What Would Google Do? Part 11

Apple does not manage abundance. It creates scarcity. Witness the fanatics who camped out overnight to get each version of the iPhone. According to blog reports, the company cut off sales of the phones on the first day with devices still in stock so there would be lines again the second day. Apple makes its own mobs.

Atoms? Apple has no problem with them. iTunes drives customers to buy more Apple hardware.

Free as a business model? The gift economy? Apple is not generous. It charges a premium for its quality.

Apple follows just a few Google rules. Lord knows, it innovates. And n.o.body's better at simplifying tasks and design.

How does Apple do it? How does it get away with operating this way even as every other company and industry is forced to redefine itself? It's just that good. Its vision is that strong and its products even better. I left Apple once, in the 1990s, before Steve Jobs returned to the company, when I suffered through a string of bad laptops. But when I'd had it with Dell, I returned to Apple and now everyone in my family has a Mac (plus one new Dell); we have three iPhones; we have lots of iPods; I lobbied successfully to make Macs the standard in the journalism school where I teach. I'm a believer, a gla.s.sy-eyed cultist. But I didn't write this book about Apple because I believe it is the grand exception. Frank Sinatra was allowed to violate every rule about phrasing because he was Sinatra. Apple can violate the rules of business in the next millennium because it is Apple (and more important, because Jobs is Jobs).

So then Apple is the ultimate unGoogle. Right?

Not so fast. When I put that notion to Rishad Tobaccowala, he disagreed and said that Apple and Google, at their cores, are quite alike.

"They have a very good idea of what people want," he said. Jobs' "taste engine" makes sure of that. Both companies create platforms that others can build upon-whether they are start-ups making iPod cases and iPhone apps or entertainment companies finding new strategies and networks for distribution in iTunes.

Apple, like Google, also knows how to attract, retain, and energize talent. "Apple people believe they are even better than Google people," he said. "They're cooler."

Apple's products, like Google's, are designed simply, but Tobaccowala said Apple does Google one better: "They define beauty as s.e.x," he said.

Apple understands the power of networks. Its successful products are all about connecting. Apple, like Google, keeps its focus unrelentingly on the user, the customer-us-and not on itself and its industry. And I'll add that, of course, both companies make the best products. They are fanatical about quality.

But Tobaccowala said that what makes these two companies most alike is that-like any great brand-they answer one strong desire: "People want to be like G.o.d." Google search grants omniscience and Google Earth, with its heavenly perch, gives us G.o.d's worldview. Apple packages the world inside objects of Zen beauty. Both, Tobaccowala said, "give me G.o.dlike power." WWGD? indeed.

Generation G

Google is changing our societies, our lives, our relationships, our worldviews, probably even our brains in ways we can only begin to calculate.

Start with our relationships. I believe young people today-Generation Google-will have an evolving understanding and experience of friendship as the internet will not let them lose touch with the people in their lives. Google will keep them connected. Admit it: You've searched for old girlfriends and boyfriends on Google (and wondered whether they've Googled you). Your ability to find those old, familiar faces likely drops in inverse proportion to age: The older you are, the harder it is to find old friends online. I went to Google-purely as an academic and technical exercise, understand-and searched for old girlfriends. I found my college girlfriend, now a philosophy professor. I couldn't find my high-school sweetheart as she had left no visible Google tracks. But she later found me because, with my blog, I had left as many tracks as a herd of buffalo in snow. We live on opposite coasts now but when I was in her city on business, we got together and filled each other in on the last-gulp-30-odd years. We never would have had that chance to catch up and come to account without Google. Thank you, Google.

That won't be the experience of young people today. Thanks to our connection machine, they will stay linked, likely for the rest of their lives. With their blogs, Mys.p.a.ce pages, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Seesmic conversations, Twitter feeds, and all the means for sharing their lives yet to be invented, they will leave lifelong Google tracks that will make it easier to find them. Alloy, a marketing firm, reported in 2007 that 96 percent of U.S. teens and tweens used social networks-they are essentially universal-and so even if one tie is severed, young people will still be linked to friends of friends via another, never more than a degree or two apart.

I believe this lasting connectedness can improve the nature of friendship and how we treat each other. It will no longer be easy to escape our pasts, to act like cads and run away. More threads will tie more of us together longer than in any time since the bygone days when we lived all our lives in small towns. Today, our circles of friends grow only larger. Does this abundance of friendship make each relationship shallower? I don't think so. Friendship finds its natural water level-we know our capacity for relationships and stick closest to those we like best. The so-called Dunbar number says we are wired to pay attention to about 150 relationships. I think that could grow with relationships of various kinds that are easier to maintain online. But remember the key insight that made Facebook such a success: It brought real names and real relationships to the internet. It's about good friends.

