Worldwide connectedness. That’s the beauty of the Web. Find anything, anywhere, at any time.
It’s the idea Google used to disrupt and build a multi-platform empire – fueled by search dominance. But now it’s at risk of being gone for all us – and we will likely never get it back.
With its recent announcement about search changes, Google fully committed to its strategy of joining others in creating walled gardens on the Internet. It is big change by the Web industry’s leader.
google
Google was always about an open Web. It is what made Google the Web king – particularly in search. When the average user thinks of the transcendent Web experience, they think “Google it,” right?
Google let other companies worry about social. MySpace came along, whatever. Facebook started up, also a yawn. Twitter, not worried. Besides, they were all walled gardens. Google was the Web!
But as Facebook began rising toward 1 billion users, Google started to get worried. I was at a Google developer event last year when word of the Google+ social network was leaked. The story was denied by Google, but it was clear something big was coming from Google.
Google+ was later launched. Though the Facebook-Google+ rivalry was about social on its face, it was about much more: Facebook set out a goal of becoming the exclusive Web experience.
Yet Facebook had always been the anti-Google and, as a walled garden, they could never be Google. But now, over the past year, Google is pivoting hard.
Its new strategy will make it look more like the other walled gardens of the Web. Google-related results now get top billing in its brand-defining search results, clearly an effort to boost Google+.
As a marketer and digital strategist, it is job security. It’s one more platform with one more strategy to define and execute. As a techie, it bums me out. I loved the old Google’s “open” idealism. As a consumer, I am frustrated to no longer have a quintessential platform-agnostic Web choice.
The example that crystalizes it for me is the choice of my next phone. A longtime Microsoft user, I have gravitated toward the Mac platform, but hadn’t gone all-in with an iPhone. As a pre-iPhone Verizon customer, I opted last time for an Android phone and its tailored Google Web experience.
However, when I upgrade in April, I will be looking at a choice that will essentially define my Web experience for the next two years. The next era of the Web will be mobile, one we will each experience in distinct ways: from Apple’s iPhone view; Microsoft’s Windows phone view; or Google’s Android view.
We are well on our way to a splintered world-wide Web of many walled gardens. It reminds of the view of some in my former industry, journalism, who didn’t want to include outside links on the notion, “We don’t want them to go anywhere but our site.” It was a bad idea then and it still is now.
It has become my annual tradition in December to look back in this blog at the year concluding – and look forward to the one approaching.
2012
There is so much to say about my incredible journey in 2011, it is hard to pick a highlight. There are certainly themes for the year; they center around growth, gratitude, and professional development. It looks like more of the same for 2012.
I will most likely be able to look back at this serendipitous year as a seminal one for me, thanks in large part to the undying support from my indescribable network of friends, family and colleagues. It was equal parts challenging, exhilarating, and satisfying.
On a professional level, it was the year of full transition to the field of digital marketing as a Digital Strategist. I had the opportunity to work with a wide-ranging collection of professionals in the B2B, B2C, agency and non-profit worlds. Their leaders have taught me so much.
On a personal level, the circle of life played itself out in poignant ways. New lives were brought into this world and milestones were celebrated, but we lost some great people who left things better than they found them. I think mostly of my children’s great grandmother, 93, who was such an inspiration.
Steve Jobs (Creative Commons, Matt Yohe)
In the technology world, it was never more crystalized this year than by the premature passing of Steve Jobs. He has been called many things, including the Thomas Edison of our age, and he is all of them. He helped to change the world and left an indelible impact.
We learned even more about his gifts after he was gone. I blogged about Jobs’ legacy and that post was a microcosm of how I had a small impact on the digital world.
Analytics for my blog show visits, visitors, and pageviews were up nearly 2.5 times the previous year’s levels. Visitors came from 63 countries and they spoke two dozen languages.
Those statistics show how much our world has changed, just in this millennium. I can reach thousands of people as a publisher, thanks to free platforms such as WordPress, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and Google’s suite of products.
I got to meet and interact with some of my digital heroes in 2011: Doc Searls, Jeremiah Owyang, Jeff Pulver, Jay Baer, Jason Falls, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Ben Huh. I was maybe most touched by the inspirational speech of legendary basketball star Bill Walton and our brief meeting afterward.
I attended South by Southwest and had the privilege of moderating a panel at the #140 Conference when it came to my hometown of Vancouver, WA. It was a great year.
