Top 50 John Battelle Quotes

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.

Google+ was, to my mind, all about creating a first-party data connection between Google most important services – search, mail, YouTube, Android/Play, and apps.

Way back in 2008, when the iPhone was new and Instagram was a gleam in Kevin Systrom’s eye, I was involved in creating a service called CrowdFire. It was a way for fans at a festival (the first was Outside Lands) to share photos, tweets, and texts in a location and event specific way.

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.

The ‘Occupy‘ movement seems to have found a central theme to its 2012 movement around overturning ‘the corporation as a person,’ and some legislators are supporting that concept.

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.

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.

If we as a society do not understand ‘the cloud,’ in all its aspects – what data it holds, how it works, what the bargains are we make as we engage with it, we’ll all be the poorer for it, I believe.

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.

There are essentially two main reasons to hold a phone up at a show. First, to capture a memory for yourself, a reminder of the moment you’re enjoying. And second, to share that moment with someone – to express your emotions socially. Both seem perfectly legitimate to me.

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.

I’ll admit it: I’m one of those people who has a Google News alert set for my own name.

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 think Facebook is an extraordinarily important part of the Internet ecosystem, and having a robust presence there is a critical part of any brand (or company‘s) strategy.

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.

Consumers online expect dialogue, so pairing your brand with relevant and passion-driven topics is one of the best ways to ensure that you are engaged with key audiences.

Anytime Facebook wants to change how it might use all that data about you, in any way, across any service it has within the Facebook ecosystem, all it has to do is change one privacy policy, tell you about it, and that’s that.

I left ‘Wired‘ before it was sold to Conde Nast and Lycos, so I didn’t experience that transition.

Making media companies that you hope to sell is not a lot of fun for anyone who cares deeply about making media.

The beauty of the innovation that flows from the open web is that no one has to ask for permission, get a credential, or win a Disrupt or Launch award to go prove their idea is worthy. They just… put up a page on the web, iterate, iterate, iterate… and eventually, a Facebook emerges.

Boxes and rectangles on the side or top of a website simply do not deliver against brand advertising goals. Like it or not, boxes and rectangles have for the most part become the province of direct response advertising, or brand advertising that pays, on average, as if it’s driven by direct response metrics.

Obama will win the 2012 election, thanks in part to the tech community rallying behind him due to issues like SOPA, visas, and free speech.

When you use Facebook, you’re always logged in, and your identity and relationships – to others, to content, to apps and services – are assets Facebook can use to customize your experience (oh, and your ads).

Where one industry stumbles, another rises up.

It’s not easy being number two. As a marketer, you have limited choices – you can pretend you’re not defined by the market leader, or, you can embrace your position and go directly after your nemesis.

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.

Facebook’s data trove is enviable, and its moves into nearly every aspect of our lives – from payment to media, will create even more of it. The company also has created a huge base of developers for its platform, but the ecosystem is incomplete compared to vertically integrated OSes like iOS, Mac or Windows.

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.

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.

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.

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.

WordPress makes it drop-dead easy to start a site. Take my advice and go do it.

In a world lit by data, street corners are painted with contextual information, automobiles can navigate autonomously, thermostats respond to patterns of activity, and retail outlets change as rapidly (and individually) as search results from Google.

‘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.

In the past, Google has used teams of humans to ‘read’ its street address images – in essence, to render images into actionable data. But using neural network technology, the company has trained computers to extract that data automatically – and with a level of accuracy that meets or beats human operators.

Teenagers aren’t loyal to much of anything – especially Internet stuff.

The experience that a publication creates for its audience is the very essence of that publication’s brand – and without deep engagement, that publication’s brand will be weak. A good publication is a convener and an arbiter – it expresses a core narrative that becomes a badge of sorts for its readership.

‘The Victorian Internet’ is a must read for anyone interested in the history of technology and in the cycles of hype, boom, and bust that seem to only quicken with each new wave of innovation. Highly recommended.

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.

When you bring the scale and precision of data-driven platforms to the brilliance of great media executions, magic will happen. Delivering on that vision for the Independent Web is the mission of Federated Media Publishing.

Just as like the music industry still wishes for the days when it controlled its own production and distribution, the media and marketing world still yearns for the silver bullet of the thirty-second spot on ‘Seinfeld,’ even as it knows those days are over.

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.

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.

Google likely never cared if Google+ ‘won‘ as a competitor to Facebook (though if it did, that would have been a nice bonus). All that mattered, in the end, was whether Plus became the connective tissue between all of Google’s formerly scattered services. And in a few short years, it’s fair to say it has.

Bill Gates has become the patron saint of philanthropy and the poster child of rebirth, and from what I can tell, rightly so.

You happily give Facebook terabytes of structured data about yourself, content with the implicit tradeoff that Facebook is going to give you a social service that makes your life better.

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.

When it broke out in the mid 1990s, the web was society’s first at-scale digital artifact. It spread in orders of ten, first thousands, then millions, then hundreds of millions of pages – and on it went, to the billions it now encompasses.

Good first drafts and speedy responses to consumer dialog will always trump lawyered corporate speak.

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.