"A Journey on the Information Highway"

I came to think about, why did this work, why was blogging important, why was this democratization of publishing important? And the way I described it at the time was, it's not about Blogger, about blogging. It's really about the realization of this great promise of the Internet, this idea that is about the democratization of knowledge, of ideas, e... See more

When I picked up this WIRED, it wasn't just about computers. It was about this world. On the other side of the computer world you could get to from anywhere, and that world was full of knowledge and ideas and people.Dave Hughes who was working on wiring up the Internet. And there's this quote, “My life's mission is to hook up the 5.5 billion brains... See more

The Internet is still awesome. And after 20 years in cyberspace, today I think it is mundane because it's ubiquitous, but it's also powerful and now real unlike it was back then because it's ubiquitous. So let's go make it worthwhile.

I discovered a technology that could take me out of there (my small town) for periods of time. It was combination of a form of time travel and mind reading that allowed me to tap the knowledge and ideas of people who are much wiser than anyone I thought was around me and learn amazing things. Of course, this technology was books.

I decided that the Internet is simply a giant machine designed to give people what they want. That's what these connections do. And another way to say that is that the Internet makes human desires more easily attainable. In other words, it offers convenience. I learned that the Latin root of “convenience” actually means assembling and agreeing. Isn... See more

The amazing thing was when I was reading that book, I just had this epiphany. And I realized, years of experience and knowledge had gone into this little device in my hand, and I could read that in a few hours and gain the benefits of that experience and knowledge.

There is the potential and reality of amazing, positive, good things coming from the Internet even though it's driving force is convenience. Because humans don't only have mundane desires. They have amazing desires. They have desires to make art and music and funny card games. And they have desire to help people and to do science. And the Internet ... See more

Here's the formula if you want to build $1 billion Internet company because I know that's what people come to XOXO to learn. It's simply this, identify a human desire, preferably one that's been around for a really long time. We often think the Internet enables people to do new things, but people just want to do the same things they've always done.... See more

Meg and Paul and I started Blogger. And so the origin of Blogger came from… We were actually working on something else. It was a much more complicated project management thing. But we all had blogs, and I'd written a little script for my personal website that made it so I could just type in a box and a new thing showed up at the top. And basically,... See more

Paul Saffo…talked about text as the hot new medium. I realized this magazine may have influenced me more than I realize, but in that, Saffo says, “Words have been decoupled from paper. In fact, our electronic novelties are transforming the word as profoundly as the printing press did half a millennium ago.”