Words matter. These are the best John Battelle Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In short, Now is Google’s attempt at becoming the real time interface to our lives – moving well beyond the siloed confines of ‘search’ and into the far more ambitious world of ‘experience.’ As in – every experience one has could well be lit by data delivered through Google Now.
It’s become something of a ritual – every year, Google publishes its year-end summary of what the world wants, and every year I complain about how shallow it is, given what Google really knows about what the world is up to.
As the border between physical and digital gets more permeable, a new kind of literacy emerges. And that literacy is built on a foundation of code – whether it’s the codes of letters and words, or the code of bits and algorithms.
I’m quite certain the Windows 8 team is preparing to market IE 10 – and by extension, Windows 8 – as the safe, privacy-enhancing choice, capitalizing on Google’s many government woes and consumers’ overall unease with the search giant’s power.
I like Diaspora because it’s audacious, it’s driven by passion, and it’s very, very hard to do. After all, who in their right mind would set as a goal taking on Facebook? That’s sort of like deciding to build a better search engine – very expensive, with a high likelihood of failure.
‘Dependent web’ platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Google and Yahoo are where people go to discover and share new content. Independent sites are the millions of blogs, community and service sites where passionate individuals ‘hang out’ with like-minded folks. This is where shared content is often created.
Bitcoin woke us all up to a new way to pay, and culturally, I think a much larger percentage of us have become accustomed to the idea that money no longer comes with the friction it once had.
Making media companies that you hope to sell is not a lot of fun for anyone who cares deeply about making media.
When documents were analog, they were protected by government laws against unreasonable search and seizure. When they live in the cloud… the ground is shifting.
I think ad networks is an ongoing story. Federated was a chapter in that story, and it continues to write a new one.
Publishers are born connectors; they bring like-minded people together. They are also conversationalists of the first order. They foster the interaction between the three key parties in commercial media: the audience, the author/creator and the marketer.
An elaborate system of etiquette and social standards flowered around the home phone: how long a child might be allowed to stay on the phone, how late one could call without being impolite, and of course, the dread implications of a late night call which violated that norm.
Teenagers aren’t loyal to much of anything – especially Internet stuff.
I sense that the sea of smart phones lit up at concerts is a temporary phenomenon. The integration of technology, sharing, and social into our physical world, on the other hand, well, that ain’t going away.
I’ve been a Mac guy for almost my entire adult life. I wrote my first college papers on a typewriter, but by the end of my freshman year – almost 20 years ago – I was on an IBM PC. Then, in 1984, I found the Mac, and I never looked back.
The Nexus 7 is about the same size as a Moleskine notebook, and it just ‘feels’ like the right form factor for doing all those things you want to do on a smart phone, but can’t quite do in the right way. It’s not too big, and not too small – just right.
Where one industry stumbles, another rises up.
It seems everyone is converging on a simple set of facts: Our lives are digital, and we wish to share our lives. Pinterest came at it through images, artfully curated. Facebook came at it through friends, cunningly organized. Dropbox came to it via files, cleverly clouded.
I find web browsing, checking multiple email accounts, and Google mapping rather tiresome on an iPhone – the iPhone’s native interface, for all its supposed perfection, has all kinds of wrong baked in – and the screen is just far too small.
I found the iPad to be too large and heavy to use comfortably in casual situations (like reading in bed, for example), and too limited to use as a replacement for my laptop. By comparison, the Nexus 7 is just the right size for use anywhere – it’s very similar in size to my daughter’s Kindle Fire, but lighter.
I left ‘Wired’ before it was sold to Conde Nast and Lycos, so I didn’t experience that transition.
As our society tips toward one based on data, our collective decisions around how that data can be used will determine what kind of a culture we live in.
In conversation marketing, you’re providing a service, a continuing dialogue whose course through the Web is unknown. The more value it adds to the ecosystem, the more it will be shared, amplified and celebrated.
When you break it down, Yahoo! is a Very Large Display Advertising business, with a hefty side of search and a bit of this and that on top.
Founded by an ex-Apple employee, Nest devices do for thermostats and smoke alarms what the Mac did for PCs – Google Buys Nest made them relevant and far more valuable.
I’ve always liked the fact that anyone with a great idea, access to the Internet, and an unrelenting will can spark a world-beating company simply by standing up code on the Internet and/or leveraging the information and relationship network that is the web. That’s how Facebook started, after all.
Brand marketers don’t believe that ad-tech companies view brands as true partners. Ad-tech companies think brand marketers are paying attention to the wrong things. And publishers, with a few important exceptions, feel taken advantage of by everyone.
We all know the future is mobile, right? And the iPhone and iPad are Perfect Expressions of Beauty, Ideal Combinations of Form and Function. Except they’re Not.
Long walks force a certain meditative awareness. You’re not moving so fast that you miss the world’s details passing by – in fact, you can stop to inspect something that might catch your eye.
Prior to email, our private correspondence was secured by a government institution called the postal service. Today, we trust AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, or Gmail with our private utterances.
I’ll admit it: I’m one of those people who has a Google News alert set for my own name.
The largest issue with search is that we learned about it when the web was young, when the universe was ‘complete’ – the entire web was searchable! Now our digital lives are utterly fractured – in apps, in walled gardens like Facebook, across clunky interfaces like those in automobiles or Comcast cable boxes.
Ideally, content should be shared, mixed, mashed, and reposted – it wants to flow through the Internet like water. This was the point of RSS, after all – a technology that has actually been declared dead more often than the lowly display banner.
The only thing Google has failed to do, so far, is fail.
Good first drafts and speedy responses to consumer dialog will always trump lawyered corporate speak.
