John Battelle Quotes

The Web provides a very easy way to immediately grasp what's going on. It really offers the transparency, so you can see, especially with the search engine, how people are using Twitter at one glance. The phone doesn't allow for that.

Ideally, Facebook would take all our clicks and information and would magically give us everything we want, without us even knowing we want it.

Back in the time when life was easy, the Internet would have told me what I needed to know. The great thing about the Internet was it didn't care why you were asking.

I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.... You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).

The beauty of Netflix is on the 28th of October they push a button and the film will be in 190 countries at the same moment in 17 languages.

I don't, consciously anyways, sort of listen to things with the idea of getting something from them that I can use.

Education is not the accumulation of knowledge, but the ability to find it.

I don't like to read nonfiction. To me, fact is something I can look up.

The Star Trek computer doesn't seem that interesting. They ask it random questions, it thinks for a while. I think we can do better than that.

When in doubt, go to the library.

No one wants to wait for tracks to buffer or spend hours searching through a Web site to find their favorite song.

The value of knowledge is to use it. It is not humanly possible that a person can retain all knowledge of the world, but if a person knows how to search for all the knowledge of the world, he will find it when he wants it.

You just had to know where to look.

Nowadays, when kids decide they like an artist, they'll absorb everything that artist has ever done in a single night.

What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself.

I have to admit that business-type thoughts do sneak into my head: I hope our customers pay us, I hope this stuff is decent, I hope we get it done on time. The little additions and subtractions that one has to do. Take sales, take costs and try to get that big positive number at the bottom.

The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.' Isn't he just a librarian?' Garion asked, 'somebody who looks after books?' That's where all the rest of scholarship starts, Garion. All the books in the world won't help you if they're just piled up in a heap.

The whole world has changed, so you just stay current with the world. There's nothing different in my language of how I say things.

[The Internet] is by far the most important innovation in the media in my lifetime. It's like having a huge encyclopedia permanently available. There's a tremendous amount of rubbish on the world wide web, but retrieval of what you want to so rapid that it doesn't really matter

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

Internet's been down most of the day [at work]. Doing research by just asking everyone what we remember to be true. What could possibly go wrong?

My mother used to say, "Tell your brain you want that piece of information or you want to solve this problem, and then just walk away from it. Just forget about it. Just do something else, completely distract yourself, and you'll see, it's like a computer. Eventually, it will deliver it up." And I find that's really true.

That's what librarians do. They open up the world. Because knowledge is useless if you don’t know how to find it, if you don’t even know where to begin to look.

It is very unlikely that the computer will displace the books, except in areas where we need information speedily.

Of course. You get everything from books.