But the convenience is only bad if we miss the point, if we miss that it’s about nourishment and freeing people up and doing better and better things, and if we only focus on the clicks and the connections and the retweets and the likes for the sake of more and more connections.

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. So you identify that desire, and then you use modern technology to take out steps and make them not have to think. And so to... See more

So then you look at the really big Internet companies and services, and you see this pattern over and over. Look at Google, the biggest. They are really good at speed. They cover a wide range of human desires, answers, solutions, information. They make it so easy. There’s one box. You don’t even have to come close to spelling anything correctly,... See more

And then Twitter came along and obliterated a lot of blogging because it fulfilled the same desires more conveniently. And part of the reason it was more convenient was that it reduced cognitive strain because it eliminated tons of choices.

So human desire of course doesn’t change that much over years or generations or millennia depending on how much you abstract, and people want the things they’ve always wanted. They want love and money and status and a sense of belonging, and they want to influence, and they want to get answers. They want to create, and they want solutions to their... See more

And 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.

So I made it out to California. I got a job at O’Reilly, the book publisher, and a couple years later, 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... See more

But 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. And I thought, “That’s incredibly powerful. Why aren’t people reading books all... See more

But there was one way I discovered growing up in that small town literally in the middle of the cornfields. I discovered a technology that could take me out of there 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... See more