“We The Media”

In “we the media” Dan Gillmor, talks about the thirst for news that grew post 9-11, it is interesting how the emergence of so many blogs were dedicated to comments about what the 9-11 attacks, he also talks bout how the big media companies are not the only ones dominating the news agenda.  Now the big media companies formerly know as the big three ABC, CBS, and NBC don’t dominate the news business anymore.  Now, anyone who is interested in certain news or topics can write about it, and as Gillmor says sometimes they create big stories and become famous independently from the media.

Gilmore also says that a lot of good content is being written by amateurs who are passionate about topics and technology.  As long as people are interested in voicing out their opinion and as long as they have the tools and a computer to write it, they will do it.  This is his approach or philosophy of “we the media” in which he says that anyone of us can create our own conversation online and we don’t necessarily have to what for the big media to us what to think of who to think.  Now some of us tell big media what we think the agenda should be. Now and in the future it seems that we are the media.  

The Wealth of Networks

The whole philosophy of pee-to-peer open source programs is basically being able to use any program available for free. Of course this is something that big companies like Microsoft don’t like because it takes business away from them. The programmers who designed the open source system truly believe in the movement of freedom in regard freedom of sharing programs with others without them having to pay for it.  Moreover, Benkler also talks about the freedom people have to make any modified changes to the programs if needed; as long as they give credit to the original General Public License it is good.   

“In the Peer Production of Information, Knowledge, and Culture”In the open source systems anyone’s knowledge is well appreciated, because, even now it exists technical supports through the blogs, now users don’t even have to wait hours and hours to have technical support from the company. That is a great advantage, and the support is for free. Is cool to find places that offer support where individuals share “their time, experience, wisdom, and creativity to form new information, knowledge, and cultural goods” (Benkler, 15). Finally in this age of technology, it is always good to find out how much valuable information we can find online and best of all it has been provided to us by someone who cares and knows about technology and he or she is willing to share that knowledge with the whole world. Great!    

We Are The Web: WIRED

In We Are The Web, Kevin Kelly, takes an interesting review of how the experts in technology got the evolution of the Internet wrong.  He goes back to the 1990’s when the Internet was not even understood by the computer experts.  It just amazes me how wrong experts were.  For example Kelly talks about an article published in 1994 by Time Magazine.  In this article the author explained “why the Internet would never go mainstream: “It was not designed for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accommodate new arrivals”.  So many experts cataloged the emergence of the web as “baloney”.  Wow! Even experts were dead wrong. One thing that I found questionable in this article were some statistics about who the Internet uses are.  Their surveys have found that the majority of the Internet users are females. I agree with his findings.  However, I don’t agree with the findings that teenagers don’t really use the Internet.  The article says that “Internet is not and has never been a teenage realm… in fact; they say that the average Internet user age is 41 years old.  I don’t agree with these numbers and there are many reasons why I don’t agree with these figures.  First of all, we know that for the most part teenagers tend to be the early adapters of technology; they are the ones who have the latest gadgets, the most recent cell phones, computers, or the most recent games. Thus I think some of the findings are not really accurate, however, the article is really interesting. It really shows who much the internet has evolved since the 1990’s.    At first, Internet was seen as a medium of communication for the elite, now it is a communication medium for anyone, to do just about anything.  It is unimaginable the things we are able to do Online thanks to the creation of the Internet. Now people buy, gamble, watch movies Online, do their banking, dating, play games, chat, and get information about anything they want from everywhere they want.  It is just amazing.  Finally, equally important, the future for the web evolution is unimaginable that not even the most knowledgeable experts in technology are able to accurately predict it.     

Google’s hiring culture

One of the things that Battelle touches on “The Search” is the culture of hiring approach. He explains how the hiring process is strictly enforced so Google can have the best possible employees in their company. Battelle mentions that contrary to other companies which employee hire other people based on social connections or not necessarily based on their skills, at the end they hurt the productiveness of the company. He explains that when a candidate applies for a position, the people on top usually hire someone who they can manipulate so they can control the person thus, creating a hierarchy, eventually creating a hostile environment in which employees are very little productive. “They created hiring committees that review every single open position. That way, it wasn’t just one employee’s opinion that gated a person joining the company; it was more of a pluralistic debate”.(Battelle,131).
           On chapter seven Battelle explains how the marketing process for Ad-words works. I think it is interesting how Google establishes a market price for an Ad-word. For example, he mentions that Google sells key words to a company so that when someone types that key word, Google will rank their page at the top of the search. Obviously it works. One example of how companies are encouraged to buy Ad-words is the key words: “digital camera” for example Sony or Kodak would be willing to pay a lot of money for those key words because their site would be ranked at the top of the page bringing more traffic to their online store. Another example of good competition to buy online Ad-words would be “HD TV’S” key words. We know that through the rest of the year a lot of people will be upgrading their TV sets. I bet that big companies are going to pay a lot of money to buy those key words on Ad-words. I really think that Google came up with a good market strategy. The only negative aspect of it is that small businesses cannot afford to compete with big companies for the key words on Ad-words online advertising.

The search

Certainly, “The Search” book is full of details which explain the most important questions of how the Internet was created and which companies are the pioneers in this business. It is very detailed; it shows a vast amount of valuable information for everyone. It explains how the average person, the professors, students, doctors and scholar make a valuable use of all the resources found online. Moreover, it shows very explicitly, how everything we do online is traced. “The Search” explains how companies target our behavior online to later target us with specific commercial or informational products. Obviously all the great services offered by the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, or AOL, are not entirely free. They come with a price, the price of turning our privacy to those big companies. I liked the way; John Battlle explained in chapter two all the possible questions we as users might have, by using the: who, what, where, why and how much. As I said before, nothing is really for free and he proved that the major search engines have a very innovative marketing strategy to catch us. Moreover, it is interesting how the first years of Google’s creation, the CEO rejected the idea of “Media Company” in which basically compared to TV broadcast. They wanted to be named only a “Technology Company” we know that it was basically impossible to only be a technology company, we know that Google has become a media technology company, and who knows in the near future we might have a broadcast TV called Google TV Broadcast Company.

Google business partners satisfaction is not guarantee.

     One of the things that shocked me the most is the fact that too many people complaint the way Google is run. Former employees as well as advertising agencies, complaint a lot about Google’s business practices.  They say that Page and Brin are too authoritarian and that they don’t like delegating responsibilities because of lack of trust to their employees.

     The book also, mentions that Wall Street investors didn’t want that kind of business practices because it was too time consuming, however investors gave up because the Google guys were making the proper decisions and still making profits.  On the other hand, Page and Brin, say that there are many ways of running a company, and that every company is different.  They have different clients and different market, thus they run the company their way. In fact some people accuse Page and Brin very, very authoritarian.  “Google is a monarchy with two kings” (Battelle, 233).  Furthermore Page and Brin defenders, say that people are just jealous of them, because they are young, brilliant and successful.  They say that few companies in the world grow that fast and that it is impossible to keep up with the company growth, employee and business satisfaction, although they are trying to improve costumer service.  In my personal opinion I think that in terms of job satisfaction at Google is very high.  They have free lunch, good food, a lot of free time laundry, and valuable stock options.  Literally some of Google employees are now rich and are still working because Google is a great company and they love working there