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The New Rules of the Internet

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The “new rules” have been around for a while now, but this is still a great summary by Jeff Jarvis in What Would Google Do?:

  1. Customers are now in charge.
  2. People can find each other anywhere and coalesce around you or against you.
  3. The mass market is [sort of] dead, replaced by the mass of niches.
  4. Since markets are conversations, the key skill in any organization is no longer marketing but conversing.
  5. We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance.
  6. Enabling customers to collaborate with you (creating, distributing, marketing, supporting products) is what creates a premium in today’s market.
  7. The most successful enterprises today are networks and the platforms on which those networks are built.
  8. The key to success is not owning pipelines, people, products, or even intellectual property, but openness.

Mediocrity and the Web

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From Seth Godin’s latest book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?:

The Internet has raised the bar because it’s so easy for word to spread about great stuff. There’s more junk than ever before, more lousy writing, more pointless products. But this abundance of trash is overwhelmed by the market’s ability to distribute news about the great stuff.

Of course, mediocrity isn’t going to go away. Yesterday’s remarkable is today’s really good and tomorrow’s mediocre.

Mediocre is merely a failed attempt to be really good.

Note: Godin isn’t using “really good” in a positive sense in that last line. His point is: don’t go for really good. Go for remarkable.

And so the problem in being mediocre is not that you failed at being really good. It’s that you were aiming at being really good in the first place, instead of aiming at being remarkable.

(Side note: remarkable doesn’t necessarily mean flawless. It means “worth remarking on.” So doing something remarkable is not necessarily to be confused with a perfectionistic quest.)

On Not Worrying About Typos on Blogs

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Here’s Penelope Trunk’s perspective on typos on blogs:

There is a new economy for writing. The focus has shifted toward taking risks with conversation and ideas, and away from hierarchical input (the editorial process) and perfection.

As the world of content and writing shifts, the spelling tyrants will be left behind. Here are five reasons why complaining about typos is totally stupid and outdated.

I don’t totally agree with her angle, but I do think we should be lenient about typos on blogs (and, as a time-pressed blogger, that’s a relief). It’s interesting to read the whole thing.

Old Media vs New Media Continued: What is a Platform?

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From What Would Google Do? (pp. 32ff):

Networks are built atop platforms. The internet is a platform, as is Google, as are services such as photo site Flickr, blogging service WordPress.com, payment service PayPal, self-publishing company Lulu.com and business software company Salesforce.com A platform enables. It helps others build value.

Any company can be a platform. Home Depot is a platform for contractors and Continental Airlines is a platform for book tours. Platforms help users create products, businesses, communities, and networks of their own. If it is open and collaborative, those users may in turn add value to the platforms — as IBM does when it shares the improvements it makes in the open-source Linux operating system.

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In the old architecture and language of centralized, controlling businesses, Google Maps would be a product that consumers may use, generating an audience that Google could sell to advertisers. That’s if Google wanted to stay in control.

Instead, Google handed over control to anyone. It opened up maps so others could build atop them. This openness has spawned no end of new applications known as “mashups.”

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Opening Google Maps as a platform spawned not just neat applications but entire businesses. Mobile phone companies are building Google maps into their devices, which gets maps into the hands of new customers. Platial.com built an elegant user interface atop Google Maps that lets users place pins at any locations, showing the world anyone’s favorite restaurants or a family’s stops on vacation. Neighbors can collaborate and create a map pinpointing all the potholes in town. That map could, turn, be embedded on a blog or a newspaper page. News sites have used maps to have readers pinpoint their photos during big stories, such as floods in the U.K.

Thinking in terms of how to make your company a platform is a key to success in the new economy. So, some questions to ask yourself:

How can you act as a platform? What can others build on top of it? How can you add value? How little value can you extract? How big can the network atop your platform grow? How can the platform get better learning from users? How can you create open standards so even competitors will use and contribute to the network and you get a share of their value? It’s time to make your own virtuous circle.

If Google Thought Like an Old Media Company

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This is instructive on the difference between old media and new media. From What Would Google Do?, by Jeff Jarvis:

[Old media companies] all want to control the internet because that is how they view their worlds. Listen to the rhetoric of corporate value: Companies own customers, control distribution, make exclusive deals, lock out competitors, keep trade secrets. The internet explodes all those points of control. It abhors centralization. It loves sea level and tears down barriers to entry. It despises secrecy and rewards openness. It favors collaboration over ownership. The once-powerful approach the internet with dread when they realize they cannot control it.

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If Google thought like an old-media company — like, say, Time Inc. or Yahoo — it would have controlled content, built a wall around it, and tried to keep us inside. Instead, it opened up and put its ads anywhere, building an advertising network so vast and powerful that it is overtaking both the media and advertising industries even as it collaborates with and powers them online. There’s Google’s next virtuous circle: The  more Google sends traffic to sites with its ads, the more money it makes; the more money those sites make the more content they can create for Google to organize. Google also helps those sites by giving them content and functionality: maps, widgets, search pages, YouTube videos. Google feeds the network to make the network grow.

I am surprised that old media companies have not tried to copy Google’s model — that is, creating open networks.

In sum, it comes down to create closed networks you try to control (old media), or creating and feeding open networks you don’t try to control.