As a new Googler, Porat spent some time learning the words that describe the Googley people who work in those buildings.

Amazon is pursuing something called Amazon Key, which lets its couriers unlock Prime customers' doors and deliver packages. It's pairing the service, which it plans to make available in 37 cities next month, with a camera so users will have intelligence inside and outside their homes, presumably boosting trust and lowering creepiness.

Apple is a military-like command-and-control organization where people lower down in the organization manage up. They are constantly preparing their boss who may be preparing their boss and their boss for a presentation to the CEO or to the executive team.

AIM started in 1997, and I remember when I started using it in earnest, in 1999, when I joined TheStreet.com from 'The San Jose Mercury News'. We digital journalism pioneers communicated obsessively by AIM, and as a newbie, I recall being amazed that the whole newsroom was 'chatting' this way.

Here is one iron law of the Internet: a social network's emphasis on monetizing its product is directly proportional to its users' loss of privacy.

I like social media, as it cuts out the middleman. You can be yourself, you can't be misquoted, and it's also useful for me to get information about my theatre shows across to people.

I love researching all sorts of weird stuff. I always say, 'God help me if the FBI came across my Internet search history.'

The print magazine and print journalism industry is obviously in a great deal of trouble, and one of the things that happened when this business started to give way to the Internet and to broadcast television is that a lot of organizations started cutting specifically investigative journalism and they also started cutting fact-checkers.