How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue, not solely a personal one.
Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.
Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.
Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
Collaboration is not an absolute good.
Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.
There are three things you need to be a good writer: you need to read a lot, you need to write a lot, and you need a lot of feedback.
The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.
It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.
We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.
Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism... When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
The threat [of the U.S. bills SOPA and PIPA] is the inversion of the burden of proof, where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we're given the freedom to create, to produce or to share.
What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.
When you make the claim that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often [hear], 'Are you talking about the thing with the singing cats?'
The great tension in media has always been that freedom and quality are conflicting goals.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity
For most of modern life, our strong talents and desires for group effort have been filtered through relatively rigid institutional structures because of the complexity of managing groups. We haven't had all the groups we've wanted, we've simply had the groups we could afford. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation.
To have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action, though, is going to require discussing the current tools and services as they exist, rather than discussing their caricatures or simply wishing that they would disappear.
What you need for a participatory system to work: "a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain."
The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: