Quotes about Internet

Internet is a dimension of experience of the mind, soul, body, and energy. It is not something virtual which "does not exist".
It is just another dimension of experience where is possible to
manifest.

If a newspaper, a radio station or a TV station doesn't please advertisers, it disappears. It exists to make you (the marketer) happy.

That's the reason the medium (and its rules) exist. To please the advertisers.

But the Net is different.

It wasn't invented by business people, and it doesn't exist to help your company make money.

It's entirely possible it could be used that way, but it doesn't owe you anything. The question to ask isn't, "but how does this help me?" as if you have some sort of say in the matter. You don't get a vote on whether Google succeeds or whether your customers erect spam filters.

The question to ask is, "how are people (the people I need to reach, interact with and tell stories to) going to use this new power and how can I help them achieve their goals?"

The wake up call was finding this startling statistic that web usage in the spring of 1994 was growing at 2,300 percent a year. You know, things just don't grow that fast. It's highly unusual, and that started me about thinking , "What kind of business plan might make sense in the context of that growth?"

My favourite thing about the internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.

Google started in 1998, at a time when Yahoo! Seemed to have a stranglehold on the search business – and if Yahoo! Stumbled, then AltaVista or Lycos looked certain to be the last man standing.  But within a couple of years, Google had become the default search engine for anyone who used the internet regularly, simply because it was able to do a better job of finding the right page quickly.  And the way it does that – and does it while surveying three billion Web pages – is built on the wisdom of crowds.

            Google keeps the details of it’s technology to itself, but the core of the Google system is the PageRank algorithm, which was first defined by the company’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, in a now-legendary 1998 paper called “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.”  PageRank is an algorithm – a calculating method – that attempts to let all the Web pages on the Internet decide which pages are most relevant to a particular search.  Here’s how Google puts it:

PageRank capitalizes on the uniquely democratic characteristic of the web by using it’s vast link structure as an organizational tool.  In essence, Google interprets a link from  page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.  Google assesses a page’s importance by the votes it receives.  But Google looks at more than sheer volume of votes, or links; it also analyses the page that casts the vote.  Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

In that 0.12 seconds, what Google is doing is asking the entire Web to decide which page contains the most useful information, and the page that gets the most votes goes first on the list.  And that page, or the one immediately beneath it, more often than not is in fact the one with the most useful information.

            Now, Google is a republic, not a perfect democracy.  As the description says, the more people that have linked to a page, the more influence that page has on the final decision.  The final vote is a “weighted average” – just as stock price or an NFL point spread is – rather than a simple average like the ox-weighers’ estimate.  Nonetheless, the big sites that have the more influence over the crowd’s final verdict have that influence only because of all the votes that smaller sites have given them.  If smaller sites were giving the wrong sites too much influence, Google’s search results would not be accurate.  In the end, the crowd still rules.  To be smart at the top, the system has to be smart all the way through.

Catalyze a Virtual Community

Many companies think that building a virtual community is as simple as throwing up a cool Web site that compels people to visit every day. Dream on. These sites are commercials, not communities. If you want to build a virtual community, here are the principles to implement:

Community before commerce. In the words of John Hagel III and Arthur G. Armstrong (authors of Net.Gain), "put community before commerce." That is, the purpose of these efforts is to build a community, not sell more stuff, so cool it on the commercialism. The community exists for its own benefit, not yours.

Communication comes next. Build in the capability for people to communicate with each other via message boards and Internet mail lists. Peer-to-peer communication is more important than being able to communicate with the company. You're hosting the event, but it's a cocktail party, not a lecture.

Place the community's interests above your own. The big picture is that a vibrant community will help you, but getting to this place means sacrificing short-term interests. For example, people should be able to freely discuss and endorse competitive products.

Tolerate criticism. Not only should peple feel free to plug competitive products, they should be able to criticize your own. This freedom produces two desirable results: first, good public relations because tolerating criticism on a company-sponsored site is unheard of; second, free and voluminous customer feedback.

Encourage "personalities." Remember how one of the keys to the success of MTV was veejays with an attitude? The same is true of a Web site, so encourage your employees to develop online personalities to show that corporate thought police don't control your site.

