Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.
Clay ShirkyIf itโs a revolution it canโt be predictable. And if itโs predictable it canโt be a revolution.
Clay ShirkyCivic 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.
Clay ShirkyWhat 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.
Clay Shirky