People Power/Search

If you need more evidence that people’s passions can be the incentive for major innovation, consider that a fixation on fantasy baseball and the then-difficulty in finding out information about real-life teams and players on the Internet led David Filo and Jerry Yang to decide the Internet needed a way to search for information more easily.  By deciding to put together a way to search the Internet by viewing hundreds of websites, figuring out categories and key words to put them in, their innovation led them to fame and fortune as the founders of Yahoo!

Once advertising was put on Yahoo, followed quickly by its competitors, multiplied the various portals on their websites and in the process came to resemble the overwhelming glitter and distractions of Vegas or Times Square.

Along comes Google, with their restful clean design and their superior algorithm for doing searches, and floods of people turn to Google for all their searches.

I remember the first time I saw Google (my dad told me I should check it out). Instantly the colorful name and plentiful white space made me feel able to relax. I had not realized until that moment that the busyness of Yahoo and other search engines before Google arrived on the scene had the effect of causing me inner tension. In no time I set Google as my home page – which it remains to this day.

In reflecting on both segments, the one on "People Power" resonated with me more than that on "Search." The impulse to bypass those who would be gatekeepers and attempt to control the flow of information is strong in me too.

Though he exaggerates, I almost agree with John Hellemann, national affairs editor for New York magazine and writer of the column The Power Grid, who narrates Downloading: The True Story of the Internet when he says, “The deepest human impulse, the most profound desire and need is for communication.”

Jay Adelson of Digg asks, “Who do you trust more, do you trust some corporate executive in some corporate backroom or do you trust  your peers and the people you are connected to?” The rise of Wikileaks and the abject failure of corporate media to do much more than beat the drums for war instead of digging out the truth of claims about weapons of mass destruction are only a couple of the reasons I have to say it’s my peers and the people I connect to.

Craig Newmark - courtesy freepress.net

No doubt about it, as Craig Newmark says, "What we are living through right now is the flow of power from a relatively small group of people to, in a sense, anyone who wants their little piece of power through the net. Now anyone can get your attention - and that matters. There's problems with that, but this is the great wave of democracy."

The fact is that following one’s passion can lead to innovations that can enrich their founders, as it did for Chad Hurley, the co-founder of YouTube, and for Digg co-founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

But there is something special about the middle-aged and quite unassuming Newmark, founder of Craigslist. The fact that he did not try to gain a fortune from it and instead made it free to post classified ads online and to search them is remarkable. His office was the complete opposite of the sleek and powerful facades created for the corporate homes of Google and Apple.

I loved the fact that the last interview of “People Power” was with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet – bringing it back to the fact that it was conceived as a communication tool, saying in his own voice that the whole idea of the web originally was a two-way thing.

Remembering the way he constructed the switches, making each one as important as every other one, I wonder if he had an inkling at the time that he was providing a communication tool that would be nearly impossible for an authoritarian regime to shut down.