The Internet is an élite organization; most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call. 

An omni-linked world populated with intelligent artifacts will bring sweeping changes to virtually every facet of modern life – from science and education to industry and commerce – leaving no segment of society unaffected by its advance.

Freedom of connection with any application to any party is the fundamental social basis of the internet. And now, is the basis of the society built on the internet.

Just as we are beginning to see the power that free resources produce, changes in the architecture of the Internet--both legal and technical--are sapping the Internet of this power. Fueled by bias in favor of control, pushed by those whose financial interest favor control, our social and political institutions are ratifying changes in the Internet that will reestablish control, in turn, reduce innovation on the Internet and in society generally.

“Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing... you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn't affect two-thirds of the people of the world.”

When I first began tinkering with a software program that eventually gave rise to the idea of the World Wide Web, I named it Enquire, short for Enquire Within upon Everything, a musty old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child in my parent's house outside London. With its title suggestive of magic, the book served as a portal to a world of information, everything from how to remove clothing stains to tips on investing money. Not a perfect analogy for the Web, but a primitive starting point.

A few years ago you could make an interesting distinction who thought there was something special about the Internet and those who saw it as no big deal. Now of course everybody sees it as a big deal mostly because of those weirdball IPOs and the overnight billionnaires they spawned. But I think the distinction is still valid. Most companies with Net-dollar-signs in their eyes today are still missing the "something special" dimension.

Under the [Communications Decency Act], a parent allowing her 17 year old to use the family computer to obtain information on the Internet that she, in her parental judgment, deems appropriate could face a lengthy prison term. . . . Similarly, a parent who sent his 17 year old college freshman information on birth control via e mail could be incarcerated even though neither he, his child, nor anyone in their home community, found the material "indecent" or "patently offensive," if the college town's community thought otherwise. The breadth of this content based restriction of speech imposes an especially heavy burden on the Government to explain why a less restrictive provision would not be as effective as the CDA. It has not done so.

We agree with the District Court's conclusion that the [Communications Decency Act] places an unacceptably heavy burden on protected speech... In Sable [v. FCC] we remarked that the speech restriction at issue there amounted to "burning the house to roast the pig." The CDA, casting a far darker shadow over free speech, threatens to torch a large segment of the Internet community.

The Government first contends that, even though the [Communications Decency Act] effectively censors discourse on many of the Internet's modalities - such as chat groups, newsgroups, and mail exploders - it is nonetheless constitutional because it provides a "reasonable opportunity" for speakers to engage in the restricted speech on the World Wide Web.... The Government's position is equivalent to arguing that a statute could ban leaflets on certain subjects as long as individuals are free to publish books.... One is not to have the exercise of his liberty of expression in appropriate places abridged on the plea that it may be exercised in some other place.

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

The Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. The government may not, through the [Communications Decency Act], interrupt that conversation. . . . As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from governmental intrusion. . . . The government, therefore, implicitly asks this court to limit both the amount of speech on the Internet and the availability of that speech. This argument is profoundly repugnant to First Amendment principles.

True it is that many find some of the speech on the Internet to be offensive, and amid the din of cyberspace many hear discordant voices that they regard as indecent. The absence of governmental regulation of Internet content has unquestionably produced a kind of chaos, but as one of plaintiffs' experts put it with such resonance at the hearing: "What achieved success was the very chaos that the Internet is. The strength of the Internet is that chaos." Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects. For these reasons, I without hesitation hold that the [Communications Decency Act] is unconstitutional on its face.

The Internet is a far more speech-enhancing medium than print, the village green, or the mails. Because it would necessarily affect the Internet itself, the [Communications Decency Act] would necessarily reduce the speech available for adults on the medium. This is a constitutionally intolerable result.

We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

The Internet is like a freight train roaring along while people are laying tracks in front of it. It's not just gaining on those laying tracks; it's gaining on the steel mills.

The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.

There are two kinds of business people on the internet: successful people, and those who quit too soon.

It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that the Internet has evolved into a force strong enough to reflect the greatest hopes and fears of those who use it. After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious fanatics.

The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, "people without lives." We don't care. We have each other.... While you are destroying your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV, we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most settings, uninhibited, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our "CONFIG.SYS."