What Would Google Do? Part 10

Right. The network becomes a form of insurance as connected devices can be monitored, repaired, and improved and can learn to do their jobs better and more safely. In the comments, Chris Cranley took off on G.o.din's idea and suggested that just as smarter products may need less insurance, the same may be said of smarter people: "If I knew how to avoid problem X, I would not insure against it." Education and information become insurance against insurance. G.o.din took this line of thinking to its extreme when he speculated about opportunities not just for smarter people but-genetically speaking-healthier people as determined by 23andMe, a service that a.n.a.lyzes users' DNA. (Founded by Brin's wife, Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe discovered his Parkinson's gene. Google invested in the company.) G.o.din said: And while some may not like it, what happens when 23andMe gets a lot smarter and the healthiest gene pool starts their own life insurance coop?

U.K. business journalist James Ball agreed with me that insurance is "a glorified betting market" where insurance providers "offer odds against certain outcomes-adverse outcomes-and we pay up the stake. The similarity between insurance providers and bookmakers stack up easily." His comment added that open betting exchanges had shattered bookmakers' control over odds and premiums and could do the same in insurance. "There's no built-in reason for 'social' insurance to fail," he wrote. "In fact, it could work quite well." Ball was arguing, as I have many times in this book, that the power of open information will make markets more efficient. He gave me a dose of my own medicine and I had to agree.

But still, I argued in response, there is the issue of fraud: People try to rip off insurance companies and that can undercut communities and markets built on trust. Ball replied that fraud is less of a problem in some cases. "Let's suppose we have insurance against burglary by requiring the crime to be reported before paying out," he wrote. That requirement gives insurers a measure of security. He continued: Risky, or trusting, insurers could offer worse "odds" with less requirement for proof in the event of a claim. By treating insurance as any other betting market, we'd effectively be insured by many small stakeholders.Cleverer yet, the marketplace could take a cut of premiums in some markets (say 5 per cent?) and use this to audit a random percentage of claims, for particularly risk-averse insurers, or for markets particularly sensitive to moral hazard.

Ball said his insurance marketplace would use technology and the theory of social networks to rely on transparency more than trust. He concluded: "Health insurance would certainly take some thought. But then again, I'm in the U.K., so not a problem for me." Rub it in, why don't you, James?

Shaun Abrahamson, a friend and former colleague, piped in to the comments, pointing out that the original insurance companies, like credit unions, "would have been recognizable as precursors to social networks." Then he pushed the social envelope in the discussion: "To James' point on betting and odds-making, do you think groups of people who know one another might outperform actuaries in a.s.sessing risk? Do you think it would be easy to defraud a network of people who know each other via friend-of-a-friend type connections?" In other words, if a community insures itself, are there social disincentives against s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g friends and neighbors?

Ivan Pope, a U.K. web entrepreneur, echoed Abrahamson and told me my premise was wrong. Insurance, he said, is inherently social.

In the same way that mutual societies and co-operative societies are all social, so insurance is a social contract. We all put in a bit and the ones who need it draw down from the pool. Sure, we privatised the management of it, gave away the profit, turned it into a huge scale business.... So we need some imagination, some ambition and some skill to build these back again as social communities.

Scott Heiferman, founder of Meetup, also brought historical perspective to the discussion, writing a brief manifesto for change in the coming decade, chock full of hip blog references (the "social graph" to which he refers is what Mark Zuckerberg calls the architecture of personal connections on Facebook): Historically, when people are free to a.s.semble & a.s.sociate, they self-organize insurance, cooperatively. Later it became the centralized, professionalized industry we know today. I predict there'll be some kind of ma.s.sive craigslistification of insurance by April 27, 2018. It's about de-inst.i.tutionalization-not from the government borg (social security), not from the corporate borg (AIG). The New Social [graph] Security. Decentralized, self-organized. Not just DIY, but DIO (Do It Ourselves). That is the big theme for everything now.

There is the great promise and power of the Google age: DIO.

In the end, commenter Gregory Lent summed up the ideal for the Google age, saying that the web 2.0 social network will blow up insurance, because it will transparently link the whole system, insured, insurers, providers of the service that insurance is paying for. no place to hide, accountability everywhere, prices will drop, profits/savings more evenly dispersed. best thing that can happen.

Tie all this together and we can begin to draw a picture of a disruptive insurance enterprise that empowers a community by handing over control of insurance to the members of that community. I played out this scenario for a couple of insurance executives who said I may be mad but the ideas are good.

Imagine a forward-looking company-Google, for example-creating a new insurance compact: If the community makes itself healthier and lowers the costs-and raises the effectiveness-of its own care, the cost of insurance will fall. The deal would motivate the community to pressure its members to become healthier and smarter. Insurance companies today try to get us to act healthier, pus.h.i.+ng us to join health clubs or eat smarter. But-apart from our feeling better-the direct economic benefit on medical costs is almost entirely the insurance company's and we never see a transparent accounting of the impact. The insurance 2.0 compact puts the community in charge and gives it mutual benefit and responsibility. Giving the community control means giving it information. The insurance company would need to give members complete disclosure about actuarial data, costs, and profits. The insurance company would also need to pressure doctors to hand over data about their work so community members could make smarter decisions about treatment.

