What Would Google Do? Part 2

If you're not searchable, you won't be found

Once upon a time, all roads led to Rome. Today, all roads lead from Google.

Google defines what your web presence should be. Of course, you need a web site. Who doesn't? But don't look at your site as a place where you get your message across. Don't obsess on a fancy home page and a path of navigation you want users to take (and please don't play music when I get there). Remember that many or most people won't see that home page. Most will likely come to you through Google after they ask a question.

The question is: Will you have the answer? That's how you should think of your site: answers for every question you can imagine, each on a page that is clearly and simply laid out so both Google and busy readers can find it and figure it out in an instant. If you're a manufacturer, customers should be able to find product details and support in an instant. If you're a politician, voters want to know your stands and record. If you're a food company, buyers want nutritional information. If you're a clothing company, shoppers want you to give the information a good sales clerk would-does this run large? Where can I buy your product? How do I contact you? Your users are already telling you what they want to know. Have your web folks show you the searches people made in Google when they clicked on a link to come to you. That is your starting list of questions to answer.

I learned about watching Google queries from About.com, the first media company made for the Google age. A vast majority of its traffic comes from Google. A large proportion of its ad revenue also comes from Google. About.com might as well be a division of Google, but it's not. It's merely built on Google's platform. About.com is owned by The New York Times Company, which bought it in 2005 for $410 million (and hired me to consult there). I'll confess I was dubious about the acquisition when it occurred, but I was wrong. Today, as papers struggle in the new economy, About.com is one of the rare bright spots in any newspaper company's P&L.

About.com at first wanted to compete with Google or even to be Google. Started by Scott Kurnit as The Mining Company in 1997-a year before Google was incorporated-its goal was to provide a human-powered guide to the internet. But as Yahoo also learned, that was hard and expensive, especially as the internet grew so unfathomably large. The company was rechristened About.com and became a content service with 700 sites maintained by independent writers and more than a million helpful, focused, and usually timeless articles about niche topics from car repair to thyroid disease. All these articles are structured so Google will find them easily.

About.com works hard to make itself Google-ready. Writers are taught search-engine optimization (SEO)-how to craft headlines, leads, page t.i.tles, and text around keywords so Google will recognize what each article is about. Writers are also taught to monitor search queries. If users are asking questions for which About.com doesn't have answers, they write articles with those answers. Keeping an eye on search terms is a preemptive readership survey, except instead of asking what people have read, About.com finds out what they want to read.

About.com's search-engine-optimization wizardry infiltrated its corporate sibling, The New York Times, where editors began to rewrite newspaper headlines for the web so Google's computers would understand them better and send more traffic to them. (For instance, the headline on a book review in the print Times may be clever but indecipherable unless you see the accompanying photo of the book cover and captions; online, the proper headline should include the t.i.tle and author so anyone searching on either will find the review.) The Times also creates content aimed in part at pleasing Google: permanent topic pages on newsmakers and companies, which the paper hopes will become resources people will click on and link to over time, helping these pages rise in Google results, bringing in more traffic. Google was also a key reason why The Times changed its digital business model and stopped charging for content online (which I'll address in the chapter, "Free is a business model"). The most important benefit The Times received by opening up: Googlejuice.

Everybody needs Googlejuice

Googlejuice? That's the magic elixir you drink when Google values you more because the world values you more. It's another virtuous circle: The more links, clicks, and mentions you get, the higher you rise in Google's search results, offering you the potential for yet more clicks. The rich get richer, the Googley Googlier. I wonder whether, someday, companies will come to be valued not only on their revenue, marketshare, EBITDA, and profit but also on their Googlejuice.

The benefits of Googlejuice are lost on companies that do not make their information searchable-from local businesses that don't have sites to stores that don't post sales to manufacturers that don't publish product details to magazines that put content online in overcomplicated designs and databases that Google can't read. The benefits of search are also lost on a few media companies that resent Google and think they are punishing the big, bad beast by hiding from it. They're cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Various European papers have argued that Google and Google News are making money off their content and so they have demanded that Google stop searching their sites (which is easy for a site to do; just add a snippet of code to any web page to tell robots and spiders-the programs that crawl the web for search engines-to stay away). Blocking Google only means that it will stop sending readers, which is nothing short of suicide. That's like newspapers saying to a newsstand operator, "How dare you make a penny distributing my product? Give my papers back or I'll sue!" Google is their new newsstand.

