Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants.

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.

We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.

It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.

Civic participants don't aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate.

The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.