Best book on the subject by far

If in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, Jeff Jarvis contends Google jumped into the blind, half-realized world of Web 1.0 full-sighted and fully aware of the possibilities. Jarvis writes about the impact and power of Google the way a disciple follows a prophet - he's a smart, perceptive, at times skeptical disciple, but a disciple non-the-less.

Jeff Jarvis, a blogger, describes Google's groundbreaking business model - a business model based on fundamental changes in customer expectations and organization, the architecture of the internet, openness, ethics and economy. Jarvis doesn't write a history of Google, he writes a journalistic analysis of its culture from the outsider's perspective, a choice that hurt this books credibility. While Jarvis knows his Google: how Google rankings work, the widespread and at times pointed power of blogs, the mass of niche marketing - I wish Jarvis had a quarterly report. I wish he could point me to a webpage or newspaper article or Google PR report to explain those things. I don't require Jarvis to follow an academic's footnoted thesis, I just like to know where he got the knowledge. A book is a still a book, Jarvis, and it's not searchable or linkable, you said so yourself.

Jarvis spends the last half of his book re-imagining certain industries into Google-esque, internet-based free-markets. Jarvis is an unapologetic proponent of open-source anything, be it wine lists or GM-car design, and interconnecting as much of our lives into the computing cloud as possible. Jervis envisions restaurants where the customers affect the menu, peer-to-peer loans ala Kiva.org for banks, and a nebulous online-aggregated university process. His ideas strike a ring of truth, and sometimes a ring of fear - the old order slips away, the center of today's world will not hold. Jarvis has already found his battlecry: Long Live Google! Long Live the King!

Other Reviews & Original Words: http://motorcyclesshotguns.blogspot.c... ( )

A great overview of a different way of doing business. This isn't just about Google. It is about how to rethink your own business model. If you don't like Google, skip the book. ( )

See the review on my blog http://zerochampion.building.co.uk/20...

What Would Google Do?
Jeff Jarvis
HarperCollins Publishers, New York
ISBN-978-0-06-170971-5

257 pages (hardback)

Jarvis (City of New York Graduate School of Journalism and founder of Entertainment Weekly) wraps a wide range of services and industries including law, manufacturing, and government within the context of - What Would Google Do? or WWGD?. Jarvis provides the perspective of his real world experience with other leaders in print and interactive media to show how services and industries will no longer survive and grow as exclusive gatekeepers of information. Google and the internet have simply changed market expectations – customers want and expect control over the choices they make. Google’s highly successful business model as developer of freely available information platforms focusing on client interaction allows them to dominate the new advertising marketplace. Jarvis demonstrates how other businesses can also flourish by focusing on customer and client dialogs and defining the scope of their services and products within niche markets. True to the question of WWGD?, Jarvis invites ongoing participation through his blog Buzzmachine.com – effecting an interactive conversation about the book. Well indexed and thought provoking, WWGD is highly recommended for public, academic, and business libraries. ( )