The number of people who are willing to start something is smaller, much smaller, than the number of people who are willing to contribute once someone else starts something.

The groups of photographers were all latent groups, which is to say groups that existed only in potentia, and too much effort would have been required to turn those latent groups into real ones by conventional means.

aggregations of anything from atoms to people exhibit complex behavior that cannot be predicted by observing the component parts.

The ability to turn a collection of tanks into a coordinated force rested on two very different kinds of things, in other words. First, it required the media with which to coordinate the tanks. No radios, no blitzkrieg. Second, it required a strategy that took the new possibilities into account. No new strategy, no blitzkrieg either. Neither the

Fewer than two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users.

Because of homophily, the value to you that comes from one of your friends plugging into the network is much higher than the value of a random stranger half the world away plugging in, but as we are increasingly seeing with examples like the Sichuan quake, the connections don’t all have to be direct to be valuable. Having Kaiser Kuo on Twitter was

The two basic organizational imperatives—acquire resources, and use them to pursue some goal or agenda—saddle every organization with the institutional dilemma, whether its goal is saving souls or selling soap. The question that mass amateurization poses to traditional media is “What happens when the costs of reproduction and distribution go away?

My uncle Howard was a small-town newspaperman, publishing the local paper for Richmond, Missouri (population 5,000). The paper, founded by my grandfather, was the family business, and ink ran in Howard’s blood. I can still remember him fulminating about the rise of USA Today; he criticized it as “TV on paper” and held it up as further evidence of

Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.