"... once [those] people got online, they almost immediately started behaving in unpredictable ways. They didn't wait for a media corporation to tell them what to do; they began writing pages and posting comments and building sites and contributing reviews and arguing and inventing identities. This unplanned behavior was made possible because of design decisions made by the engineers who established the Internet long before the media world ever heard of it. As Doc Searls summarizes these principles, "Nobody owns it; everyone can use it; anyone can improve it." . . .
Weinberger's Web is not just a giant marketplace or an "information resource" -- it's a social commons on which the interests of a mass of individuals are splayed in universally accessible detail and trumpeted in an effectively infinite array of personal voices. That concept is almost unfathomable to media pros whose business is "aggregating eyeballs" to sell to advertisers. . . .
What Weinberger reminds us is that every Web site, every Internet posting matters to the person who created it -- and maybe to that person's circle of site visitors, whether they number 10 million or just 10. Sure, some 11-year-old's book review on Amazon may be full of grammatical errors. OK, the world may not need any more Britney Spears fan sites. But lord, here's the quark machine some imaginative scientists built in 1997! Here's the complete lyrics of Bob Dylan! And here's everything you ever wanted to know about repairing your old Volkswagen! . . .
Individually, these contributions may be crude, untrustworthy, unnoteworthy. Collectively, they represent the largest and most widely accessible pool of information and entertainment in human history. And it's still growing."
[Excerpts from The media titans still don't get it. Scott Rosenberg, Salon.com]
The Weinberger mentioned above is David Weinberger. He has a zine here and blog there and he's written a book called "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" which has it's own website here! I have borrowed the book from the library and have added it to my very own infinitely expanding must read list. Oh, and the author of the quotes above, Scott Rosenberg, has his own blog right over here.
10:28:38 PM 
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