been doing a fine job.