Is 'What would Google do' really the right question?
Is "Google the new God," as Jeff Jarvis not so modestly proclaims?
Rafat Ali points to a discussion between Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of New York Times Digital, and Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine:
Martin thinks Jeff Jarvis is the extreme in this journalism vs bloggers debate--especially when it comes to mainstream news sites working with bloggers and aggregating and pointing to them, working with them, and bringing them onboard--and was trying to point to a middle ground, something which he thinks NYT is doing, when in fact Jarvis is that middle ground, if you peel the layers behind some of his hyperbole. Either way, it is an important argument, though some of it is pure theater, done for the sake of it.
Jarvis responds in a comment:
Yes, to the theater. But Martin and I agree we were also disagreeing about something more fundamental…We were arguing about the centralized-v-distributed models of media: Yahoo as an example of the old, centralized model (’we control content and market to bring you to us and then give ads here’ and Google is the example of decentralized (’we go where you are so your pageview is our pageview and thus we enable you to do what you do’). Martin is arguing that some media brands—yes, the Times—are worth coming to. I’m arguing that all brands need to ask: WWGD—what would Google do? How can we go to where the people are and create a wider network of quality to do more than we could have done alone?”
Is Jeff Jarvis really, “in fact,” the “middle ground”? Jarvis’ hyperbolic “theater” may, in fact, be deemed prosetylizing.
Is $150 billion market cap number one search engine Google, with its public mission to organize all the world’s information within the mighty Google Cloud, along with the world’s advertising, really the Web 2.0 poster child for “decentralized” information distribution?
Not only does Google enjoy a 50% plus search market share, it even one-ups "old" Yahoo on the Internet portal destination front. A Google spokesperson told me in December:
People equate the Google search box with their browser window. Google is often used as the gateway to the Internet.
ALSO: Why Google will never pay for content and Why Google is not King and Google CEO wants your personal information