About Google's Eric Schmidt :: AO: "

AlwaysOn: Let’s talk about this second chapter of the Internet. My view is that in the first chapter, as media businesses we reached out and found people. But in the second chapter, which I call the eBay-ization of the business model, there’s this awareness that, hey, Metcalfe’s Law is two-way, and that’s much more interesting than one-way.

Schmidt: Ten years ago, before the Mosaic/Netscape phenomenon, the culture in our country really felt very uniform. It felt like everybody was talking about the same things. On a day-to-day basis you didn’t hear a lot of wildly differing views from your own, because you worked with the same people and you read the same stuff and you were busy working on whatever problem you had.

When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world. People are amazingly surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they’re idiots, whether it is the Flat Earth Society or some other variant. Back then, everybody talked about how the Internet was going to change media, because it would bring everybody together.

But the Internet is really about highly specialized information, highly specialized targeting.

For example, we grew up with this notion of the three major broadcast networks. We all got news at the same time. We’re all still reeling from the fact that there are not homogeneous news sources anymore, that the magazine and publishing industries are becoming more variegated, more distributed, and smaller and more targeted.

The Internet, in particular what’s happening at Google now, is the extreme of this. This is not necessarily all good, but it’s clear that if you"