Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Net is the greatest listening engine ever devised. These days anyone can choose, with its help, to be well-informed. You have to make the effort to figure out which key people are really on top of what you care about, so that you can start listening to them. Plus, you need to deploy some saved searches. Once you’ve done these things, then when you turn your computer on in the morning, it’ll tell you if anything’s happened that you need to know about.

— Tim Bray 10th February 2010, 5:40 pm

Authority, historically, gets bestowed on the gatekeepers of information, such as Britannica, universities, newspapers, etc. Everything that can be digitized will be digitized, and will then be available over the internet, which is disruptive, not only to business models, but to authority.

— Joe Gregorio 19th November 2009, 6:53 pm

I was thinking the other day how long it had been since I used the acronym “IRL” or the expanded phrase “In Real Life.” It used to be the thing we’d say when we meant “not on the internet”, and I’m glad that it has become gradually obsolete over the years, now that the internet is accepted as part of life.

— Meg Pickard 26th October 2009, 9:59 pm

There’s no such thing as a good day to bury bad news any more, the Internet has seen to that.

— Tom Steinberg 22nd January 2009, 10:20 am

What the Internet has actually done is not decimate literary reading; that was really a done deal by 1970. What it has done, instead, is brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people.

— Clay Shirky 13th January 2009, 2:22 pm