Won't our embarra.s.sments also live on? Our missteps, youthful mistakes, and indiscretions will be more public and permanent, haunting us for the rest of our lives because the world, thanks to Google, has a better memory. True. But here the doctrine of mutually a.s.sured humiliation enters to shield us. We will all have our causes to cringe. The tarnished flipside of the golden rule becomes: I'll spare you your shame if you spare me mine. Or to put it more eloquently, I once again quote author David Weinberger, who said at a conference (according to the Twitter feed of blogger Lisa Williams, who was there): "An age of transparency must be an age of forgiveness." Our new publicness may make us more empathetic and ultimately forgiving of each others' and even of public figures' faults and foibles. We see that already. Barack Obama said he inhaled and no one gasped. Who are we to throw stones when Google moves us all into gla.s.s towns? In Googley terms: Life is a beta.

But still, I hear, hasn't life become too public? What has become of privacy? "Nothing you do ever goes away and nothing you do ever escapes notice," Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet and most recently a Google executive, told an audience in Seattle. Then he added-please note, with irony-"There isn't any privacy, get over it." He's right. I say privacy is one of the most overused fear words of the age. Privacy is not the issue. Control is. We need control of our personal information, whether it is made public and to whom, and how it is used. That is our right, at least for matters outside the public sphere.

The ethics and expectations of privacy have changed radically in Generation G. People my age and older fret at all the information young people make public about themselves. I try to explain that this sharing of personal information is a social act. It forms the basis of the connections Google makes possible. When we reveal something of ourselves publicly, we have tagged ourselves in such a way that we can be searched and found under that description. As I said in the chapter on health, I now can be found in a search for my heart condition, afib. That is how others came to me and how we shared information. Publicness brings me personal benefits that outweigh the risks.

Publicness also brings us collective benefits, as should be made clear by now from the aggregated wisdom Google gathers and shares back with us thanks to our public actions: our searches, clicks, links, and creations. Publicness is a community a.s.set. The crowd owns the wisdom of the crowd and to withhold information from that collective knowledge-a link, a restaurant rating, a bit of advice-may be a new definition of antisocial or at least selfish behavior.

For all these reasons and one more powerful than any of them-ego-we will continue to reveal more of ourselves online. We will want to speak and to be discovered. Our online shadows become our ident.i.ties. To stand out from our crowd, we need distinct ident.i.ties. I'll bet we'll soon see parents giving children unique names so they can stand alone in Google searches. Wired editor Chris Anderson linked to an early indication of the trend: Laura Wattenberg, author of The Baby Name Wizard The Baby Name Wizard, reported that in the 1950s, a quarter of all children got one of the top 10 baby names; more recently that has fallen to a tenth. I was about to predict that someday soon, parents would check to a.s.sure the.com domain for a name is available before giving the moniker to a baby. Then I searched on Google and, sure enough, the a.s.sociated Press reported in 2007 that it's already happening: "In fact, before naming his child, Mark Pankow checked to make sure 'BennettPankow.com' hadn't already been claimed. 'One of the criteria was, if we liked the name, the domain had to be available,' Pankow said." At last check, young Bennett wasn't blogging, but his digital destiny is set.

More than names, ident.i.ty will be about accomplishments and creations, things you are known for that narrow your Google search. I am the blogger Jeff Jarvis who writes about Google and media, not Jeff Jarvis the jazz trumpeter, Jeff Jarvis who ran Segway tours in Thailand (drat-I think I'd like to be him), Jeff Jarvis who heads a mobile field service software provider (whatever that is), and certainly not Jeff Jarvis the high school athlete (sadly, I'm too old and too clumsy). I am the No. 1 Jeff Jarvis. In Google wars, it's every Jeff for himself.

This brings us to another argument against public ident.i.ty: It turns us into egotistical exhibitionists. We share everything, down to the most intimate and mundane. Who cares what I had for breakfast? Why share it? London blogger Leisa Reichelt found that this "ambient intimacy"-reporting small signposts of life, sharing what we're doing, who we're with, when we get a new haircut or a new car-allows us to "keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn't usually have access to, because time and s.p.a.ce conspire to make it impossible." Ambient intimacy is good for friendship. "It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we're not able to partic.i.p.ate as closely as we'd like." And on a practical level, Reichelt said, "It also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catch up with these people in real life!"

