WWGD: What Would Google Do?
02 Mar 2009Wow, I missed a whole month there. What happened?
Not a whole lot really. Mostly just work, and exhaustion, and tiredness… oh, and cleaning. Our apartment is sparklingly clean (if you excuse that pile of dishes from yesterday).
Work is going well. I’m still employed. That’s what we call a good thing around these parts. Hundreds and hundreds of game developers and probably thousands of software engineers have been let go over the last month. Even a few of my friends have been let go from various companies.
If however you were looking to start a company, now is the time to hire. There are a lot of great individuals available on the market. Probably some terrible ones as well, but lots of variety to choose from.
Other than that I’ve been reading, okay you caught me, listening to some books on CD. Mostly about getting out of debt, money management and business. Not what I would generally consider to be interesting reading, but they are relevant.
One of the books is What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis.
I won’t lie, this book started off very slowly. After a couple of hours of introduction it started to hit on some interesting topics though. I’ll paraphrase some of the key ideas here:
- Free is a business model.
- Find out what business you are really in?
- The community is the content.
- The community is the brand.
This book, which Holly brought home from the library for me, at complete random as far as I can tell; has inspired me to try something; in fact three things, which then spawned a fourth. More on this will follow in the future. I still have some things to sort out and secure before I talk too much about it.
I highly recommend the book if you want to get a better understanding of how the web really works. How companies that charge nothing make millions and even billions. How being free helps to reduce competition. Only people who really love and/or believe in what they do will do it for free. So unless someone is equally passionate, skilled, and lucky tries to do what you do, no one can swoop in and undercut you.
It is also a great book at teaching you how to see the world around you differently.
No doubt you have noticed that I have added Ads to my blog. This is sort of an experiment. Plus it is a process of education by doing. I wanted to learn how people go about getting Ads on their sites, and exactly how it works on both ends. I want to see how smart the Ad system is at picking items that are relevant to my posts.
This is just how I learn. I can read, listen, and watch to learn, but I don’t retain it all for very long unless I have actually done something with it.
This will be a long, slow education. Certainly I’ll be missing the prime window for what I have in mind, but it will come around again. Probably not all of the ideas I have will be developed, but is great to have them floating around helping to refine current ideas and spawn new ones.