"When I was a kid, sometimes I’d run home to Mommy with a bloody nose and say, “Mom, my friends beat me up,” and my Mom would say “well then they’re not worth having as friends, are they?” At the time, I figured she was just trying to put a postive spin on having birthed an unpopular pussy. But this is, after all, the same lady that bought me my first typewriter. Then later, a Commodore 64. And later, a 300 baud modem for it. Through which I met new friends that did like me much, much more.

I’m 39, now. The friends my Mom warned me about are bigger now, and older, bloodying my nose with old world numbers, and old world tactics, like, oh, I don’t know, sending out press releases to TV Guide at 7pm on a Friday.

But my Commodore 64 is mobile now, like yours, and the modems are invisible, and the internet is the air all around us.  And the good friends, the real friends, are finding each other, and connecting with each other, and my Mom is turning out to be more right than ever."

"TED is not simply “engaging” & “entertaining” but a specific type of entertainment that is increasingly out of touch & exclusionary.

…appears that whole TED brand induces laughter from many of those skeptical of corporate speak & techno-jargon. At first, I thought I was laughing alone; however, it turns out that lots of other people are equally unimpressed by the current state of TED…I’m not the only one who does not take TED very seriously or worse, views the whole project as suspect…

Perhaps the biggest complaint I heard was that TED smells of corporatism…

So many of the TED talks take on the form of those famous patent medicine tonic cure-all pitches of previous centuries, as though they must convince you not through the content of what’s being said but through the hyper-engaging style of the delivery…

As Mike Bulajewski pointed out in a Tweet, “TED’s ‘revolutionary ideas’ mask capitalism as usual, giving it a narrative of progress and change.”"

"That’s what was so compelling, I think, about the first few waves of blogs. By and large, they weren’t just venues for the publication of content. They also served as outposts for your identity, a representation of who you were on the World Wide Web. By contrast, Tumblr blogs often seem more like something dishonest — well, dishonest is too strong a word. But when I browse through many of these tumblelogs, they feel as if their authors are trying to get away with something, trying to sneak something past somebody. There’s a sense of evasiveness, or vagueness, of no one really standing behind what’s been published, or no one being sufficiently committed to the content to offer up their name."

"This may be the most insidious artifact of a leaderboard community: the very presence of a leaderboard changes the community dynamic and calls into question the motivations of everyone for any action they might take. If that sounds a bit extreme, consider Twitter: friend counts and followers have become the coins of that realm, and when you get a notification of a new follower...? Aren't you just a little more likely to believe that it's just someone fishing around for a reciprocal 'follow'? Sad, but true. And this is a site that itself has never officially featured a leaderboard. Twitter merely made the statistics known and provided an API to get at them: in doing so, they may have let the genie out of the bottle."

"Create your own online leagues or use our existing ones (below). Power League is a versatile resource that lets you ask tough questions, stimulates debate and creates a visual league table based on votes gathered across your group. Start your own league

"By repeatedly casting votes, students create league, ranked in order of most powerful, important, popular, influential....results often unexpected...surprised to see how peers voted...good starting point for discussion. Why does this person have more pow

"School is strange, artificial thing, half sterile, half feral...Teenage kids used to have more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices ...weren't left to create own societies....were junior members of adult societies."

"AideRSS is an intelligent assistant that saves time and keeps you on top of the latest news. We research every story and filter out the noise, allowing you to focus on what matters most."

"We are consigned to communicating through design, but it’s an impoverished language that can only say one thing: “That’s cool.” Design ceases to serve our needs, and the superficial qualities of useful things end up cannibalizing their functional