The Economist has a good piece on Evan Williams, the Blogger and Twitter founder whom the paper says “epitomises Silicon Valley’s right brain.” Williams makes a number of interesting observations, including that genuinely good ideas are stumbled upon rather than sought out.

The story also mentions that Williams hated his time working at Google, which bought Blogger in 2003. And it offers some reasons that might contain the seeds of some problems for the search giant over the long haul: “Google trumpets its innovative nature, but its genius is for attacking known problems (web search, e-mail, calendars, etc) with brute force — weapons of mass computing and mathematical algorithms. Mr Williams’s passion is solving new problems. Google values official brains — the credentialled, academic sort — whereas Mr Williams dropped out of university in Nebraska because he found the concept somewhat silly. He left Google after less than a year.”
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