The internet and Google are causing no end of small behavioral changes whose impact is, again, difficult to weigh quite yet. Some may be short-lived fads; others may have a long-term influence on societal norms. Here are a few:

- Ever since I started working with computers, I've found it terribly seductive that there is always a solution to a problem involving machines and software. You just have to find it. If only life were so symmetrical and complete. I fear young people today could become more disappointed with the harsh, illogical, and incomplete reality of life than my generation was. Then again, we were flower children.

- I wonder, too, whether Google's slavish devotion to data, its belief that numbers tell truth, could have us miss the qualitative, counterintuitive, human view of life: the eureka moments that come from the illogical. Would we still discover the accidental gift of bread mold, penicillin?

- Then again, perhaps all this will hone our a.n.a.lytic skills. Employees at Google are not permitted to rely on intuition, hunches, wishes, beliefs, and the way things have always been-easy answers and accepted wisdom. Perhaps our employees, bosses, politicians, and educators would better serve us if they were held to such an empirical standard.

- I would be delighted if education put less emphasis on rote memorization of that which we can easily look up, but I wonder whether Google's instant access to every imaginable fact will atrophy our memory cells. Or perhaps that's just my fear of age.

In a 2008 article in The Atlantic, internet curmudgeon Nicholas Carr, a sometimes sparring partner of mine in the blogosphere, fretted about these changes in our habits, brains, and society in an article ent.i.tled, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" He confessed to reading less and differently-as I have. "The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds," Carr argued. "In the quiet s.p.a.ces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own a.s.sociations, draw our own inferences and a.n.a.logies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking."

Google CEO Eric Schmidt's defense against Carr: "I observe that we're smarter than ever." Carr might accuse me of triumphalist reflex-it wouldn't be the first time-but I say that deep interaction, too, can yield deeper thinking. Because I write in short blog bursts instead of long essays, it might appear that my thoughts are quicker and shallower-you're free to conclude that. But my ideas may span many posts and take form and shape over weeks and even months, with input, challenge, and argument from many of my blog readers and commenters. Under that pressure, I also drop ideas that don't work. For me, the blog is a new and efficient means of both collaboration and peer review. It molded a great many of the ideas in this book. So though I do fret about the unread books on my shelves and the virgin New Yorker magazines on my desk-as well as a constant stock of unread tabs in my browser-I also know that I learn volumes online every day. Is what I do now better or worse? I'm not sure that judgment is meaningful. I learn differently, discuss differently, see differently, think differently. Thinking differently is the key product and skill of the Google age.

It has been said that young people today may take on new behavioral norms and mores and political outlooks from games and social software-and I don't mean s.e.x and violence, but subtler worldviews. "Social software is political science in executable form," NYU professor Clay Shirky said in one essay. "Social norms in game worlds have the effect of governance," he said in another. Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig famously declared that code is law: "This code, or architecture, sets the terms on which life in cybers.p.a.ce is experienced. It determines how easy it is to protect privacy, or how easy it is to censor speech. It determines whether access to information is general or whether information is zoned. It affects who sees what, or what is monitored." He said code "implements values, or not. It enables freedoms, or disables them."

So what ethics, values, mores, and models are implicit in Google and our use of it, and how might they affect Generation G? Once more the caveat: It's difficult to know. But we can speculate. I talked earlier in the book about the ethics I learned from blogs and bloggers: the ethics of the link, of transparency, and of the correction. What else flows from Google?

- I believe the aesthetic of simplicity we see online becomes an ethic of simplicity. Elegant code is spare and efficient. That norm of geek culture carried over to Google's home page and design, where powerful tasks look una.s.suming and easy-simplicity is complexity well done. Simplicity may carry over from web sites to products to culture and to our view of life.

- Google rewards-and more and more, we expect-openness. In our lives, openness takes the form of personal transparency-the bloggers' code that calls for revealing one's conflicts and prejudices. In business, companies built on proprietary secrets may not be trusted. The public will now expect them to operate in the open.

- I think we will see growing respect for the small and odd. The ma.s.s norm of keeping up with the Joneses now yields to prideful individuality because Google rewards uniqueness in the ma.s.s of niches-and because odd geeks are coming to rule the culture.

- But I fear ours could become a culture of complaint-and I would bear some personal responsibility for that, given my Dell battle. Online, complaint pays off, and after so many years of being subjugated to corporate control, it feels mighty good for us little guys to win. But online, any complaint also threatens to become a war. We, the people, have to learn that we have more power than we know, and we must learn to use it judiciously.

Out of all the new societal norms the internet fosters, my greatest hope is that future generations will enforce a doctrine of free speech with governments and inst.i.tutions. The internet is the First Amendment brought to life. It abhors and subverts censorship-for whatever speech is tamped down in one place can and will arise somewhere else. That is the positive force of global communication. The danger in this globalism, however, is that our freedom could be reduced to a lowest common denominator of speech as dictated by the worst regime, whether that is through government repression, pressure groups that object to TV shows in America or cartoons in Denmark, or regressive libel laws (which some say are outmoded now that everyone has the means to respond). We must expect powerful forces such as Google to use their economic, cultural, and moral influence to pressure censors in China, Iran, and elsewhere to value and protect speech.

Whatever causes they take up, Generation G will be able to organize without organizations, as Shirky wrote in Here Comes Everybody Here Comes Everybody. That ability to coalesce will have a profound destabilizing impact on inst.i.tutions. We can organize bypa.s.sing governments, borders, political parties, companies, academic inst.i.tutions, religious groups, and ethnic groups, inevitably reducing their power and hold on our lives. In an essay in Foreign Affairs in 2008, Richard Haa.s.s argued that the world structure is moving from bi-and unipolarity (i.e., the Cold War and its aftermath) to nonpolarity (i.e., no one's in charge). We now operate in an open marketplace of influence. Google makes it possible to broadcast our interests and find, organize, and act in concert with others. One need no longer control inst.i.tutions to control agendas. Haa.s.s chronicles the dilution of governments. Bloggers Umair Haque and Fred Wilson have written about the fall of the firm, and earlier I examined the idea that networks are becoming more efficient than corporations. In my blog, I follow the crumbling of the fourth estate, the press. One could debate the stature and power of the first estate, the church. What's left? The internet is fueling the rise of the third estate-the rise of the people. That might bode anarchy except that the internet also brings the power to organize.

Our organization is ad hoc. We can find and take action with people of like interest, need, opinion, taste, background, and worldview anywhere in the world. I hope this could lead to a new growth in individual leadership: Online, you can accomplish what you want alone and you can gather a group to collaborate. Being out of power need not be an excuse or a bar from seeking power. That may encourage more involvement in communities and nations-witness the youth armies that gathered in Facebook around Barack Obama, a powerful lesson for a generation to have learned.

Early in its rise, I wondered whether the internet would be inherently liberal or conservative. Conventional wisdom says that broadcast TV, serving the ma.s.ses, was the medium of the left, whereas talk radio and cable TV, serving large niches with the ability to hammer contrary messages, were the media of the right. What is the internet, then? At first, I thought it was libertarian as that was, disproportionately, the ethos of so many early political bloggers. It made sense: The internet champions and enables personal liberty. But as time went on, I learned that the internet is neither a monolith nor a medium. In industry and politics, it disaggregates elements and then enables free atoms to reaggregate into new molecules. It fragments the old and unifies the new. It obsoletes old orthodoxies and old definitions of left and right and provides the opportunity to make more nuanced expressions of our political worldview. It was then that I saw the internet not as left, right, or libertarian but as the connection machine that brings together any and all worldviews.

I pray that Google and the internet will change, spread, and strengthen democracy. Google's moral of universal empowerment is the sometimes-forgotten ideal of democracy. This revolution won't start at the top, in governments and inst.i.tutions. As with everything Google touches, it will grow from the bottom, in communities of all sizes and descriptions, as more involvement leads to new ways to organize, manage, and govern. That is what we mean when we talk about power shifting to the edge, no longer centralized. Political movements need not start in Washington but can start in a thousand places linked online. When millions of people give $10 each to a campaign-instead of 10 people giving $1 million each-the power in a party shifts to the edge, some hope. That is what political strategist Joe Trippi argues in his book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Generation G will have a different sense of membership, loyalty, patriotism, and power. They will belong to new nations: a nation of geeks, a nation of diabetics, a nation of artists. They may feel greater allegiances to these nations and less to their town or country.

Hear the Declaration of Independence of Cybers.p.a.ce by John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist and a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, from 1999: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cybers.p.a.ce, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather." Barlow warned that the old world's laws of property, ident.i.ty, and movement "are all based on matter, and there is no matter here." He said the only law that all online cultures recognize is the golden rule. "We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity."

