John Battelle

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

“'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 speak of 'software eating the world,' 'the Internet of Things,' and we massify 'data' by declaring it 'Big.' But these concepts remain for the most part abstract. It's hard for many of us to grasp the impact of digital technology on the 'real world' of things like rocks, homes, cars, and trees. We lack a metaphor that hits home.”

“The 'old' Internet is shrinking and being replaced by walled gardens over which Google's crawlers can't climb. Sure, Google can crawl Facebook's 'public pages,' but those represent a tiny fraction of the 'pages' on Faceboo, and are not informed by the crucial signals of identity and relationship which give those pages meaning.”

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

“Drones ply the liminal space between the physical and the digital - pilots fly them, but aren't in them. They are versatile and fascinating objects - the things they can do range from the mundane (aerial photography) to the spectacular - killing people, for example.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The home phone is relatively cheap, incredibly reliable, and - if you buy the right phone - will work for years without replacement. Oh, and far as I can tell, a home phone won't give you brain cancer. In a perfect world, the hard line should have become a platform for building out an entire app ecosystem for the home. And yet... it didn't.”

“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.”

“Call it a hunch, but I sense that many of us are not entirely comfortable with a world in which every single thing we buy creates a cloud of data. I'd like to have an option to not have a record of how much I tipped, or what I bought at 1:08 A.M. at a corner market in New York City.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Google is a global Rorschach test. We see in it what we want to see. Google has built an infrastructure that makes a lot of dreams closer to reality.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”