It's insane to treat Google as the enemy. Even Yahoo doesn't (it asked Google to sell its ads). The goal today is to be Google's friend or at least, as adman Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP has dubbed Google, your "frenemy." The way to befriend and to exploit Google is to be searchable.

The way to become Google's enemy is to game and spam its search results. Evildoers will try to corrupt Google's algorithms to award their sleazy clients fraudulent Googlejuice. Some use automated software to create spam blogs-"splogs"-that carry fake content with lots of links to their clients, trying to trick Google into indexing and valuing all those links. Other companies use humans to do this dirty work, hoping to fake Google out and make it harder to ferret out the frauds. Some spammers pay people in poor nations pennies to create splog sites. And some companies hire bloggers to write nice things about their clients when, in reality, what they write is nothing any person would want to read. These often-unsuspecting bloggers are just creating more splog links to help give the bad guys more Googlejuice. It's insidious. Sadly, Google isn't always as diligent as it should be in cutting off the sploggers. Those pages also carry Google ads, which earn Google money.

What's good for big companies such as About.com is good for any small company or organization-or person. We all want to be found on Google. We all want Googlejuice. Customers now expect any information in the world to be available with one click. So every restaurant should have its menu, specials, hours, address, and more online. On a recent vacation, researching restaurants for the family, I went only to places that had web sites; I figured the others just didn't care enough. Not having an up-to-date web presence that Google can crawl and search and then present to users is like not having a phone number or a sign over the door. Today, that's particularly so because it's so easy to be on the web. The age of the geeky web priesthood is over. That restaurant can post its specials every day with a free weblog tool such as Blogger-which comes from Google. It can attract customers by buying ads on sites shown to people in the area-with Google. It can list itself on Google Maps and buy ads there, too.

The same can be said of you as an individual. You need a search presence. Your resume should be online, because you never know when a job might come by. When you sell your house or car or golf clubs, you'll want them to be where they can be searched and found. As we'll discuss at the end of the book, without a Google shadow, old friends (and girlfriends and boyfriends) will never find you. Today, if you can't be found in Google, you might as well not exist.

How can you be sure to be found on Google? A new industry has emerged around just that need. Convention floors are filled with search-engine optimization companies promising to help you get to the promised land: the essential first page of search results for a topic relevant to what you do. Plenty of books and consultants can take you through all the technical details of searchability. I don't pretend to be a wizard of SEO, but there are a number of simple and obvious rules for how to think of your internet presence.

- Make sure every possible bit of information that anyone could want to know about you is on the web, searchable by Google.

- Construct information on pages so it can be understood by machine and man. In a word, be clear. If you're a dentist, say you're a dentist, not a smile doctor. Use the word "dentist" in the t.i.tle of the page, the headline, and the beginning of what you write-make it so obvious even a computer couldn't be confused. This also means that when human beings come to the page, they'll know what you do. Clarity is always beneficial.

- Don't use fancy technology to make the content on your page dance and sing. Google won't recognize much of it (and readers will be irritated). Keep it simple.

- Don't bury your content inside fancy content management systems that stow it away in databases Google can't get to.

- Give everything you publish a permanent address-a permalink-so it can attract and acc.u.mulate more traffic and links and so Google has a place to which it can reliably send the people looking for you.

- Create separate pages for separate topics. If you're a restaurant, have a menu page and a directions page so, when I go searching for "Jeff's Chop House menu," Google can send me straight to your menu page.

- If there's any possible reason why anyone elsewhere on the web would want to link to you, make it easy for them to do so. If there are sites and bloggers writing about restaurants in your town, make them aware of your site. Google will notice their links, giving you a few more precious drops of Googlejuice.

- Once people come to your page, make sure you make it clear where they are: Put your brand on every page. When people go looking for an answer and find it via a click from a Google search, they often don't know where they have landed and who gave them their answer. Take credit.

