David Weinberger

“Every embarrassing moment is going to be shown on the Internet, whether the candidate likes it or not. The ones that can't deal with that are going to fail.”

“If explicit metadata is a real problem, it raises problems that just can't be solved. It's not that we're not good at it; it's the problems cannot be solved because we're not going to agree about these deep questions of how we organize.”

“History keeps teaching us that we can't recognize the important events that are going to trigger changes.”

“We've known for a long time, and I think culturally we've accepted, that diversity is an important thing in the work of knowledge.”

“In the university library, we know when a book has been used in a class or put on reserve... or while it was out, did somebody call it back in. It turns out to be a pretty good indicator of how relevant the work is at that time.”

“We've organized ourselves as cultures, to a large degree, around what we agree we know. And when you have multiple ways of knowing, multiple ways of organizing, the society loses one of its deepest organizational principles.”

“With the new medium of knowledge - the Internet - knowledge not only takes on properties of that medium but also lives at the level of the network.”

“The degree to which campaigns have become dominated by marketing is breaking the spirit of democracy, and we're all just so sick of it, across party lines.”

“Because books are written by individuals, it has often made knowledge seem like the product of individuals, even though everybody has always understood that individuals are working within the social network.”

“In the digital age, we filter forward instead of filtering out. As a result, all that material is still available to us and to others to filter in their own ways, and to bring forward in other contexts.”

“How your social network - the people that you know, or in your community - understand or value a work can be... a tremendously relevant indicator of how important or meaningful it's going to be to you.”

“I've learned the dangerous lesson of the web: You succeed by giving up control, and that's inverse of the normal campaign.”

“Knowledge in the Internet Age - networked knowledge - is becoming more like what knowledge has been in the past few hundreds years for scientists: it's provisional; it's a hypothesis that is waiting to be disproved.”

“The world is deterministic, but it's chaotic and emergent.”

“Knowledge is now accepted as the best we humans can do at the moment, but with the hope that we will turn out to be wrong - and thus to advance our knowledge. What's happening to networked knowledge seems to make it much closer to the scientific idea of what knowledge is.”