The Googlization of Everything

Greg Lastowka wonders:

... But despite my concerns about the easy way reporters seem to associate Google with the greater body of useful knowledge that it indexes, I’m actually starting to see a closer connection between Google and the Web. The Web and Google are blurring.

As I explain in more detail in this article, the AdSense era makes the conflation of Google with the Web a little more accurate. When Google began offering a broad base of small-scale website owners the ability to easily display and obtain revenues from contextual ads via AdSense, this essentially meant that Google was buying up screen real estate in the broader Web. The amateur and professional Web content that Google used to index is now increasingly partnered with Google in an advertising business relationships. So Google–or it’s advertising arm–is starting to bleed into the content of the Web and the mechanics of content production.

There are some interesting implications from this. A couple years ago, I observed in an article (Digitial Attribution) that much of the creativity on the Web seems to be fueled by reputation economics. Many people create content on the Web without any clear economic motivations. They do so, in part, because they desire and receive certain forms of valuable social recognition for their contributions.

That’s still true, in the main, of much of the Web today. But AdSense may be changing things a bit. ...