"One of the very few things that I know I believe strongly is that we must learn how to make a better world out of usable pasts rather than dreaming of infinite futures. It’s a very late-Enlightenment view that says that the only way to make a better future is to believe that the future will be better. Smarter people than me used to believe very differently and I think it is time to listen to them once again."

Standards (and their maintenance efforts) should be judged for their ability to catalyze stable polishing activities around the contact surface rather than for the qualities of the surface they were meant to describe. A good polishing process with a rough surface will always end up more polished that a well polished surface with a poor polishing process around it.

"As Bruno Bachimont uses to say, an ontology is mainly a tool to explicit inconsistencies of our knowledge, pointing to new questions for research. After that, you can throw it away."

"On the the Wikipedia page for what_happened they gonna show Cornelius leavin' this club with that dancer just now"

People are weaving a web of dull factual data... what’s not clear is how such a vision allows for the diversity of opinion, modeling, belief systems and cultural diversity that is one of the distinct characters of humanity.

Historian Xia Chun-tao, vice director of one of China’s core ideological think tanks, says, “It’s very natural for historians to have different views on events. But there is only one correct and accurate interpretation..."

"That’s what’s so wonderful about user generated content sites; it keeps all those fixated males at home with their computers, instead of having them out and about, freaking out the rest of us."

"Reference is a device, and is only as useful as the artist who wields it is talented. In other words, ideally, it will spur creativity, not stifle it, allowing the artist to work efficiently and effectively."

"Wikipedia's philosophy is seated firmly in the quantum camp, whereby there can be no objective Truth, only subjective observations made by sentient humans." (IMO, Haraway's notion of 'webbed objectivity' would be a better WP philosophy.)

Design doesn't have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn't have to be good, but it has to be new. I think these two paths converge at the top.

The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.

Flickr gives you a window into things that you might otherwise never see, from the perspective of people that you might otherwise never encounter.

Search engines are like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it.

Basically doing with TV what bloggers were doing in 1999 with the web -- snipping bits here and there to make a full picture of some topic through the use of quotes and links.

The open source model is not a democratic model. It is the combination of community and hierarchy that makes it work. Community without hierarchy means mediocrity.

"We don't want this technology to be available to every hobbyist. We need to keep the number of licensees down to a manageable number."

I do not want any more mp3s. I want more organization, but it's not so easy to download that.

"One thing that disturbs me about attacks on organized classification schemes (in general) is the ease in which decades of thinking and research are cast aside in favor of trendy, book-selling concepts of the moment."

There is a focus in 2005 among leading Internet service architects: creating a social media computer that leverages user generated content to automate the production of commercial content.

"Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?)."

"If we are to encourage new kinds of creative expression, we have to accept that this will only happen if we allow our content to degrade into dust. Remix culture requires flexibility – the ability to reduce content to the single atom."

"That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace."

'On the Shoulders of Giants' (which shall hereafter be referred to as OTSOG) is the quintessential study of the nature of academicism...

The idea here is to let the users of the archive promote the collection by creating things so the free tier promotes the paid tier. Today’s remixer is tomorrow’s licensee.

"The action right now is in making the music and video owned by the major labels and film studios archaic and unpopular."

"Get the ownership system out of the way so that we can all add our voices to the choir, even if that means pasting our singing on top of the Mormon Tabernacle and sending the output to a friend?"

Brian Eno: "I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside."

"Firms in publishing, music, film, television, gaming, software, and hardware are increasingly understanding that much of the most exciting media work in the world today is being... facilitated by the creative wisdom of information or library science."

"Video search - and its attendant economies... will only work if we have millions of people informing our collective knowledge of what is worth our individual attention, and that can only happen if we can annotate, share, and remix video."

Geez, in the community if it's not from an overhyped TV show or overvidded movie, no one comments on it...

Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

There's a lot to learn from search engines, xml feeds, weblogs, etc. Now that video can be produced cheaply and with reasonable production values, and now that it can be affordably distributed, will we see an emerging new class of "video site producers."