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. – John Battelle
Given the trendlines of digital publishing, where more and more large platforms are profiting from, and controlling, the works of individuals, I can’t stress enough: Put your taproot in the independent web. Use the platforms for free distribution (they’re using you for free content, after all). And make sure you link back to your own domain. – John Battelle
I left ‘Wired’ before it was sold to Conde Nast and Lycos, so I didn’t experience that transition. – John Battelle
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
When good media takes a bounded form, and comes once in a period of time, it begs to be consumed as a whole – it creates an engaging experience. We don’t dip in and out of an episode of ‘Game of Thrones,’ after all – we take it in as a whole. Why have we abandoned this concept when it comes to publications, simply because they exist online? – John Battelle
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. – John Battelle
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. – John Battelle
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. – John Battelle
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. – John Battelle
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. – John Battelle
Making media companies that you hope to sell is not a lot of fun for anyone who cares deeply about making media. – John Battelle
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. – John Battelle
As much as I love scores of wonderful sites across the web, most of them are driven by the daily grind of the display/pageview hamster wheel. They create 20, 30, 40 ‘content snacks’ a day, and I miss far more than I consume. – John Battelle
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
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. – John Battelle
I have done a pretty good job of partitioning my life digitally, posting utterances and stories that I’m happy to share with anyone on Twitter, leaving a few sparse comments and ‘Likes’ on Facebook (I’m not a huge user of the service, I’ll be honest), and sending any number of photos to thousands of ‘followers’ on Instagram and Tumblr. – John Battelle