The community, in return, needs to manage its health care, including keeping an eye on health providers. For example, my medical group makes me come in every four weeks to get checked for the blood-thinning drug I take because of my afib. My results never vary. Every time I'm there, I'm amazed at the inefficiency I see: two nurses making a big show out of p.r.i.c.king a finger (which some diabetics do on their own a half-dozen times a day). The medical group profits from my copay and from my insurance company's fees. It's a waste. I'm not motivated to do much about it. I have no relations.h.i.+p with the insurance company except mutual distrust and inconvenience. I would get nothing out of protesting or whistleblowing. If my community and I were in charge of our health care and insurance, that would be different. I'd make it my business.

The community also might choose to sponsor races, diets, and cla.s.ses and pay for that out of its pool of premiums if it believes the bet on health will pay off. It might offer services such as the French MAIF's home and child care if the group believes it is worth the cost. That becomes the community's decision. What emerges is a community whose members want to maintain better health at lower cost and risk through mutual benefit. They are able to do this because the new insurance company provides a platform with tools, information, and organization to help the community meet its goals. The insurance company's not in charge. The community is. It's a vision of insurance that follows many of Google's rules and starts with Jarvis' First Law.

This vision came from my readers. They applied the internet's new ways to old problems to see what could be improved. They believed that more transparency in marketplaces would yield greater value. They believed that adding social elements-the interests and pressures of a community-would increase value. They told me that handing control to the market would increase trust, and insurance is about trust. So they proposed networks of mutual need and service that diminish if not eliminate the middlemen.

I'm proud to say that I didn't come up with these ideas. My generous readers did. They were my insurance against an empty chapter.

Public Inst.i.tutions

Google U The United States of Google

Google U: Opening education Opening education

Who needs a university when we have Google? All the world's digital knowledge is available at a search. We can connect those who want to know with those who know. We can link students to the best teachers for them (who may be fellow students). We can find experts on any topic. Textbooks need no longer be petrified on pages but can link to information and discussion; they can be the products of collaboration, updated and corrected, answering questions and giving quizzes, even singing and dancing. There's no reason my children should be limited to the courses at one school; even now, they can get coursework online from no less than MIT and Stanford. And there's no reason that I, long out of college, shouldn't take those courses, too.

You may suspect that because I'm a professor, I'll now come out of this litany of opportunities with a rhetorical flip and demonstrate why we must preserve universities as they are. But I won't. Of course, I value the academy and its tradition and don't wish to destroy it. But just as every other inst.i.tution examined in this book is facing fundamental challenges to its essence and existence in the Google age, so is education. Indeed, education is one of the inst.i.tutions most deserving of disruption-and with the greatest opportunities to come of it.

Call me a utopian but I imagine a new educational ecology where students may take courses from anywhere and instructors may select any students, where courses are collaborative and public, where creativity is nurtured as Google nurtures it, where making mistakes well is valued over sameness and safety, where education continues long past age 21, where tests and degrees matter less than one's own portfolio of work, where the gift economy may turn anyone with knowledge into teachers, where the skills of research and reasoning and skepticism are valued over the skills of memorization and calculation, and where universities teach an abundance of knowledge to those who want it rather than manage a scarcity of seats in a cla.s.s.

Who's to say that college is the only or even the best place to learn? Will Richardson, who teaches fellow educators how to use the internet in the cla.s.sroom, wrote an open letter to his children, Tess and Tucker, on his blog, Webblog-ed.com: "I want you to know that you don't have to go to college if you don't want to, and that there are other avenues to achieving that future that may be more instructive, more meaningful, and more relevant than getting a degree." He said education may take them to cla.s.srooms and lead to certification but it also may involve learning through games, communities, and networks built around their interests. "Instead of the piece of paper on the wall that says you are an expert," he told his children, "you will have an array of products and experiences, reflections and conversations that show your expertise, show what you know, make it transparent. It will be comprised of a body of work and a network of learners that you will continually turn to over time, that will evolve as you evolve, and will capture your most important learning."

If that is what education looks like, what does a university look like? I asked that question on my blog and entrepreneur and technologist Bob Wyman (who works for Google) responded by abstracting the university and identifying its key roles: teaching, testing, and research. I'll add a fourth and unofficial role: socialization. Let's examine them in reverse order.

