Top 95 Quotes & Sayings by John Battelle - Page 2

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

The Web 2.0 world is defined by new ways of understanding ourselves, of creating value in our culture, of running companies, and of working together.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

If you're a publisher and you forbid deep linking into your site, or have a paid wall or registration requirement, then you're making it hard to 'point to' your content. When no one points to your content, your content is harder to find because search uses links as a proxy for popularity.

Just like the VCR opened the film and TV industries to unimaginable new revenue streams, search, RSS and the Internet will do the same for marketers and media companies.

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.

Building out a professional profile on LinkedIn certainly makes sense, and bolstering that CV with intelligent pieces of writing is also a great idea. But if you're going to take the time to create content, you should also take the time to create a home for that content that is yours and yours alone.

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.

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.

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.

There will soon be streams of data coming from all manner of products - appliances, clothing, sporting goods, you name it. Wouldn't you rather live in a world where you can export the data from your son's football helmet to a new app that monitors force and impact against a cohort of high school players around the country?

'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.

There's a reason publishers don't build on top of social platforms: publishers are an independent lot, and they naturally understand the value of owning your own domain. Publishers don't want to be beholden to the shifting sands of inscrutable platform policies.

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.

If you're going to build something, don't build on land someone else already owns. You want your own land, your own domain, your own sovereignty. Trouble is, so much of the choice land - the land where all the people are - is already owned by someone else: By Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Apple (in apps, anyway).

Where one industry stumbles, another rises up.

Google Now is one of those products that to many users doesn't seem like a product at all. It is instead the experience one has when you use the Google Search application on your Android or iPhone device (it's consistently a top free app on the iTunes charts). You probably know it as Google search, but it's far, far more than that.

It seems there is no area in our culture that is not touched, changed, even swallowed by the Internet. It's both medium and message, mass and personal, social and solitary.

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.

Step one of Street View was to get the pictures in place - in a few short years, we've gotten used to the idea that nearly any place on earth can now be visited as a set of images on Google.

Google Now supplants the need to open an app by surfacing cards - cards that magically turn into just the information you need, when you need it - without having to go to an app to get it.

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

Teenagers aren't loyal to much of anything - especially Internet stuff.

Every good story needs a hero. Back when I wrote 'The Search,' that hero was Google - the book wasn't about Google alone, but Google's narrative worked to drive the entire story.

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.

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

Search, a marketing method that didn't exist a decade ago, provides the most efficient and inexpensive way for businesses to find leads.

Increasingly, search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world, and our place within it.

We overthrew the feudal system in the 1600s, and the theocracy in the 1700s. But currently, corporations play similar roles in many of our lives, either directly or indirectly.

The old internet is shrinking and being replaced by walled gardens over which Google's crawlers can't climb.