What Would Google Do?

"Google is an avalanche and it has only just begun to tumble down the mountain," Jeff Jarvis writes in a new book called "What Would Google Do?" that advises pretty much everyone—you, your company, entire industries, and the U.S. government—to study and ape the online juggernaut, or risk getting buried. Jarvis writes like he changes jobs, which is to say rapidly. He has been a TV critic, magazine founder, blogger, investor and professor, and if "WWGD" occasionally goes into sound-bite overdrive (the phrase "small is the new big" is used more than a dozen times, among other abuses), the habit can be excused as the tic of a guy who's got a lot to say about the future of technology. He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Nick Summers from Munich, where he is attending a conference in advance of the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Besides Google, it seems like you have crushes on Facebook and Amazon, too. Did you ever think about writing on WWFD or WWAD, or might you in the future?
Jeff Jarvis: [Laughs] I think that's already in this book. Because the point isn't so much to worship Google, it is to face the confusing, counterintuitive, fundamental change going on in our world now and ask, "Who is succeeding in it, and why?" So, just as I try to look admiringly from a distance at Google, I include anecdotes and examples from Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Craig Newmark at craigslist and Jeff Bezos at Amazon. There is a club of people who've figured out the Internet and succeeded at it. You can pick your own. I just think Google is the most appropriate lens, because it's gigantic; indeed the Times of London said that it's the fastest growing company in the history of the world, so who better to use as a lens to this new worldview?

So, what are the ways in which you've used Google in the last 24 hours?
Oh, can I count them all? My mail is on Google, so every time I've pinged it, I'm on Google. I've searched for news of various sorts; I used Google Maps to find restaurants in Munich, I used Google Maps to get directions; I used Google search to find movie listings, and then I used it to find reviews. I watched a mess of Google videos.

That's a lot!
I'm probably not even done. On my blog, I have Google ads there, so I made some pennies. Tonight I'm going to take a Flip video of this great event last night [a beatbox-violin duet] and put that on YouTube. I'm trying to think of all the tentacles that Google reaches out—I've probably used it in ways I don't even know.

Printed books are about the least Google-y medium around. How did you apply the "What Would Google Do?" concept to this title?
First, I'll confess, I'm a hypocrite. I didn't put this book up as a purely digital, searchable, linkable entity—I didn't eat my own dog food—because I got an advance from the publisher, and other services. Dog's gotta eat. I couldn't pass it up. In terms of the process of the book, though, I hope it was Googlier [than most] in that I thought this book through on my blog. And the great thing about the blog is the people who help me there—readers who with amazing generosity will act as peer review and challenge my ideas, and push them and fill in gaps in my knowledge.

Are there any areas in which Google itself doesn't act very "Google-y?" Not disclosing its advertising revenue splits, for example.
Right. There are areas where Google doesn't act very Google-y, which are mainly about transparency. It can't be transparent about its algorithms and how they operate, because then they will get gamed more. And those are special sauce. I wish Google were more open about its advertising arrangements and splits, so we had a better sense of the value of the market; I wish it were more open about the sources that it puts into Google News.

I wish it understood the power that it could have to support free speech against regimes in countries like China and Iran. The argument that is made by Google and its defenders on that point is that it is better for the Chinese to have a hampered Internet than no Internet at all. I think that underestimates Google's own power and strength. If suddenly the Chinese had the opportunity to lose Google tomorrow, I think they might well rise up, and that'd be "the Google Revolution." I say that with some hyperbole! I wish that Google would recognize its power and use it for good when it comes to free speech, because it lives by free speech.

You write about the end of scarcity, managing abundance … Is there anything in the book you'd update now that the financial crisis has hit so hard, and is probably getting worse?
I managed to get an insert into the book at the very last minute: the idea that we're going through more than a financial crisis, we're going through a fundamental change in the structure of the economy. Google is not the cause of that, but it is part and parcel of that. And one big outcome of this is that it'll be a long time before companies grow to scale by borrowing capital to make big acquisitions, because they can't borrow the capital, obviously.