Socialization is, of course, a key reason we go to college and send our children there. Adults see college as a process of maturation and increased independence and responsibility. Students, on the other hand, may see it as a process of getting away from the parents. Whatever. Jeffrey Rayport, a consultant and Harvard Business School professor, sat with me in the Harvard Club in New York and told me it was designed by a graduate of the university who didn't much care for the school's harsh Cambridge atmosphere. In the club, he created what he wished Harvard had been: warm wood and fires, Harry Potter without the pomp and kitsch, the experience-the Disney World-of education. I do think there is a time to have that experience and live with our peers. Old people do. My parents live in Sun City Center, Florida, a town where one legally may not reside if under the age of 55. Why not have youth towns where residents are evicted by age 30: Melrose Place University?

But seriously...if one has the luxury of time and resources to explore the world before buckling down to a job and a mortgage, great. That exploration can take the form of backpacking around Asia, hanging out in a dorm, or joining the Peace Corps. Or these days, it may mean starting a company. Our young years may be our most creative and productive. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Google boys dropped out of school at various stages to start their corporate giants. Should we be forcing young people to go through 18, 16, or even 12 years of school-trying to get them all to think the same way-before they make things? Instead of the perennial call to subject our youth to mandatory national service-how's that for a way to squander a precious resource?-shouldn't we instead be helping them find and feed their muses?

Perhaps we need to separate youth from education. Education lasts forever. Youth is the time for exploration, maturation, socialization. We may want to create a preserve around youth-as Google does around its inventors-to nurture and challenge the young. What if we told students that, like Google engineers, they should take one day a week or one course a term or one year in college to create something: a company, a book, a song, a sculpture, an invention? School could act as an incubator, advising, pus.h.i.+ng, and nurturing their ideas and effort. What would come of it? Great things and mediocre things. But it would force students to take greater responsibility for what they do and to break out of the straitjacket of uniformity. It would make them ask questions before they are told answers. It could reveal to them their own talents and needs. The skeptic will say that not every student is responsible enough or a self-starter. Perhaps. But how will we know students' capabilities unless we put them in the position to try? And why structure education for everyone around the lowest denominator of the few?

Another byproduct of a university's society is its network-its old-boy network, as we s.e.xistly if accurately called it. That club has long held value for getting jobs, hiring, and making connections. But now that we have the greatest connection machine ever made-the internet-do we still need that old mechanism for connections? LinkedIn, Facebook, and other services enable us to create and organize extended networks (any friend of yours...) springing out of not just school but employment, conferences, introductions, even blogs. Members of Skull and Bones at Yale and graduates of Harvard Business School may object, but as an internet populist, I celebrate the idea that old networks could be eclipsed by new meritocracies. Facebook didn't just bring elegant organization to universities, it could supplant them as a creator of networks.

The next role of the university will be harder to nurture in a distributed architecture. Research, pure and directed, are values of the academe that the marketplace alone may not support. Unless it has a market value and is paid for by a company, research must be subsidized by foundations, endowments, donations, and tax dollars-and often by the generous pa.s.sion of the researcher. That will still be the case. The question is whether research will be done in schools or in think tanks and whether it will be performed by professors or by paid thinkers. There's little reason that research must be performed on campuses by academics and little reason why those academics cannot work in wider networks. Research has long been a process more than a product as papers are peer reviewed and research results are replicated. That is even more the case now as research is opened up online in web sites, blogs, and wikis and as their contents are linkable and searchable via Google (which provides a search service for academic works at scholar.Google.com). This openness invites contributions, collaboration, and checks.

The next role of the university is testing and certification: the granting of degrees and anointing of experts. The idea of a once-in-a-lifetime, one-size-fits-many certification of education-the diploma-looks more absurd as knowledge and needs change. Are there better measures of knowledge and thinking than a degree? Why should education stop at age 21? Diplomas become dated. Most of what I have done in my career has required me to learn new lessons-long past graduation-about technology, business, economics, sociology, science, education, law, and design. Lately I've learned many of these lessons in public, on my blog, with the help of my readers. That is why I urge other academics to blog and be challenged by their public. I believe that should count as publis.h.i.+ng. Blog or perish, I say.

Our portfolios of work online, searchable by Google, become our new CVs. Neil McIntosh, an editor at the Guardian, blogged that when he interviews young candidates for online journalism jobs, he expects them to have a blog. "There's no excuse for a student journalist who wants to work online not to have one," he wrote. "Moreover, the quality of the blog really matters, because it lets me see how good someone is, unedited and entirely self-motivated." Our work-our collection of creations, opinions, curiosities, and company-says volumes about us. Before a job interview, what employer doesn't Google the candidate (a practice banned by law in Finland, by the way)? Our fear is that employers will find embarra.s.sing, boozy pictures from spring break, but that's all the more reason to make sure they also find our blogs and collected works.

