David Weinberger Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Transparency is the new objectivity

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.

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

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.

The smartest person in the room, is the room.

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

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.

The cure to information overload is more information.

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.

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.

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

Citizens are starting not to excuse political candidates who have web sites that do nothing but throw virtual confetti.

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

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.

The Internet's abundant capacity has removed the old artificial constraints on publishing - including getting our content checked and verified. The new strategy of publishing everything we find out thus results in an immense cloud of data, free of theory, published before verified, and available to anyone with an Internet connection. And this is changing the role that facts have played as the foundation of knowledge.