LJ Talks to Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?

Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 01/22/2009

Jeff Jarvis, founding editor of Entertainment Weekly and journalism professor at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, is probably best known as a new media pundit, via his Buzzmachine.com blog and a column in London’s Guardian. 

His new book, What Would Google Do? (CollinsBusiness), is officially published next week. It’s drawn cheers (and some sneers) for its effort to “reverse engineer”—without interviewing the company—Google’s present and future impact on numerous sectors, from publishing to banking to carmaking. (Update: Browse inside; here's an audio excerpt.) 

LJ's Norman Oder posed some questions to Jarvis.

LJ:  You’ve criticized books because they’re “frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected” and they lack links and interactivity. What are you doing to make sure this book goes digital? 
Jeff Jarvis: What Would Google Do? began interactively, on my blog. One entire chapter of the book, on insurance, came from the commenters after I had said I couldn’t imagine ways to make that industry Googley; they could. 

Collins Business is trying many new things. We recorded a video version of the book to sell online and I also recorded a score of videos with added thoughts for a V-book (an E-book with videos). We’re planning to put up a snippet of the book every day starting on the on-sale date (Jan. 27) to spark discussion—on my blog, where the discussion is already going on.

Other authors have shared their entire books online and they say it worked well for them. But I’m a first-time book author. Frankly, with college for my kids looming, I couldn’t pass up the advance. And there’s still a great deal about physical publishing that does work: the investment in and value of editing, promotion, sales, with the publisher’s relationships with booksellers, librarians, and media. 

You didn’t write about libraries in the book—why?
I chose some sample industries as illustrations of how to adapt the rules behind Google’s rise. Libraries already act like Google in many ways. Or I should say instead, Google acts like libraries. It is the mission of both to organize the world’s information, to make it openly accessible, to find and present the most authoritative (by many definitions) sources, to instill an ethic of information use in the public, to act as a platform for communities of information, to encourage creation.

So how could libraries, in turn, think like Google? Some libraries act as platforms for community content creation (one of my first efforts in hyperlocal community journalism, GoSkokie.net, made with the Medill School of Journalism, is now run by the library). In how many ways could a library act as a platform for the community to inform itself by providing tools and training for content creation?

How can libraries collect the wisdom of the crowd that is their communities (e.g., creating collaborative town wikis and maps made by the community)? Librarians and their expert patrons could curate the web and create topic pages that would rise in Google search as valuable resources for the world (if your library is in Florida, it could maintain the best collections of sources for information on manatees or sunburns). What I’d really like to do is brainstorm this question with your readers on my blog: How could they be Googlier?

I think librarians will have a key role in what I believe will be a distributed future of education... in a limitless web of teachers and students no longer bound by a classroom or campus or by geography. Librarians, like Google and like learners, are thinking past their libraries. 

Companies like Starbucks and Salesforce, you write, solicit ideas from their users. How might that apply to libraries?
The notion behind the Ideas platform at Dell and Starbucks is that customers should tell companies what to do, not just through a suggestion box but through a discussion (and voting) in which the best ideas rise and the worst wither. Soliciting ideas is the first step; refining them collaboratively is the next; doing them together is the next—mobilizing your readers or patrons to work as a community on projects.

Another Googley idea would be to collect and share lots of data about what your community or a library does, beyond best-seller lists. I’ve long said that I’d love to see the Amazon orders of New Yorker readers (in aggregate, violating no one’s privacy). In my book, I speculate about a Googley restaurant, in which we’d see data about how many people ordered which dishes (and with which wines and what they thought). I wonder what new ideas for programs, stories, and acquisitions would come out of such data that libraries already have.

While the title is What Would Google Do?, in the case of Google Book Search, we know what Google did—scanned books from libraries on a scale previously unimaginable, but enclosed them in a system that is not open. How does this square with openness, a value you stress?
There’s no reason publishers couldn’t have created their own consortium to do everything Google will do: scan books, make them searchable, manage purchases and payments, and even sell ads on book content. Similarly, libraries could have scanned works in the public domain on their own. That Google puts on conditions--some of which are not Google's but are apparently rights holders'-- should not be shocking. Just as ad-supported media conceded much of the ad market to Google, so did publishers and libraries allow Google to step into a void they left.

