David Weinberger Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Your organization is becoming hyperlinked. Whether you like it or not. It's bottom-up; it's impossible.

The next darwin is more likely to be a data wonk than a naturalist wandering through an exotic landscape.

Personalization is the automatic tailoring of sites and messages to the individuals viewing them, so that we can feel that somewhere there's a piece of software that loves us for who we are.

To a collector of curios, the dust is metadata.

Don't think of the Internet as a broadcast medium...think of it as a conversational space. Conversation is the opposite of marketing. It's talking in our own voices about things we want to hear about.

The Internet is a medium only at the bit level. At the human level, it is a conversation that, because of the persistence and linkedness of pages, has elements of a world. It could only be a medium if we absolutely didn't care about it.

How we organize our world reflects not only the world but also our interests, our passions, our needs, our dreams.

Metadata liberates us, liberates knowledge.

Transparency is the new objectivity

This is an awesome time to be a knowledge seeker, no better time, but it's also the best time in history to be a complete idiot.

It's not what you know, and it's not even who you know. It's how much knowledge you give away. Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power because it diminishes your presence.

The cure to information overload is more information.

The smartest person in the room, is the room.

Business is a conversation because the defining work of business is conversation - literally. And 'knowledge workers' are simply those people whose job consists of having interesting conversations.