Books like What would Google Do? frustrate me. They are contradictions. Take an author, in this case Jeff Jarvis. He models a new world. In this case, the world created by Google. He, with his unpaid internet collaborators, develops 40 rules for operating in this new world. Then, because he does not like the fact that the new rules will not pay him, he returns to the old world rules to ring the register. You could not make up this scenario. Yet, … more
Books like What would Google Do? frustrate me. They are contradictions. Take an author, in this case Jeff Jarvis. He models a new world. In this case, the world created by Google. He, with his unpaid internet collaborators, develops 40 rules for operating in this new world. Then, because he does not like the fact that the new rules will not pay him, he returns to the old world rules to ring the register. You could not make up this scenario. Yet, … more
WWGD - What would Google Do - is a book about the new ways that internet is changing our lives, and how the best to benefit from it. Despite its title, this is not a book about Google, at least not in a sense that it makes any effort to deeply analyze and try to explain in nonobvious terms the source of Google's success. Recently I came across a picture online which depicts a small store somewhere in India that without any shame or sense of propriety named itslef "Google." Google has indeed become … more
Until you read this book, it is reasonable for you to question the title. As it is written, it appears to be a book about different problems and solutions presented in terms of what would the Google company do. Fortunately, it is much more than that because the usage of the term Google in the title is more in the nature of a process rather than the specific company. Jarvis uses the Google model of disbursement and the soliciting of comments from the crowd as his fundamental mechanism … more
The new publishing gold rush seems to be to pseudo-scientific books that "simplify" complex subjects. Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail" which tries to mate the Paretto Principal with the bell curve to form a new marketing paradigm and Malcom Gladwell's simplistic deductions so masterfully skewered in Judge Posner's review of Gladwell. Jeff Jarvis joins the parade and now suggests that if only you managed like Google, you too would be a billionaire or, as Jarvis explains on … more