Life is public, so is business

When the photo service Flickr started, its husband-and-wife founders, Caterina Fake and Stewart b.u.t.terfield, made a fateful if almost accidental decision. As Fake puts it, they "defaulted to public." That is, while other online photo services made the a.s.sumption that users would want to keep personal pictures private-stands to reason, no?-Flickr decided instead to make photos public unless told otherwise.

Amazing things happened. People commented on each other's photos. Communities formed around them. They tagged their photos so they could be found in searches because they wanted their pictures to be seen. They contributed more photos because they were seen. And as I will explain later, their usage of photos helped interesting ones to bubble up, which was possible only because they were all public.

Fake calls this condition "publicness," which is becoming a key attribute of society and life in the Google age. I believe publicness is also becoming a key attribute of successful business. We now live and do business in gla.s.s houses (and offices), and that's not necessarily bad.

Publicness is about more than having a web site. It's about taking actions in public so people can see what you do and react to it, make suggestions, and tell their friends. Living in public today is a matter of enlightened self-interest. You have to be public to be found. Every time you decide not to make something public, you create the risk of a customer not finding you or not trusting you because you're keeping secrets. Publicness is also an ethic. The more public you are, the easier you can be found, the more opportunities you have.

Your customers are your ad agency

For more than a century, the public face of companies has been their advertising, slogans, brands, and logos. How much better it would be if a company's public face were that of its public, its satisfied customers who are willing to share their satisfaction, and its employees who have direct relationships with customers. Brands are people.

If that's the ideal, then here's the goal: Eliminate advertising. Or at least fire your ad agency. Oh, you won't get rid of advertising entirely. You should be so lucky. But every time a customer recommends you and your product to a friend is a time when you don't have to market to that friend. It is possible today to think that one good word can spread as far as an ad would. This scenario is not hypothetical. When I had my problems with Dell, I could see them losing sales as people came to my blog and left comments saying they'd just decided not to buy a Dell, often adding that they'd told their friends their vow as well. There's no telling how much one p.i.s.sed-off customer costs you today. The contrary is also true. A happy customer can sell your products. Now that bloggers are praising Dell online, new sales accrue as customers reconsider the company. When Dell started offering discounts to users of Twitter, who pa.s.sed the word to more users, the company added $500,000 in sales in no time.

The more your customers take ownership of your brand, the less you will spend annoying people with your ads. I can hear your agency: You can't hand messaging over to the people; they'll be off-message. Well, tell your agency their message may be off. Your customers have always owned your brand.

Advertising is your last priority, your last resort, an unfortunate byproduct of not having enough friends...yet. Learn this lesson from Google, which spends next to nothing on advertising. It became the fastest growing company in the history of the world without marketing. It grew thanks to its friends, not through ads. In its "10 things Google has found to be true," the company says its "growth has come not through TV ad campaigns but through word of mouth from one satisfied user to another." The generation that has that d.a.m.ned "Yahoo-ooo" sound stuck in their heads thanks to untold millions spent on commercials is the same generation that used and spread Google instead, for free.

Of course, Google's lucky. It created a spectacular product that solved a problem at just the right time, becoming essential to the internet and growing as it did with no limits on its scale. People need Google. They love Google. You may not be so lucky; you may be stuck selling a product that doesn't change the world in a market that's old and compet.i.tive. Sorry. But you may have great customer service and that's what people talk about. "Customer service is the new marketing," venture capitalist Brad Burnham blogged after having lunch with the best-known customer-service rep anywhere, Craig Newmark of craigslist. That law gained momentum as the t.i.tle of a conference in 2008 held by GetSatisfaction.com, a company that created a platform for any customer to get help with any company. "Listening to our customers is actually the most perfect form of marketing you could have," said Mark Jarvis (no relation), chief marketing officer of Dell. Even if you don't have a product to love, you can still have a company worth admiring. Alloy Media surveyed college students in 2008 and found that 41 percent preferred socially responsible brands, a 24 percent increase in two years. Maybe that's why your customers will talk about you.

Once more, it comes down to relationships-relationships that are lived in public. Every time someone says something good about you online because of your product, service, reputation, honesty, openness, or helpfulness, you should knock another dollar off your advertising budget. Will it ever get to zero? Only if you're lucky.