Sometimes employers will require certification. That, as Wyman says, is where testing comes in: exams to make sure our new doctors, lawyers, and PC support staffs know their stuff. But these exams are often given by professional organizations-medical boards and the bar-rather than schools. Preparation for those tests is undertaken by test-prep and commercial-education companies such as Kaplan. Universities ceded the market to them. Still, testing makes sense; it is our guarantee against the citizen surgeon (or that the citizen is qualified). It does make more sense to test students after after they've learned a subject than before. Tests given they've learned a subject than before. Tests given before before education commences-entrance exams-might better serve students if they discovered not what students know but rather what they need to know. Between SATs and exams mandated by No Child Left Behind laws in the U.S., we are succ.u.mbing to a tyranny of testing that commodifies learning. The system tries to turn out every student the same. education commences-entrance exams-might better serve students if they discovered not what students know but rather what they need to know. Between SATs and exams mandated by No Child Left Behind laws in the U.S., we are succ.u.mbing to a tyranny of testing that commodifies learning. The system tries to turn out every student the same.

Finally we arrive at the core, the real value of a university: teaching. Here I violate my own first law when I say that complete control of one's education should not always belong to the student. For when we embark on learning, we often don't know what we don't know. Or in Google terms, we don't know what to search for. The teacher still has a role and value: If you want to learn how to fix a computer or operate on a knee or understand metaphysics, then you hand yourself over to a teacher who crafts a syllabus to guide your understanding. When it's clear what you want to learn-how to edit a video with FinalCut, how to speak French-it's possible for a student to use books, videos, or experimentation to teach herself. The internet also makes it easy to connect teachers with students-see Teach-Street.com, which in only two cities has 55,000 teachers, trainers, tutors, coaches, and cla.s.ses, according to Springwise. I wouldn't go there to learn surgery, but I might to get help with my stale German.

One benefit of the distributed, connected university is that students may select teachers. Instructors won't be able to rest on tenure (I speak as someone who has it) but must rise on merit. Today, instructors are graded on sites such as RateMyTeachers.com, but students are still prisoners to their school's faculty. If they could take courses from anywhere, a marketplace of instruction would emerge that should lead the best to rise: the aggregated university. Instructors could also pick the best students. A cla.s.s would become a handpicked team that might research a topic as a group, blog their collective process of discovery, or write a textbook and leave a trail of their frequently asked questions and answers for the next cla.s.s or the public (what are courses but FAQs?). That product will be searchable and may provide a way for future students to find and judge courses and instructors. It's educational SEO, bringing the internet's ethic of transparency to the cla.s.sroom.

There could be new models for education. One might be education by subscription: I subscribe to a teacher or inst.i.tution and expect them to feed me new information, challenges, questions, and answers over years. Many schools give graduates refreshers and updates in skills; at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, we call this offer our 100,000-mile guarantee. Education could be a club more than a cla.s.s: We join to learn and teach together, sometimes handing the teaching duties to the best student on a given subject. Peer-to-peer education works well online as we can see in language-learning services such as Livemocha, where teachers in one language become students in another and where anyone in its gift economy can critique and help any student. It is a learning network.

In the cla.s.sroom, real or virtual, Google forces educators to teach differently. Why are we still teaching students to memorize facts when facts are available through search? Memorization is not as vital a discipline as fulfilling curiosity with research and reasoning when students recognize what they don't know, form questions, seek answers, and learn how to judge them and their sources. Internet and Google literacy should be taught to help students vet facts and judge reliability.

Is there a university, post-Google? Yes, these inst.i.tutions are too big, rich, and valuable to fade away. But like every other inst.i.tution in society, they should reshape themselves around new opportunities. Universities need to ask what value they add in educational transactions: qualifying teachers, helping students craft curricula, providing platforms for learning. We need to ask when and why it is necessary to be in the same room with fellow students and instructors. Cla.s.sroom time is valuable but not always necessary. Many professional MBA programs have found ways to limit time together so that education need not interrupt life. The Berlin School of Creative Leaders.h.i.+p (where I serve on the advisory board) has students meet in cities around the world so they can tap local expertise. Universities can become bigger than their campuses, and by bringing together special interests and needs from around the world, they can also become smaller, focusing on niches of knowledge while leaving other topics to other inst.i.tutions. Schools, too, will do what they do best and link to the rest. That requires them to make their knowledge open and searchable; Google demands it.

How will universities work as a business? To quote former MIT professor and satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer about the famous German rocket engineer who came to NASA: "'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down / That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun." If I taught three, three-credit courses a term for two terms to 20 students in each and they paid what they pay to my state-supported university-about $250 per credit-that would bring in $90,000, which is what I am paid (I don't do it for the money). In a compet.i.tive market, would students pay $750 for my cla.s.s? That depends on the quality of my teaching, the reputation of the university, and the state of the compet.i.tion. If they pay that amount, it still leaves no money for the university. Funds to support its structure would need to come, as they do now, from public or private subsidies. It doesn't look like a sustainable model.

