Quotables

"People spend their work years trying to be successful and their retirement years trying to be relevant."

-- director of philanthropy, REI

"Companies aren't charities. They're businesses. It doesn't matter why they're offering an unacceptable product -- all that matters is that the product is unacceptable. Companies aren't five-year-olds bringing their fingerpaintings home from kindergarten. We don't have to put on a brave smile and tell them, "that's just lovely dear," and display their wares proudly on the fridge. I don't care if Apple adds DRM because Lars from Metallica has incriminating photos of Steve Jobs, I don't care if Sony BMG put a rootkit on its CDs because they were duped into it by a trickster spirit that appeared to their technologists in a dream. I care whether their product is worth my money. It's the market -- there's no A for Effort."

-- Cory Doctorow

"We need to think of our kids less as victims and more as participants."

-- Anne Collier

"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro."

-- languagehat (Tx Hannah)

"They didn't care that they'd seen it work in practice because they already knew it couldn't work in theory."

-- Clay Shirky at 2007 Supernova

"Identity crash: Sudden and catastrophic collapse of an individual's ability to keep all the threads of his or her online identity straight when the individual joins one too many social networks. Example: I was ok keeping up with Facebook, Flickr, and Myspace, but after throwing lawlink, Last.fm, and Orkut into the mix, I had a total identity crash and forgot what went where."

-- Urban Dictionary (tx Becky)

"Won for one, too for two, free for three, for for four, hive for five... and so on... This is what they called 'dictionary dancing'."

-- Fiona Romeo, explaining the battle between young users and Club Penguin over the ban of numbers

There's some deep part of your brain that instinctively wants to make connections with other human beings. Even when you do something as superficial as click a button on a website to confirm that somebody you've already known for ten years is your friend, that bit of your brain experiences a little 'ping' of happiness.

This is why social networks like Friendster, MySpace and Facebook work. Once they've tricked you into signing up, you have to find everyone else you know who is also on the service and connect to them. When you run out of people to connect to, you have to tell everyone you know to get an account so you can connect to them again. Because it's fun. And it's fun because people are fun, even if they're people you see every day, and have no need to interact with over the Internet.

Eventually you run out of real friends to add. At this point you have three options:

1. Find some other feature of the site to keep you logging in
2. Gradually lose interest, returning every month or two to see if anyone else has added you
3. Radically lower your standards

-- Charles Miller, "On Social Networks" (Sept 14, 2007)

"LULWORTH (n.) - Measure of conversation. A lulworth defines the amount of the length, loudness and embarrassment of a statement you make when everyone else in the room unaccountably stops talking at the same time."

-- Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, The Meaning of Liff (tx to confused of calcutta)

"There's more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it... We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice."

-- from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, 24-25