My theme for 2011 was “Digital is Everywhere.” We saw more consolidation of technology companies, the continued growth of social networks, the ongoing explosion of mobile and video. We are evolving toward the merge point that visionaries such as Jeremiah Owyang have been talking about: where Web, social, mobile, and platforms are seamless. Of course, it won’t stop there. We have no idea where it is going.
It looks like 2012 will be further points on that continuum: Brands will get smarter, marketers will get more real, and the core principles behind #occupy will move into the digital world. Watch for privacy and personal identity principles, such as those touted by the VRM movement, to gain greater traction as we become more digitally connected.
I personally can’t wait to see what 2012 has to offer. I say, “Auld Lang Syne!”
I had a chance to catch up with serial Web entrepreneur Ben Huh recently in Portland.
Ben Huh - Public Domain image
Huh has built an empire by launching a series of off-beat sites that capture some of the folly and humor in life. He first launched “I Can Has Cheezburger?” and his later ventures led to the creation of the Cheezburger network.
I asked Huh about The Moby Dick Project – his effort to help spur innovation of the journalism industry (a business that struggles with those concepts). Huh is one of the speakers and judges of a journalism “hackathon” this weekend at Adobe’s Seattle offices. The Hacking Seattle News weekend (#HackingNews) is one of a handful of such sessions being held across the country and will award a $10,000 prize to the winning team.
I decided to do this blog post in a Topic/Answer format, allowing Huh to speak for himself – which he does very well.
FAIL Blog is one of the key reasons people say “fail” (#fail). It started in 2008 and it was a collection of things about the human error; the mistakes we make, the failures we go through, and to laugh it through.
Huh’s venture to reinvent journalism
“It’s called the Moby Dick Project. You can find out more by following us on Twitter, @MobyDickProject.
The key thesis is news curation and presentation has been done the same way since the Civil War: articles, headlines, home pages. What if we invented journalism today? What if we didn’t have all the baggage of articles, the inverted pyramid … what if we just re-imagined news in the age of social media, digital distribution, and how people consume news? What would that look like and how could we build stuff that supports it, that’s open-source, that anybody can use.
We ran a workshop at Stanford a few months ago and brought in about 80 people to rethink this idea of journalism and how to make it work in the digital world. We’re actually going through the process of creating hackathons (about four different cities total). The idea is to actually build a prototype and to use the prototype as a way to increase awareness and raising support for the program.”
A journalist who became an entrepreneur
“I have a background in journalism, a degree in journalism from Northwestern, the Medill School of Journalism, and spend some time in the media world. In that role, the ONA (Online News Association) asked me to come and speak and give a keynote in Boston and I just happened to also have this project, so it was a good coincidence. …
At the keynote in Boston, it was very, very clear that the digital world has made the journalists think twice about how their job evolves and I think they’re past the stage of fear and getting to stage of acceptance: This is going to happen whether we like it or not. What they haven’t figured out is, we need to change our perception of our job, perception of our technology, how we view our readership. All that needs to change before we can really be truly successful; that has not yet occurred.”
Where is the innovation in journalism?
“My personal opinion is that things in the news industry haven’t gotten bad enough where people will truly think of innovative ideas. The disruption really hasn’t been that bad; it’s been gradual enough. It’s been bad, but it hasn’t been catastrophic and I don’t want to see that. I don’t want it to get to catastrophic. I don’t want to see people start jumping ship. I think the industry has been really focused on cutting costs, instead of trying to build a product that’s better for everybody.
I think that providing news of value to small groups of people in more efficient ways is one of the future paths of journalism. The decimation in the last three years of journalism has come from what I call “repeatable news,” things people publish because everybody else publishes it and that has very little value. Only the winners get the majority of that traffic. So, if you’re writing about the same thing everybody else is, you’re actually declaring to your audience, “I really don’t have anything else to tell you.” We, as consumers, want more uniqueness; we want more diversity; we want more analysis; we want more opinion. We are not getting that, and that’s a big problem.”
Looking ahead: What happens to journalism …
If it doesn’t adapt: “I think you are going to see more accidental entrepreneurs who will gain followers. Boing Boing is one of those examples where they were covering things that other people weren’t; that’s how they grew. It’s the uniqueness that adds value.”
If pay walls aren’t the answer: “The jury is definitely still out on the pay wall. I think the New York Times, despite all the flak they’ve gotten, have done a decent job of making the pay wall work for themselves. The problem with a pay wall is that a lot of people believe that is the answer to their problems. I have to say, having run a business, every business is unique, and if you’re just going to implement someone else’s solution, you might as well print somebody else’s story. It’s the same response to the same problem we’ve been having all along.”