New Society

Elegant organization

Elegant organization

I sat, dumbfounded, in an audience of executives at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum International Media Council in Davos, Switzerland, as the head of a powerful news organization begged young Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, for his secret. Please, the publisher beseeched him, how can my publication start a community like yours? We should own a community, shouldn't we? Tell us how.

Zuckerberg, 22 at the time, is a geek of few words. Some a.s.sume his laconicism is a sign of arrogance-that and his habit of wearing sandals at big business conferences. But it's not. He's shy. He's direct. He's a geek, and this is how geeks are. Better get used to it. When the geeks take over the world-and they will-a few blunt words and then a silent stare will become a societal norm. But Zuckerberg is brilliant and accomplished, and so his few words are worth waiting for.

After this publishing t.i.tan pleaded for advice about how to build his own community, Zuckerberg's reply was, in full: "You can't."

Full stop. Hard stare.

He later offered more advice. He told the a.s.sembled media moguls that they were asking the wrong question. You don't start communities, he said. Communities already exist. They're already doing what they want to do. The question you should ask is how you can help them do that better.

His prescription: Bring them "elegant organization."

Let that sip of rhetorical cabernet roll around on the palate for a minute. Elegant organization. When you think about it, that is precisely what Zuckerberg brought to Harvard-then other universities, then the rest of the world-with his social platform. Harvard's community had been doing what it wanted to do for more than three centuries before Zuckerberg came along. He just helped them do it better. Facebook enabled people to organize their social networks-the social graph, he calls it: who they are, what they do, who they know, and, not unimportantly, what they look like. It was an instant hit because it met a need. It organized social life at Harvard.

At this Davos meeting (which was off the record, but Zuckerberg gave me permission to blog it), he told the story of his Harvard art course. Zuckerberg didn't have time to attend a single cla.s.s or to study. After all, he was busy founding a $15 billion company. The final exam was a week away and he was in a panic. It's one thing to drop out of Harvard to start a gigantic, world-changing company; it's another to flunk.

Zuckerberg did what comes naturally to a native of the web. He went to the internet and downloaded images of all the pieces of art he knew would be covered in the exam. He put them on a web page and added blank boxes under each. Then he emailed the address of this page to his cla.s.smates, telling them he'd just put up a study guide. Think Tom Sawyer's fence. The cla.s.s dutifully came along and filled in the blanks with the essential knowledge about each piece of art, editing each other as they went, collaborating to get it just right. This being Harvard, they did a good job of it.

You can predict the punch line: Zuckerberg aced the exam. But here's the real kicker: The professor said the cla.s.s as a whole got better grades than usual. They captured the wisdom of their crowd and helped each other. Zuckerberg had created the means for the cla.s.s to collaborate. He brought them elegant organization.

Look at your const.i.tuents, customers, community, audience-even your compet.i.tors-and ask how you can bring them elegant organization, especially now, as the internet disrupts everything. Where some see a new world disorder, others see the opportunity to bring organization. This strategy is the foundation for so many internet companies: Google helps us organize around search, advertising, maps, doc.u.ments, and more. Its mission, after all, is nothing less than to organize the world's information. eBay lets us organize markets for merchandise. Amazon helps us organize communities of consumer opinion around every product offered there. Facebook and other services like it-LinkedIn (big in business), Bebo (big in Europe), Google's Orkut (big in Brazil and India), and StudieVZ (big in Germany)-help us to organize our friends and colleagues. Skype, AOL, and Yahoo give us the tools to collaborate through chat, phone, and video, organizing our communication. Flickr lets us organize our photos and also communities of interest around them. del.icio.us does the same for our bookmarks and web recommendations. Daylife organizes the world's news. BlogAds lets bloggers organize ad networks. Wikipedia's platform enables us to organize our collective knowledge. Dell's support forums organize customers' knowledge. The internet brings us so many new paths to people, information, and functionality that we need help making sense of it. We've long needed help organizing ourselves. Government and media did that for us. Then internet portals and online media followed their centralized worldview. But the next generation of organizational enterprises-the Facebooks, Flickrs, and Wikipedias-don't organize us. They are platforms that help us to organize ourselves.