Then again, look at University of Pheonix, Kaplan University, and other for-profit professional educational companies that have sprung up teaching students what they need to know for jobs. They're not academic like Oxford, but they fill a role and work as businesses. They charge more per credit-hour than my state inst.i.tution but less than prestigious private universities. I think we'll see many entrepreneurial enterprises devoted to education emerge as the internet enables a new marketplace of learning. Perhaps different ent.i.ties will maintain different roles. To learn database programming, you go to Kaplan; to learn the entrepreneurs.h.i.+p needed to create a new Google, you go to Stanford.

On its official blog, Google gave advice to students, not about where they should learn but what they should learn. Jonathan Rosenberg, senior VP of product management, blogged that the company is looking for "non-routine problem-solving skills." His example: The routine way to solve the problem of checking spelling would be use a dictionary. The non-routine way is to watch all the corrections people make as they refine their queries and use that to suggest new spellings for words that aren't in any dictionary. Rosenberg said Google looks for people with five skills: a.n.a.lytical reasoning ("we start with data; that means we can talk about what we know, instead of what we think we know"); communication skills; willingness to experiment; playing in a team; pa.s.sion and leaders.h.i.+p. "In the real world," he said, "the tests are all open book, and your success is inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free market."

Rosenberg's best advice for students and universities: "It's easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel." Google sprung from seeing the novel. Is our educational system preparing students to work for or create Googles? I wonder.

The United States of Google: Geeks rule Geeks rule

What if a Google guy were president? Earlier, I told of witnessing the competing worldviews of Larry Page and Sergey Brin versus that of Al Gore as they tackled environmental and energy crises. Google's founders saw the world and its problems through their engineers' eyes. Rather than seeking solutions through regulation and prohibition they relied on invention and investment: shouldn't do vs. can do. If the geeks take over-and they will-we could enter an era of scientific rationality in government. Other nonpoliticians have improved government. Michael Bloomberg ran New York City as a business. Arnold Schwarzenegger ruled California on the power of personality. A Google guy might just run government as a service to solve problems.

Whether or not they take charge, Google and the internet will have a profound impact on how government is run, on its relations.h.i.+p with us, and on our expectations of it. Now that we have the technological means to open up government and make every action transparent, we must insist on a new ethic of openness. So abolish the Freedom of Information Act and turn it inside out. Why should we have to ask for information from our government? The government should have to ask to keep it from us. Every action of government must be open, searchable, and linkable by default. The information government knows must be online with permanent addresses so we can link to it, discuss it, and download and a.n.a.lyze it. Government needs a new and transparent att.i.tude: Officials and agencies should blog and engage in open conversations with const.i.tuents. They should webcast every meeting, since technology now makes that easy. Remember Weinberger's Corollary to Jarvis' First Law: There is an inverse relations.h.i.+p between control and trust. The more our leaders trust us with information, the more we will trust them with government. Right now, there's too little trust in both directions.

I want government to implement tools like MyStarbucksIdea and Dell IdeaStorm to enable citizens to make suggestions and share ideas, discussing them together as communities: GovernmentStorm. The United Kingdom has E-Pet.i.tions, a program launched by the prime minister's office in 2006 with help from citizen activists in mySociety, which creates tools for government openness. Among the pet.i.tions: "Sc.r.a.p the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy" got 1.8 million signatures. "Cut value-added tax on 100% fruit juices and smoothies to the minimum 5% allowed by EU law to encourage shoppers to take the healthier option and achieve their 'five a day'" attracted 10,400. "Make breastfeeding in public legally acceptable for all babies and children" got almost 6,000. In its first year, 29,000 pet.i.tions were submitted (14,000 of them rejected because they were duplicates, jokes, or unlawful) drawing 5.8 million signatures. Here is a new way to involve the citizenry.

We also need to use these tools to turn the conversation about government to the positive and constructive. We spend too much time complaining about government and trying to catch the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds red-handed. There are lots of red-handed b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to catch. But some people in government do care and work hard. Until we expect the best of them, we will see only the worst. Let's think like engineers and identify problems and work toward collaborative solutions. Pollyannaish? Yes, but if we never move past complaining we'll never build anything new.

I'm not suggesting government should be crowdsourced. I don't want rule by the mob, even the smart mob. The internet requires filters, moderators, fact-checkers, and skeptics. So will the conversation that powers the country. That is the definition of a republic: representatives as filters. Those in power can use the internet to become better informed about our needs and desires and we can use it to speak and to contribute. The internet can transform the gift economy into the gift society.

The internet-which is so often accused of creating echo chambers where we hear only like minds-enables us to organize in new ways, around issues and not just party banners. People of any party or state, red or blue, can gather around the environment, taxes, education, health care, or crime as issues they want to tackle. This requires a new personal political openness: We need to say where we stand to find others who stand there. I'd like to see citizens use the web as personal political pages (PPPs) in which each of us may, if we choose, reveal our positions, opinions, and allegiances: the Facebook of democracy. I'd use a PPP to post my personal political statement online. In my case, I am a centrist Democrat; I voted for Hillary Clinton; I want to actively support movements to protect the First Amendment against Federal Communications Commission censors.h.i.+p; I believe we must support an aggressive national broadband policy; and I support universal health insurance. On my page, I would explain and discuss issues, linking to blog posts I've written or to others who speak effectively for my views. I already do this on the disclosures page of my blog because I try to practice transparency; my readers have a right to know where I stand on issues I write about so they can judge what I say accordingly.

