"Working in an collaborative environment that simultaneously supports business, technology, creativity, and performance give rise to new concepts. Below we list of some of the ideas we use in our work--terms you may hear or things you may experience if you become a member and spend some time in this unique environment."

"Mass collaboration differs from mass cooperation in that the creative acts taking place requires the emergence of jointly developed shared understandings. Conversely, group members involved in a cooperation needn't engage in a joint negotiation of understanding (from which shared understandings emerge), they may simply execute instructions willingly.
Another important distinction is the borders around which a mass cooperation can be defined. Due to the extremely general characteristics and lack of need for fine grain negotiation and consensus when cooperating, the entire Internet, a city and even the global economy may be regarded as a mass cooperation. Thus a mass collaboration is more refined and complex in its process and production on the level of collective engagement."

"Wikipedia is a second example where scientists have missed an opportunity to innovate online. Wikipedia has a vision statement to warm a scientist’s heart: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.” You might guess Wikipedia was started by scientists eager to collect all of human knowledge into a single source. In fact, Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, had a background in finance and as a web developer. In the early days few established scientists were involved. To contribute would arouse suspicion from colleagues that you were wasting time that could be spent writing papers and grants."

"This is the point that everyone seems to miss: Free is not a business--it's zero-cost marketing for a business. And it works best at the largest scale: a small percentage of a big number is a big number."

Why I don't use Ning.

"I think it’s fair to say at this point that if you want to learn how to deal with such “open” development platforms and partnerships, do pretty much the opposite of what Ning did."