In his book Here Comes Everybody Here Comes Everybody, New York University professor Clay Shirky argues that self-organization is a key to understanding the internet's impact on society. We can now organize without organizations. That is his law. Shirky studied the early years of Meetup, a New York company that uses internet tools to enable groups of people to get together in person. Its founder, Scott Heiferman, was inspired by Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone Bowling Alone, which argues that our communities are unraveling as we become more disconnected. Heiferman wanted to fix that by enabling groups to come together. "Use the internet to get off the internet," Meetup's home page urges. Where others saw disorder, Heiferman saw opportunity. In Shirky's examination of Meetup's first year, he learned that the groups that organized were not what you'd expect. The most popular? Not soccer moms or football fans or knitting circles but witches. Yes, witches. With reflection, this makes sense. Witches have so few ways to organize covens or coffee klatches. Meetup helped them do that.

When I ran newspaper sites, I tried to provide organization for communities with forum discussions and web-page tools, but I made the mistake of acting like a portal or media gateway: I decided what those communities were-parents, residents of a county, cooks. I thought I knew. If instead I had provided an open platform, who knows how many witches would have gathered in New Jersey? The key to offering elegant organization to individuals or groups-the key to all platforms-is to enable others to use the tool as they wish. They know their needs. Such openness and flexibility also enables more groups to form. Each one may be small, but altogether, they add up to a larger network of groups-a ma.s.s of niches.

There is an ongoing debate about who will win the social s.p.a.ce, what company will own the social web. That's a wrong-headed view of the opportunity. The internet already is a social network. So is life. The internet merely provides more means to make more connections. The winner is not the company that gets us to come in and be social inside a wall: the social AOL or Mys.p.a.ce or, for that matter, Facebook. The winner will be the one that figures out how to bring elegant organization to the disorganized social network that the internet already is. We are waiting for the Google of people. Zuckerberg's stated ambition is to be that next Google. And Google is afraid that he might succeed, which is why it created a standard called Open Social and banded together with other social networks, hoping to beat Facebook at its own game. To win, Facebook needs to be more open, to look beyond its walls and figure out how to take its organization to the rest of our lives online. I'll bet they will be smart enough to do it.

Politics is at last learning the skills of self-organization. In 2004, Howard Dean's presidential campaign used blogs and discussion as well as in-person Meetups to organize volunteers and raise money. Barack Obama's 2008 campaign made brilliant use of social tools, including Facebook and the iPhone, to organize rallies and rake in donations. More profound, it used the social web to organize a movement. It also took advantage of the fact that other communities-such as that inside the DailyKos blog-had gathered around Obama. It didn't hurt that one of Facebook's founders, Chris Hughes, was an adviser to Obama's campaign.

We want to be connected. In the internet age, we have gained a reputation for being antisocial, for sitting on our couches, laptops on laps, earphones on ears, never talking to anyone. But in truth, we're talking to more people from more places more often than ever before because we have more ways to do it. Thanks to Google and Facebook, I've reconnected with old colleagues and friends and made new business connections. The success of Facebook comes in great measure from returning us to real ident.i.ties, real reputations, and real relationships. Anonymity had its place on the internet-it was fun for awhile, when, as the legendary New Yorker cartoon says, n.o.body knew you were a dog. But now we're settling back to our norm: hanging out with people we know, like, and trust. We often want to do more than hang out together: We want to accomplish things together.

Organization is a business model. Look at the communities around you-not communities you start but communities you serve. There is one, even if you are an airline or a cable company or a doctor's office. There is a community of people with like interests and needs. Have you enabled them to talk, to share what they know and need to know, to support each other, to do business together, even to socialize? You are probably working with a group of people who have shared concerns: Staples customers who run small businesses, Gourmet readers who like to go on food holidays, Cisco router buyers who know a lot about networks, students who need jobs, alumni who are hiring. They are gathered outside your house. All you have to do is open the windows all around to let them talk with each other.

But do be careful. Don't a.s.sume these people care about you or think of themselves as members of your community. Don't think that you can create a community. They're not yours. They're not going to start wearing Target T-shirts or singing the Toyota song-not unless you have an extraordinary product and brand (such as an entertainment brand or a hot designer label or Apple). That's about the silliest thing I hear from any company: They talk about their their community. I have sat in meetings with major consumer brands-candies, soaps, stores-as they say that they have communities that will come to their sites and do what they think they should do. Remember Zuckerberg's advice: Communities are already doing what they want to do. If you're lucky, they'll let you help them. community. I have sat in meetings with major consumer brands-candies, soaps, stores-as they say that they have communities that will come to their sites and do what they think they should do. Remember Zuckerberg's advice: Communities are already doing what they want to do. If you're lucky, they'll let you help them.

Once a community does gather around you, be aware that you don't own it; the community owns itself. American Girl, the doll brand, started an online club as a safe place where young girls could communicate with each other and play games to earn points and gifts. The business wasn't big enough for owner Mattel, so one day it up and killed the club, crushing my daughter, Julia, and cutting her off from the friends she had made there. Mattel should have learned who runs its town. It's a lesson Barack Obama learned when his followers, disappointed with his stand on an issue, used his own campaign platform to organize a protest against him. Once you hand over control, you can't take it back.

We no longer need companies, inst.i.tutions, or government to organize us. We now have the tools to organize ourselves. We can find each other and coalesce around political causes or bad companies or talent or business or ideas. We can share and sort our knowledge and behavior. We can communicate and come together in an instant. We also have new ethics and att.i.tudes that spring from this new organization and change society in ways we cannot yet see, with openness, generosity, collaboration, efficiency. We are using the internet's connective tissue to leap over borders-whether they surround countries or companies or demographics. We are reorganizing society. This is Google's-and Facebook's and craigslist's-new world order.

New Economy

Small is the new big The post-scarcity economy Join the open-source, gift economy The ma.s.s market is dead-long live the ma.s.s of niches Google commodifies everything Welcome to the Google economy

Small is the new big Mind you, big is still big. Wal-Mart is the largest company on earth. Bigbox stores such as Home Depot continue to drive mom-and-pop hardware shops out of business. Media companies are conglomerating. Airlines are merging. Even small churches are being turned into condos thanks to the rise of megachurches. The Super Bowl can still draw 97 million viewers. h.e.l.l, Google itself isn't just big; it's ginormous. No, big won't go away.

But small is rising. A tiny start-up can become a manufacturing company using somebody else's factory and distribution while selling to a worldwide market that can find its products via Google. Any of us can start a highly specialized and targeted media company using blog software and paying for it with Google ads. One person can plant a seed to start a political movement.

There won't be a single new retail behemoth to battle Wal-Mart like j.a.panese monsters in Tokyo Bay. Instead, Wal-Mart and other big chains are getting nipped at their heels by a million tiny compet.i.tors-a half a million of them on eBay alone. In 2007 eBay sold $59.4 billion in merchandise from 547,000 online stores. It may be dwarfed by Wal-Mart's $345 billion, but in 2007 eBay beat the sales of America's largest department-store chain, Federated (aka Macy's), with revenues of $26.3 billion in 853 stores.

Some weblogs now have more traffic and links than major media sites. Gawker Media, a gaggle of gossipy blogs started by Nick Denton, boasted in July 2008 that its dozen sites had double the web traffic of the Los Angeles Times online-254 million vs. 127 million page views in a month. All weblogs, as a group, now have an audience of readers (57 million as early as 2006, according to the Pew Internet and American Life survey) that is larger than the number who buy daily newspapers (50 million in early 2008, according to the Newspaper a.s.sociation of America). Even more striking, Pew said back in 2004 that 53 million Americans had used the internet to "publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online." The writers are starting to outnumber the readers.