On my PPP I should also be able to manage my relations.h.i.+p with politicians-a variation on the theme of Doc Searls' VRM or vendor relations.h.i.+p management. How about PRM: political relations.h.i.+p management? I want to say which candidates and organizations may approach me for my money or time. I'll invite opponents to try to convince me to change my mind: Give me your best shot. If someone convinces me, I'll change my public stance on the page. Personal political pages could become a standard for disclosure and could be used to reveal in clear language the stands-as well as the conflicts and biases-of politicians and journalists.

Let's imagine millions of these pages that can be searched and a.n.a.lyzed to reveal a constant snapshot of the vox populi: Google as the polling place that never closes, except now we control the questions and our opinions, not pollsters. This new public square makes politics and public opinion a constant process instead of an annual or quadrennial event. It is a platform for organizing citizens. We can search Google for people who agree on a topic and try to gather them around a page, pet.i.tion, group, politician, or organization.

When I toyed with this notion on my blog, one commenter, TV-industry a.n.a.lyst Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall Report, saw potential for reducing the power of the left-right pigeonholes in which we're too often stuck. Those pigeonholes, he said, make it so much more difficult to form coalitions with those at radically different parts of the ideological spectrum-with born-again Christians who are leading activists on HIV/AIDS or Darfur genocide; with Wall Street free traders who want to liberalize immigration with Mexico; with Cato Inst.i.tute libertarians who want to legalize narcotics; with centrist Democrats like Jeff Jarvis who want universal healthcare; with neoconservative ideologues working to replace autocrats and theocrats with democrats in the Middle East; with non-partisan bureaucrats like Michael Bloomberg who want to switch transportation from cars to ma.s.s transit.Personal political pages allow each of us to escape from the conventional left-right authoritarian-libertarian divisions of the political parties and the opinion pollsters. They allow us to align ourselves on each issue discretely, forming ad hoc, opportunistic coalitions not binding ones.

The moment Facebook was translated into Spanish (with the help of its community), it was used to organize campaigns in Colombia against FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerillas. Facebook was used to build a youth army for Barack Obama's run for the White House. Facebook's Causes is used to help the public gather support for issues. The internet and Wikipedia are used to inform the electorate. Meetup is used to help organize voters. These are tools that can help us collaborate and manage our government. Google and company aren't taking over Was.h.i.+ngton. They're helping us take over.

Exceptions

PR and lawyers G.o.d and Apple

PR and lawyers: Hopeless Hopeless

When I suggested on my blog that there were three industries immune from rehabilitation through Googlethink, my readers disagreed about one-insurance, which sp.a.w.ned an earlier chapter. But n.o.body disagreed about PR and law. I won't turn this into a joke about flacks and lawyers-there are plenty of those already (go to Google, search for "lawyer jokes," and enjoy). Instead, I'll use this opportunity to examine a few of the key tenets and prerequisites of Googlification through the exceptions that prove the rules.

The problem for public relations people and lawyers is that they have clients. They must represent a position, right or wrong. As they are paid to do that, the motives behind anything they say are necessarily suspect. They cannot be transparent, for that might hurt their clients. They cannot be consistent, for they may represent a client with one stance today and the opposite tomorrow, and we'll never know what they truly think. In a medium that treasures facts and data, they cannot always let facts win; they must spin facts to craft victory. They must negotiate to the death, which makes them bad at collaboration. It's not their job to help anybody but their clients. They are middlemen. They won't admit to making mistakes well; clients don't pay for mistakes.

Having said that these folks can't be reformed according to Google's ways is not to say that they can't use the tools we've reviewed to their own benefit. Some already do. Many lawyers blog (see a selection at Blawg. com). Like venture capitalists, they find value in talking about their specialties, giving advice, attracting business, branding themselves, and sometimes lobbying for a point of view. Some can be counted on to cover legal stories with valuable experience, background, and perspective. Lawyers are a smart bunch who-surprise!-can write in English instead of legalese. Still, when a law blogger advises me to check my made-in-China tires for problems, I'm also aware that he's on the prowl for cla.s.s-action clients. Law is business.

Some lawyers have taken advantage of online networking capabilities to create virtual law firms, eliminating the cost of offices and reducing the overhead of office staff. According to the blog Lawdragon, Virtual Law Partners uses these savings to give its partners 85 percent of billing revenue vs. the usual 3040 percent. Virtual PR and consulting firms also operate loosely, bringing in members of their networks as needed for clients and communicating and collaborating without offices.

