H.G. Wells accurately predicts the internet in 1937.

"The shutdown of library.nu is creating a virtual showdown between would-be learners and the publishing industry."

"When did TED lose its edge? When did TED stop trying to collect smart people and instead collect people trying to be smart? (...) What began as something spontaneous and unique has today become a parody of itself. What was exceptional and emergent in the realm of ideas has been bottled, packaged, and sold back to us over and over again. The whole TED vibe has come to resemble a sales pitch."

"I hope kids are still finding some way, despite Google and Wikipedia, of not knowing things. Learning how to transform mere ignorance into mystery, simple not knowing into wonder, is a useful skill. Because it turns out that the most important things in this life — why the universe is here instead of not, what happens to us when we die, how the people we love really feel about us — are things we’re never going to know."

"It was only slowly, Pettegree writes, that a workable, profitable book world took shape. The press founded by Johannes Gutenberg, like many of its competitors, kept the ship afloat by printing advertisements, "ephemeral" books for students and ordinary readers, and even indulgences -- they were a booming business in pre-Reformation Europe, and the demand for them was limitless. Eventually, the printing industry as a whole figured out how to create new books written for a popular audience. And it was this 'trade' market which, by supplementing the anemic 'academic' one, ensured that the printed book was here to stay. The age of printing, Pettegree writes, was "an age of experimentation and rapid technical advance," in which "publishers and booksellers had embraced the printed book, but without fully comprehending how much had changed." It took a lot of struggle, creativity, and, most of all, business savvy to get to the other side of the divide, and to unleash the real potential of printing."

"This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks. "

"Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques."

Qwiki is an impressive new tool for interactive storytelling. It seems to pull out Wikipedia articles and match the text to images (pulled out of links to other articles in Wikipedia?)

"Stories about the pitfalls of knowing just a little bit too little."

"There’s a point in conversation, a point at which information begins to thin, to stretch, to bend, and you take that shred of information you read online, in the Times, or heard from a friend, and you stretch it beyond where it truly belongs. It often comes in the form of talks we get into on subjects like partially hydrogenated oil, the frontal cortex, sustainable coffee bean suppliers, and the pythagorean theorem. The trouble is when you have a little information, you can go too far. And then, you’re well, you know."

"The Rudiments Of Wisdom encyclopaedia by Tim Hunkin. Thousands of cartoons covering almost everything there is to know!"