My generation, the children of the sixties, prided itself on nonconformity, but our nonconformity became conformist. I fear it was a fashion. Some worry that Generation G's nonconformity and individualism will be ent.i.tled rather than empowered, alone more than social, entertained more than educated. Any of that and worse could be true. But I have faith in this generation because, far earlier than their elders-my peers-today's young people have taken leadership, contributed to society and the economy, and created greatness: great technology, great companies, great thinking.

That is where we return at the end: creation. Looking at the internet, one must be struck by the will of the people to create. One survey I quoted earlier reported that most of us say we have a book in us. Another said, coincidentally, that most of young people think they have a business in them. We have surveyed our creation: We make tens of millions of blogs. We take hundreds of millions of Flickr photos. A few hundred thousand people write applications for Facebook. Every minute, 10 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. People create T-shirt designs on Threadless, sneaker designs on Ryz, and things of all descriptions on Etsy. Kids make companies. And on and on.

The internet doesn't make us more creative. Instead, it enables what we create to be seen, heard, and used. It enables every creator to find a public, the public he or she merits. That takes creation out of the proprietary hands of the supposed creative cla.s.s. Internet curmudgeons argue that Google and the internet bring society to ruin because they rob the creative cla.s.s of its financial support and exclusivity: its pedestal. But internet triumphalists, including me, argue that the internet opens up creativity past one-size-fits-all, ma.s.s measurements and priestly definitions of quality and lets us not only find what we like but also find people who like what we do. The internet kills the ma.s.s, once and for all. With that comes the death of ma.s.s economics and ma.s.s media. I don't lament their pa.s.sing.

There will still be a creative cla.s.s, but it's role and relationship with the public may change, acting not just as creators but also as examples, educators, and inspirations for others-the flint of creativity. That is what Paulo Coelho became when he asked his readers to make a movie of his book.

The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with c.r.a.p: a loss of taste and discrimination. I argue instead that only the playing field is flat. To stand out, one must rise on worth-as defined by the public rather than the priests-and the reward is attention. That is our culture of links and search. It is a meritocracy, only now there are many definitions of merit and each must be earned.

We have believed-I have been taught-that there are two scarcities in culture: talent and attention. There are only so many people with talent and we give their talent only so much attention-not enough of either. But just as the economy is shifting from scarcity to abundance, so is the culture. There is an abundance of talent and a limitless will to create, but they have been tamped down by an educational system that insists on sameness, starved by a ma.s.s economic system that rewarded only a few giants, and discouraged by a critical system that anointed a closed creative cla.s.s. These enemies of ma.s.s creativity turned abundance into scarcity. Google and the internet reversed that flow. Now talent of many descriptions and levels can express itself and grow. We want to create and we want to be generous with our creations. We will get the attention we deserve. That means c.r.a.p will be ignored. It just depends on your definition of c.r.a.p.

When we talk about the Google age we are talking about a new society. The rules explored in this book-Google's rules-are the rules of that society, built on connections, links, transparency, openness, publicness, listening, trust, wisdom, generosity, efficiency, markets, niches, platforms, networks, speed, and abundance. This new generation and its new worldview will change how we see and interact with the world and how business, government, and inst.i.tutions interact with us. It is only just beginning. I wish I knew how that change will turn out. But I'm thrilled to be here today with you to witness its birth.

Continuing the conversation

Our discussion is just beginning, I hope. You no doubt have seen rules of the Google age that I missed. You have corrections to make, facts to add, experiences to share, and opportunities to explore. I hope you will come online to my blog, Buzzmachine.com, to continue the conversation and keep answering the question, WWGD?

The Googlification of the world affects not only companies, industries, and inst.i.tutions but also individuals. It brings new means and expectations for how you can advance your career, lifestyle, and agenda. If you want to be Googley and take advantage of these new opportunities, then you need to understand how Google values creation, openness, connections, uniqueness, collaboration, and invention. I'll share suggestions, links, and tips for getting started with blogging, linking, Facebooking, Flickring, and more in Five Steps to a Googlier You, which you can find at Buzzmachine.com/tips.

If you forget the address, no problem. Just Google me.

Acknowledgments and disclosures

First and foremost, I must thank my blog friends-those who have read, commented on, and linked to Buzzmachine.com-for their invaluable, insightful, and generous help with this book. They inspire and teach me. They correct and challenge me. They give me ideas and push mine. Those friends are too numerous to name. I am grateful to them all.

