Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

I remember when AOL was small and they were growing like mad. Consumers were coming on in droves because they made it easy to connect to the Internet. That was the single biggest innovation of AOL; when grandmas were signing up, AOL had arrived.

Around '93, '94, the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very, very underestimated for about two years.

Frankly, it's never really been replicated in the history of the Internet what Yahoo has done in the areas it's done it.

At the height of the first great dot-com boom, Craig Kanarick, then in his early 30s, was running Razorfish, a Web design firm he'd co-founded with an old friend, which at its peak had 2,300 employees in nine countries.

The thing that people seem to miss about not just Google, but also our competitors, Yahoo, eBay and so forth, is that there's an awful lot of communities that have never been served by traditional media.

Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC.

Google started out when the dot-com boom was happening. It grew under the radar of big companies that were competing in but basically ignoring search. Then they were able to really invest during the bust for a long time.

Downloading and Web 2.0 have famously led to new ways of accessing culture. But these have tended to be parasitic on old media. The law of Web 2.0 is that everything comes back, whether it be adverts, public information films or long-forgotten TV serials: history happens first as tragedy, then as YouTube.

Now AOL is the grandma of online Web services. I mean, we don't need it anymore.

Everyone knows that the broadband era will breed a new generation of online services, but this is only half of the story. Like any innovation, broadband will inflict major changes on its environment. It will destroy, once and for all, the egalitarian vision of the Internet.

Social is a better way to interact with digital world. It is better than search. Implications for... everything. Total change.

One of the big changes at the heart of Web 2.0 is the shift from the creation of software artifacts, which is what the PC revolution was about, to the creation of software services. These are services that ultimately, if they are successful, will require competencies of operation, of scale, and the like.

I remember when MySpace came out. It did do something pretty incredible - which was unite people around the world with common interests and common tastes.

The record labels used to spend money on advertising, and social media has replaced that entirely - it's putting magazines out of business. It's put big companies into completely reinventing their strategies.

Social and digital media is a bullet train, and that bullet train is not coming home.

Newspapers are busily experimenting with different models. Traditionally, and I suspect in hindsight very mistakenly, online news was free. And once given free access readers felt it was their entitlement.

On top of opportunities in further traffic growth, there are increasing opportunities to fully realize the potential of the online video ecosystem, as China continues to evolve into a consumer-driven economy.

Just like the VCR opened the film and TV industries to unimaginable new revenue streams, search, RSS and the Internet will do the same for marketers and media companies.

Twitter became a major place to find out what was breaking on the Internet. Facebook became a place to share links. Social media really grew up.

The Internet is the ultimate vanity-publishing medium, and therefore, the ultimate place for those of us who like to watch. The Internet can reach an audience at lower cost than any medium before it.

Back in 1995, Bill Gates himself didn't understand that the internet was the direction computing was going.

I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.

We're still in the first minutes of the first day of the Internet revolution.

I'd say there was a fair amount of skepticism at the time about whether the Internet held any promise. And of course I felt that it did.

I won't even try to predict the specifics, but I think the ebook - as a medium - could be a game-changer.