PR people are trying to use the tools of web 2.0, Google, search, and social media to update their practices. Many of them blog-see, for example, Richard Edelman, head of the eponymous PR firm, and his web 2.0 guy, Steve Rubel, who blogs, Twitters, and joins in any new digital fad that comes round the corner so he can educate clients about them. PR people use these tools to keep track of what is being said about their clients and to join in those conversations. They have also been burned. In 2006, two bloggers wrote about their cross-country RV tour of Wal-Marts, where they met no end of allegedly happy employees. Revealed to have been arranged by Edelman and paid for by the front organization Working Families for Wal-Mart, the tour turned out to be an old-fas.h.i.+oned PR stunt updated only with the use of blogs. Edelman fell on his sword in a blog post: "I want to acknowledge our error in failing to be transparent about the ident.i.ty of the two bloggers from the outset. This is 100% our responsibility and our error; not the client's." Case in point: PR people are not, and likely cannot be, transparent. They have clients.

But it should be the job of PR advisers to convince clients that it is in their interest to be transparent and honest now that obfuscations and lies can be exposed so easily online. That is PR turned upside-down: Rather than representing and spinning the client to the world, they remind the client that the world is watching. They can also help companies fulfill their new role in the ecology of information online. We expect companies to have sites, to share information, to be factual if not fully transparent. Openness is the best PR you can have. Still, because they only advise, PR people aren't often in a position to change how a company is managed.

I'm sure lawyers and PR people-like real-estate agents-will be glad to tell me where I'm wrong and I welcome that discussion on my blog: Let's have at it, and if there are ways to Googlify these trades, then congratulations. In the meantime, both fields need to watch out, for the tools of Google and the internet enable others to disintermediate, undercut, and expose them.

The law and its execution are aided by obfuscation. The internet can fix that. A small number of volunteers could, Wikipedia-like, publish simple, clear, and free explanations of laws and legal doc.u.ments online. All it takes is one generous lawyer-not an oxymoron-to ruin the game for a thousand of them. I've seen a few such sites. They're not very good yet-none worth recommending-but they're a start.

Another trend that helps both lawyers and clients is the movement to open up laws and case law online, making them searchable and free. It is a scandal that the work of our own legislatures and courts is often hidden behind private pay walls. Westlaw and Lexis, the so-called Wexis duopoly, have turned our laws into their $6.5 billion industry. They add value by organizing the information, but others are now undercutting them. Forbes told the story of Fastcase, a start-up that uses algorithms instead of editors to index cases so it can reduce costs and lower fees to lawyers. Better yet, public.resource.org is fighting to get laws and regulations online for free. Patents are online now, and Google has made them searchable (go to google.com/patents and, for entertainment, look up p.o.o.per scooper-aka "Apparatus for the sanitary gathering and retention of animal waste for disposal" or "perpetual motion machine" or Google itself). Laws, regulations, and government doc.u.ments are prime meat for Google's disintermediation.

Sometimes lawyers are employed merely to intimidate-but now the internet's power to gather flash mobs enables those targeted by attorneys to return the intimidation. I've seen many cases of bloggers pleading openly for help against big organizations that are threatening or suing them. They received offers of pro bono representation from lawyers, often thanks to the Media Bloggers a.s.sociation. The intimidators then received floods of bad PR. The internet doesn't defang lawyers, but it can dull their teeth or bite them back.

I would like to see an open marketplace of legal representation-present your problem and take bids from lawyers who have handled similar cases, with data on their success rates. Legal representation can also be open-sourced. People who've been in cases can offer free advice and aid to others: Here's how I dealt with my landlord and here are all the doc.u.ments I used; feel free to copy and adapt them.

The goal is to free the law-our law-from the private stranglehold of the legal priesthood. Between putting laws and cases online and making them searchable, creating simplified legal doc.u.ments anyone can use, holding weapons to fight legal intimidation, and creating a more transparent marketplace, we would not replace the legal profession with all its faults but we could create checks on its power. law-from the private stranglehold of the legal priesthood. Between putting laws and cases online and making them searchable, creating simplified legal doc.u.ments anyone can use, holding weapons to fight legal intimidation, and creating a more transparent marketplace, we would not replace the legal profession with all its faults but we could create checks on its power.

Even the Supreme Court could benefit from a little Googlification. After the Court's esteemed justices made two mistakes in two decisions one day in 2008-one in a case involving the death penalty and child rape, the other involving energy regulation-they were corrected by bloggers who would have been happy to do so before before the decisions, if only they'd been given the chance. I wouldn't hold my breath. the decisions, if only they'd been given the chance. I wouldn't hold my breath.

