One of the things I like about making stuff in the age of the Internet, is that people make stuff in response to it. You can see people respond to your work visually or musically or with writing.
The past two decades revolutionized the way we access information. You and I can have our questions answered with the click of a mouse at any time of day. If America, both corporation and citizen alike, can use these services to solve problems, why can't Washington?
It was something of a personal challenge for me to come up with a business suitable for the Internet world and the Internet age.
Today, we jump into this globalization of the economy and the internet age.
When I first got started in the late '70s, early '80s, and first was thinking about the interactive world, I believed so fervently that it was the next big thing, I thought it would happen quickly.
Romance isn't measured by how viral your proposal goes. The Internet age may try to sell you something different, but don't ever forget that viral is closely associated with sickness - so don't ever make being viral your goal.
I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.
Non-disclosure in the Internet Age is quickly perceived as a breach of trust. Government, corporations and each of us as individuals must recalibrate how we live and share our lives appropriate to the information now available and the expectations of others.
One way to think about the magnitude of the changes to come is to think about how you went about your business before powerful Web search engines. You probably wouldn't have imagined that a world of answers would be available to you in under a second. The next set of advances will have an different effect, but similar in magnitude.
The thing I have learned, especially in the Internet age, probably the easiest thing in the world is to declare that something is not funny. I mean it's not actually humor to say something is not funny, but it is viewed by a lot of people - and by that I mean mainly snarky young Internet men - as a kind of humor in and of itself is putting down other people's efforts at humor. And I don't care that much anymore about that because I know how easy that is to do.
In many ways, people growing up with the Web and now the Semantic Web take the power at their fingertips for granted.
Authoritarian systems evolve. Authoritarianism in the Internet Age is not your old Cold War authoritarianism.
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.
You lock your windows before you leave. You put on an alarm if you live in the country because you know that there are bad people out there. Well, in this Internet age, you know that there are bad people out there. And no matter what you do, those bad people are going to get into your house.
I was at Harvard when Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, and I begged him not to do it.
When the Constitution was written, the founders had no way of anticipating the new technologies that would evolve in the coming centuries.
I do believe that with more worldwide influences, the coming of the internet age and digital media, the flow of information is far greater, and people's understanding can expand more easily.
In the business world, allegations of accounting irregularities is tantamount to yelling fire in a crowded theater, except, today, in our Internet world, instead of people running for the exit signs, they just push the button on their computer.
Back in 1995, Bill Gates himself didn't understand that the internet was the direction computing was going.
I think we've seen a lot of examples of giving a name its own definition in the dot-com world. Amazon, Google, Yahoo - these are names we never would have dreamed major corporations would choose.
Who needs fan mail when you have the Internet?
It would be easy to assume that the open letter is a symptom of the Internet age. Such is not the case. In 1774, Benjamin Franklin wrote an open letter to the prime minister of Great Britain, Lord North - a satirical call for the imposition of martial law in the colonies.
It sounds crazy, but even in the first plan that I wrote up, I mentioned AOL, Yahoo and hotmail, knowing we would be big. And its crazy to think that it happened.
I have gotten anti-Semitic mail pieces to my home that I have had to try to keep out of my children's eyes. I've gotten a lot. But whatever - this is what happens in the Internet age.
In the age of the internet, with all of its problems, over time, the very fact that individuals can join the conversation creates the opportunity for the emergence of - for the re-emergence of a genuine conversation of democracy.
