[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.

Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive.

[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.

Civic participants don't aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate...

Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say, 'No.'

The historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to the mass media's all-producing Yang....In the age of the internet, no one is a passive consumer anymore because everyone is a media outlet.

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.

Curiously, once technology gets boring, the social effects get interesting.