Friday, October 15, 2010

Read (Audiobook) - What Would Google Do? and "the Google Story"

I recently finished listening to What Would Google Do? (http://www.harpercollins.com/books/What-Would-Google-Do-Jeff-Jarvis/?isbn=9780061709715)

I liked this book, as it portrays a relatively positive and democratic view of the world of business - not the image or model I believe exists in many places.

That being said, I think Mr. Jarvis is a bit too big of a fan and has perhaps a "too rose" coloured perception of the model in play on the large scale.

My biggest concern about the proliferation of the web as the "source of all knowledge" is that it is almost impossible to identify or establish a method of evaluating the relative validity of sources - virtually any source can appear reliable, clean, professional and thus appear valid.

Democracy alone can't fix the problem.  The U.S. is going through dramatic, highly charged political infighting, primarily because there is a belief that if enough people believe something, it becomes true (see weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; see the renewal of the evolution vs religion arguments, see the Muslim Obama.....).

Google is not the cause of these events, but some of the more rosy scenarios outlined by Mr. Jarvis would be problematic, given the US model above.  He has put his medical records online, and gotten useful advice.  On a larger scale, this would probably bring forth any and all forms of advice - from medical research (both completed and promising) through to the natuarlists (let nature fix it, or eat this herb) to voodoo.  If the volume was sufficient, it would become quickly impossible to make any sense of the mass of data, and the sources themselves may not reliably indicate the appropriate degree(s) of validity.

All and all, it was certainly a good read, and had lots of interesting examples, proposals and discussion.

I had listened to The Google Story (http://www.thegooglestory.com/) a month or so prior to What Would Google Do?  This book is a history of the Google growth as a company and business model and explained their key innovation ("page rank") and how that differentiated Google from other search engines, and how it was able to be used to democratically set pricing for advertising - increasing the pertinence of advertisements to users, and increasing the effectiveness of ads for the vendors.

The Google Story is a very nice "david and goliath" story, though in this case David may become much larger than Goliath ever dreamed of.

No comments:

Post a Comment