WordPress makes it drop-dead easy to start a site. Take my advice and go do it. John Battelle More Quotes by John Battelle More Quotes From John Battelle Search, a marketing method that didn't exist a decade ago, provides the most efficient and inexpensive way for businesses to find leads. John Battelle inexpensive marketing way Increasingly, search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world, and our place within it. John Battelle our-world marketing world Making media companies that you hope to sell is not a lot of fun for anyone who cares deeply about making media. John Battelle who-cares media fun Bill Gates has become the patron saint of philanthropy and the poster child of rebirth, and from what I can tell, rightly so. John Battelle bills saint children The old internet is shrinking and being replaced by walled gardens over which Google's crawlers can't climb. John Battelle shrinking internet garden Where one industry stumbles, another rises up. John Battelle industry 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. John Battelle notebook smart phones 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. John Battelle feudal-system roles play The only thing Google has failed to do, so far, is fail. John Battelle google failing 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. John Battelle google dream reality 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. John Battelle year-end google years As you grow older, you learn a few things. One of them is to actually take the time you've allotted for vacation. John Battelle grow you vacation time 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? John Battelle you football world son 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. John Battelle fly digital space people 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. John Battelle technology eating home world 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. John Battelle service trust government today 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. John Battelle you choices leader easy 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. John Battelle street computers technology past 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. John Battelle will company data media 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. John Battelle yourself service you life