More quotes that I like – this time from Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger:

Distance on the Web is measured by links, so the way to make your site ‘close’ to where your customers are is to get lots of places to point to it. How? By being interesting or worthwhile. That’s not how space works where ‘location location location’ ouweighs almost everything – precisely because navigating real space is such a pain. while big companies have an advantage when it comes to location because their fatter wallets can buy better positioning, big sites don’t have a leg up on being interesting. In fact, often it’s quite the contrary.

I think this goes a fair way towards explaining why a lot of big companies have had trouble taking advantage of the benefits that the internet offers. It doesn’t play to their strengths. A big part of innovating is getting your ideas to spread. How? The same way you do it on the Web – by making the ideas more interesting. And by embedding them within a network – which is what the second quote gets at:

Yes, we’re individuals, but we’re at our best when we acknowledge our dep attachment to the others of our world. Yes, the world is independent of us, but we’re at our best when we work the stuff of the world to enrich our common potential… These beliefs put together and shorn of their negative valuations say something quite commonsensical and quite true: We are creatures in a shared world not of our making, and we’re in it not simply as bodies but as people who care about ourselves and others; we understand our world based on the hard work and poetry of those who went before us.

I know it’s a bit utopian, but I like it! Which is probably a fair summary of the entire book…