What other industries are immune from Googlethink? VC Fred Wilson said construction, because it's so laden with atoms. Yes, but architecture is opening up-I've seen more than one effort to open-source both the creation and use of designs. We can also share ways to fix up our homes. Waste disposal? Atoms again, but I'll bet that we, the customers, will start using online soapboxes to gang up on manufacturers and force them to reduce their obscene packaging. Furniture? There's a blog called Ikeahacker that enables fans to share ideas for modifying the slavishly standardized Swedish products. Mining? The book Wikinomics Wikinomics delights in telling the story of a mining company that opened up its geologic data to enable the public to help it find deposits and to get a share of the wealth that resulted. p.o.r.nographers? Of course, they have been the pioneers in most every innovation in online media and the industry benefited from each move-until amateur p.o.r.n came along on p.o.r.nTube (the not-safe-for-work YouTube) to undercut the business benefits of scarcity. The military? Actually, it was among the earliest users of blogs and wikis because it wants troops to share their experience and what they know. Terrorists? Unfortunately, they have made all-too-effective use of the internet and SEO to spread poison and create networks. No, few are immune from Google's impact. delights in telling the story of a mining company that opened up its geologic data to enable the public to help it find deposits and to get a share of the wealth that resulted. p.o.r.nographers? Of course, they have been the pioneers in most every innovation in online media and the industry benefited from each move-until amateur p.o.r.n came along on p.o.r.nTube (the not-safe-for-work YouTube) to undercut the business benefits of scarcity. The military? Actually, it was among the earliest users of blogs and wikis because it wants troops to share their experience and what they know. Terrorists? Unfortunately, they have made all-too-effective use of the internet and SEO to spread poison and create networks. No, few are immune from Google's impact.

G.o.d and Apple: Beyond Google? Beyond Google?

OK, then, what about G.o.d? Is he immune from Googlethink? Churches have used the internet to spread their word and create virtual congregations that meet online or through Meetup. There are religious versions of many of the internet's big sites-such as G.o.dTube, holier than YouTube-and religious groups have made clever use of others: G.o.d is big on Mys.p.a.ce and Facebook. Bible and Koran verses are searchable not only on the web but even on the iPhone. It's hard to imagine G.o.d endorsing a wiki version of the Bible-but then, wasn't the Talmud the world's first wiki? There are even web 2.0 religious movements. Open-Source Judaism-inspired by Douglas Rushkoff's 2003 book Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism-has created the Open-Source Haggadah (a prayer book). G.o.d is not immune from the power and influence of Google.

Is there any ent.i.ty that is untouched? Is there an anti-Google, one inst.i.tution that has become successful by violating the rules in this book? I could think of one: Apple.

Consider: Apple flouts Jarvis' First Law. Hand over control to the customer? You must be joking. Steve Jobs controls all-and we want him to. It is thanks to his brilliant and single-minded vision and grumpy pa.s.sion for perfection that his products work so well. Microsoft's products, by contrast, operate as if they were designed by warring committees. Google's products, though far more functional than Microsoft's and built with considerable input from users, appear to have been designed by a computer (I await the aesthetic algorithm).

Apple is the opposite of collaborative. It's not that it doesn't care what we think. After a product comes out, Apple has learned to fix its mistakes-quietly. The first iPhone's headphone jack was recessed in the case to make it look prettier, but that also made it incompatible with all plugs but Apple's own. In the next iPhone, the problem was fixed. Make mistakes well? Apple makes them quietly. Apple has apologized-most recently for its botched MobileMe launch-but mea culpas are rare.

Apple is a cult company and its customers are its best marketers-that much is Googley. Apple customers have made commercials for its products, they love them so. But Apple still spends a fortune in advertising, imbuing the brand with more cool because its commercials are as well-designed and well-executed as its products. Its most effective advertis.e.m.e.nt of all is Jobs' keynote lecture and demonstration at Apple conferences. The company could not be more one-way and less interactive.

Apple is the farthest thing from transparent. It has sued bloggers for ferreting out and revealing its secrets. Attacking its own fans was unbloggy and uncool, but Apple didn't care about the bad publicity. It's Apple.

Apple abhors openness. That's another reason its products work so well, because it controls what can run on them, how it runs, and how it makes money. When the iPhone came out, there were many complaints from open-minded geeks about not being able to install their own programs. Then with the next iPhone, Apple created a closed app store with lots of choices. The complainers kept themselves busy trying out new toys, and many said it was a pleasure to see applications that had been screened for quality, unlike the software fleamarket that Facebook and Mys.p.a.ce had become.

Apple's closed way of doing business is one of its advantages. While the rest of the online world was merrily destroying the music business with openness, Apple created the secure means for fans to buy billions of songs legally and happily.

Apple does, however, support open-source software, bragging on its site that it contributes to dozens of pools of code. That is a good business decision. Apple based its operating system on Unix rather than trying to make one itself; it's cleaner, far more reliable, and simpler than Windows. Apple's not stupid.

Apple does not think distributed. It makes us come to wors.h.i.+p at its altar.