Great thinking about the web's underlying trends (and some promises for the future) in this talk by Clay Shirky at the Web 2.0 Expo (here's the edited transcript, here's a post by me on his new book). Nice quotes in there, like this one on innovation in the digital economy:
The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you're going. That's the phase we're in now.
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