When you make the claim that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often [hear], 'Are you talking about the thing with the singing cats?'

The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.

The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.

Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.

In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.

Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.