I am grateful to my editor, Ben Loehnen, for every time I cursed him (as in, "d.a.m.n, he's right"). Even as I questioned the old means of publishing, he proved its value with his intelligent, perceptive, and always-encouraging editing. And my publisher, Collins, surprised me with its openness to finding new ways online. (When it came to the digital strategy for this book, they said I was the one who wasn't being brave enough.) At the Collins Publishing Group, I thank Carla Clifford, Hollis Heimbouch, Larry Hughes, Matt Inman, Angie Lee, Shawn Nicholls, Carolyn Pittis, Catherine Barbosa-Ross, Steve Ross, and Margot Schupf for their work to make this book a success.

I also thank my agent, Kate Lee of ICM-the first agent in the industry to respect blogs as sources of talent and ideas. Kate patiently tolerated my ideas and pushed for better ones until we clicked on What Would Google Do? What Would Google Do?

My family could not have been more wonderful through the process of writing this book. My brilliant and beautiful wife, Tammy, tolerated my hours and travels and nerves and made it possible for me to write. My son, Jake, showed me the way to the future. My daughter, Julia, gave me an example as a writer in the family. They tolerated me, too. My parents, Joan and Darrell Jarvis, and sister, the Rev. Cynthia Jarvis, encouraged me to be a writer and never pointed out that I was only twenty-four years late in meeting my life goal of publishing a book.

Various employers and colleagues generously enabled me to blog and learn digital ways and I thank them. They include Dean Steve Shepard and a.s.sociate Dean Judy Watson of the City University of New York; Steve Newhouse of Advance.net; Jim Willse of the Star-Ledger; Alan Rusbridger, Emily Bell, and the editors of Media Guardian at the Guardian; and Upendra Shardanand and Tom Tercek of Daylife. I also thank the editors of BusinessWeek for a.s.signing me reporting that contributed to this book.

I want to thank Peter Hauck, Margaret Kimble, Scott Karp, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Jay Rosen, Rishad Tobaccowala, Fred Wilson, Paulo Coelho, Paula Bracconot, Gary Vaynerchuk, Edward Roussel, Tom Evslin, Seth G.o.din, Craig Newmark, Samir Arora, Marc Benioff, Chris Bruzzo, Peter Osnos, Jim Louderback, Mark Zuckerberg, Dave Winer, Umair Haque, Martin Nisenholtz, Jeffrey Rayport, Andrew Heyward, Kevin Rose, David Cohn, Dave Morgan, Nick Denton, Scott Heiferman, Chris Anderson, Steven Johnson, Ken Layne, Matt Welch, Caterina Fake, Stewart b.u.t.terfield, Bob Garfield, Jimmy Wales, Joan Feeney, Bob Wyman, Will Richardson, Andrew Tyndall, Rick Segal, Bonnie Arnold, Tim O'Reilly, Henry Copeland, Marcel Reichert, Stephanie Czerny, Jochen Wegner, Hubert Burda, Wolfgang Blau, Claudia Gonzalez Gisiger, the World Economic Forum, the Aspen Inst.i.tute, Lionel Menchaca, , Michael Dell, and Dell itself.

Note that I am not thanking Google. I am grateful for Google's existence, its lessons, and its inspiration-not to mention Marissa Mayer's quotable advice online. But I want to note that I did not seek access to Google for this book because I wanted to judge it and learn from it at a distance. My admiration of Google, then, does not spring from any relationship with the company but from its incredible example.

Now, in the spirit of transparency and full disclosure: I have worked for and with many of the organizations I've written about here, including the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, the Guardian, Daylife, the New York Times Company, About.com, Advance Publications, Time Warner, Denuo, News Corp., and Burda.

I own stock in various of the companies I've written about, including Google (which I bought as I was finishing research so I would follow its fortunes from a different viewpoint; as I write this, in the depth of the financial crisis, my investment is off about 30 percent), Time Warner, Apple, Amazon, Sirius XM, and Microsoft. I have small investments in startups including Covestor and 33Across and have served on the board of Publish2. At various times, I have advised startups including Technorati, Outside.in, and Meetup.

I receive revenue on my blog from various advertisers via Google AdSense and BlogAds.

I will keep an updated list of disclosures on my blog at buzzmachine.com/about-me.

And finally, thank you for reading my book.