I think that Google Book Search and the settlement around it are good for books and authors because the service will enable many more readers to discover many more books. Authors and publishers might end up with another revenue stream. And books can live on past the remainder table. Rather than fighting the tide and Google, publishers should have tried to see how to offer and capture these benefits themselves. Now they’re wise to work with Google. 

I am a fan of openness and see its many benefits but I also believe in ownership and in copyright (though I’ve learned from Larry Lessig that owners often benefit more by opening up). So I don’t think publishers, Google, or I would disagree with the idea that creators deserve control.

You acknowledge on page 114 “the irony of advocating transparency in a book about Google” given the secrecy about its operations and formulae. We wouldn’t want Google running our public libraries, right? Shouldn’t we be concerned about the tradeoffs involved in ceding our digital libraries to Google?
Isn’t Google already running the public library of our digital knowledge? Its mission, after all, is to organize the world’s knowledge and it does an excellent job of that, making more knowledge accessible to more people than ever. Google benefits from openness—our openness—and the more open we are with our knowledge, the more we’ll be found via Google, and the more we benefit in turn. 

Yes, I wish Google itself were more open about, for example, the sources it includes in GoogleNews and its advertising splits. Google can’t be open about its algorithms or it will be gamed by spammers more than it already is. So I recognize the limits of openness, especially for a business. But I do think that Google is not in competition with libraries in this sense: Both want knowledge to be open and accessible (and organized).

You write that the “next generation of local (news) won’t be about news organizations but about their communities.” What does that mean to communities of interest, not location, served by magazines like Library Journal?
First, I wonder why your magazine still needs to be a magazine, with the cost of paper, ink, and distribution and the other limitations of print—delays and the inability to correct, search, link, and comment. You have a good site and your audience is wired. Your value is most certainly not in your press. Other trade publishers, notably IDG, have passed the Rubicon from print to digital [Details here] and its executives go so far as to say that print is now a distraction.

I’m not against print. But neither am I sentimental about it. What’s the best way to gather and share your information with your public and to use the web to connect members of your community with each other?

Yes, I’ve been saying for some time that editors will be curators. Curating the work of the biblioblogosphere is a great service but you can also do more and become a platform for it to grow and prosper with content, training, vetting, promotion, technology—and revenue: the LJ Library Blog Network. Media properties—especially specialized and business publications—should think of themselves less as products and more as platforms for their communities. That’s thinking like Google.

You offer an unusually extensive “About me” set of disclosures on your blog. Why?
Transparency—more than objectivity—is an ethic I’ve learned in the blog world. I was transparent about my thought process for my book and I gained value from readers as a result. We now see many journalists who are opening up at last about their process if not about themselves. Companies and government must learn the benefits of such transparency and certainly libraries can also benefit. But the key to transparency is not exhibitionism or ego; it’s relevance: what should your public know about your work to both judge what you do and help you do it better?

You write that “every action of government must be open, searchable, and linkable by default.” A worthy goal, but how to pay for it?
Transparency is an ethic. I suggest in the book—with only so much hyperbole—that we abolish the Freedom of Information Act and replace it with a moral of openness: Instead of citizens having to ask government permission to get information, government should have to ask citizens to keep information from them. Transparency should be the default. That won’t be expensive to manage if government does its business digitally—it already does—and opens up under standard data formats and if government officials, especially the elected, open up their process of governing in conversations via simple tools such as blogs. Hell, I’ll bet Google would be happy to help make government searchable.

Are you confident Google will be around for the imaginable future? After all, there are cycles with tech companies.
What Would Google Do? isn’t about Google being infallible (the joke in the title aside). It’s about Google’s worldview, its perspective on the vast and permanent changes in technology and society and the opportunities they present; that is the key to its success.

Our world today is inside-out, confusing, and counterintuitive, and Google is the one company that has figured it out to become, according to The Times of London, the fastest growing company in the history of the world. That’s why we should ask, what would Google do? Google could fall, but it’s not easy to see how that would happen—not just because its search is great but because it now serves more than a million advertisers. Other companies and institutions—Facebook, perhaps, or craigslist, or the Obama administration, or someone new—could succeed similarly, but if they do so it will be because they, too, look at this new world in a new way.

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