“The open web is full of spam, shady operators, and blatant falsehoods....” — John Battelle Quote

The open web is full of spam, shady operators, and blatant falsehoods. Outside of a relatively small percentage of high quality sites, most of the web is chock full of popup ads and other interruptive come-ons. It's nearly impossible to find signal in that noise, and the web is in danger of being overrun by all that crap.

Call it a hunch, but I sense that many of us are not entirely comfortable with a world in which every single thing we buy creates a cloud of data. I'd like to have an option to not have a record of how much I tipped, or what I bought at 1:08 A.M. at a corner market in New York City.

As our society tips toward one based on data, our collective decisions around how that data can be used will determine what kind of a culture we live in.

Step one of Street View was to get the pictures in place - in a few short years, we've gotten used to the idea that nearly any place on earth can now be visited as a set of images on Google.

TV ads let people know you're still around. Not only do they sell albums, they give you a high profile. They let people know you're out there and working.

Web media needs to move to TV metaphor - with full-screen imagery and other content interrupted with full-screen ads.

People turn off the news, stop reading in-depth magazine articles - especially young people. Look at the increasing reluctance of young people to vote. I think a lot of that is directly - you can lay it at the feet of these negative campaigns and relentless attack ads.

People say Facebook connects the world. Facebook has 5,000 Ph.D.s that think about how to make you click on ads you don't want to see. Their business model is about something that most people would not perceive as making the world better.