“The perfect recall of silicon memory,’ Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, ‘can be an enormous boon to thinking.’ But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Nicholas Carr
Author/Speaker
(via The Atlantic)

“And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism. The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of ‘news’—and each with its own set of ‘truths’ upon which to base debate and discussion—will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of ‘facts’ by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly ‘red’ or ‘blue.’”

Eric Alterman
The New Yorker

“There is going to be a shake-out here in the next year or two” (as many Web 2.0 companies disappear)

Roger Lee
Partner
Battery Ventures

“If you look at some of the valuations, you wonder what fantasy of revenues they’re based on.”

Mitchell Kertzman
Partner
Hummer Winblad

(Source: FT.comFT.com)

“When marketers see social media as yet another channel to drive a message down, they’re missing the boat. Worse, they’re making themselves look insensitive, unpleasant, and not worth the community’s time. It’s a lose-lose. Take the time to understand the digital natives, and your results will be MUCH better.”

Chris Brogan
Vice President, Strategy and Technology
CrossTech Media

“The web is facing it’s own global warming crisis as marketers continue to pollute it. Consumers are voting with their clicks and eyeballs by engaging with authentic content that adds value, while ignoring the rest.”

Steve Rubel
MicroPersuasion

“10 years from now: I am pessimistic about the long-term prospects for SEO jobs, because the basics of search engine optimization are fairly simple and ought to be to part of the core competency of anybody who makes a living in Web design, Internet marketing, or writing for the Web.

You shouldn’t need a special consultant to make a website that follows simple guidelines.”

Jakob Nielsen