The Lilliputians have triumphed. The economies of scale must now compete with the economies of small. What changed is the definition of "big enough"-big enough to make money, big enough to survive and succeed. The tipping point of critical ma.s.s in business has fallen from the sky to eye level. Once upon a time in retail, you had to have a store, which needed location, location, location; capital to fill it with inventory; and cash flow to hire staff and buy ads to bring in customers. Then you had to have a chain of stores to gather muscle with suppliers and create marketing efficiencies. Now, you can find customers via eBay, Amazon (which is as much a platform for retailers as it is a retailer itself), Google (where you can buy inexpensive and targeted ads), and new online marketplaces of neat and unique stuff such as Etsy.com (which sells handmade clothes and crafts). Profits accrue sooner because you don't own bricks or necessarily stock inventory or spend a fortune on marketing.

Once upon a time, you couldn't write for a living unless you were paid by a big publisher, the guy who could afford to own printing presses because he was the guy who had the big audience (a virtuous circle of its time). Now many writers make money blogging. Enough money? Well, that's up to you. It could be enough to pay for your internet hosting or maybe a lunch or two-or a decent living. Here's an accounting of the value of my blog: In 2007, I made $13,855 in ad revenue ($4,450 of that from Google) on Buzzmachine. I shouldn't have quit my day job, you say. But Buzzmachine is what got me appointed as a journalism professor at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism (worth not quite six figures a year) and consulting and speaking gigs (worth a few times that in good times) and the contract for this book (worth about double those gigs). So over a few years, my weblog is easily worth seven figures. My cost: $327 a year for deluxe internet hosting. There are bloggers who make-and whose blogs are worth-much more. But Buzzmachine is big enough.

Calculate in the falling cost of work if you want to go it alone online-no office, no commuting, no suits-and our definitions of profitability, critical ma.s.s, and success all shrink. The cost of independence has dropped. In an age when so many people are sick of their jobs-you know who you are-this self-reliance is empowering. Loyalty from employer to employees died in my lifetime. Now, given the chance to earn FU money and leave office politics behind, there is less loyalty from employees to employers as well. We'll see more people trying to make it on their own because they want to and they can-or because they have no choice when shrinking companies lay them off.

What should their former employers' relationships be to these newly independent agents? Companies should encourage and support some one-man spin-offs. After U.K. football writer Rick Waghorn was laid off from his paper in Norwich, he started his own football blog and community with a former business colleague. Their old paper viewed them as compet.i.tion. Foolish. It was the paper that had built Waghorn's brand and audience. When it fired him, it lost that investment along with his content. It didn't have to. Instead, the paper should have sold Waghorn's ads and promoted his site. It could have taken advantage of his expertise, work, reputation, and audience without having to pay his salary. Meanwhile, Waghorn would have been able to build a company. Everybody won. If I were to run the paper, I'd invest in Waghorn. I'd build a network of Waghorns.

But it's not easy being a Waghorn. Without the paper acting as his promoter, he and others like him have a hard time building the critical ma.s.s of audience and advertisers they need. Even in the small-is-the-new-big era, it is possible to be too small. At a conference on collaborative journalism I ran at CUNY, online news entrepreneur Mark Potts said that perhaps the only way to succeed at being small is to be part of something big: a network. Big still has its place. It's the relationship between small and big that is evolving.

If we end up with more independent agents able to do what they do best-making jewelry or providing computer advice or writing-I hope we will start to see a reversal of the malling of the world that big manufacturing and retail have brought: the sameness of scale. Before the Berlin Wall fell, I was amazed to find a Benetton store even in communist East Berlin. They were everywhere. Starbucks cafes and Pret A Manger sandwich shops (which are one-third owned by McDonald's) have replaced pubs all around London. Hip Soho in New York is filled no longer with artists and boutiques making singular merchandise but with Banana Republics. Everything's the same; nothing's unique; and that takes the fun out of making, buying, and owning. The small-is-the-new-big world could bring variety back. The craftsman lives again on Etsy, eBay, Amazon, and hip T-shirt company Threadless (where the buyers and wearers make the designs).

In 2005, I read two posts by marketing visionary, author, and blogger Seth G.o.din about companies that just didn't care. He inspired me to blog that we could now create new compet.i.tors. "Small is the new big," I wrote. At the same moment, G.o.din, similarly inspired, wrote the same line on his blog (and he beat me to using it as the t.i.tle of a book). "Get small," G.o.din blogged. "Think big."

The post-scarcity economy