At the turn of the millennium, the U.S. had some of the best broadband access in the world. It reached more homes, and at a lower price, than most every other industrial country. Ten years later the U.S. is a solid C-minus student, ranking slightly below average on nearly every metric.

those of us who write on the internet have to be hyper-aware of what we’ve said in the past, an ever-pressing challenge as we age. (I have a really terrible memory and always have.) Tagging helps. But if we change our minds or evolve our perspective about certain things, we need to acknowledge it as it happens. Otherwise it looks to a reader — fairly! — like the sort of hypocrisy Times writer Jonathan Dee describes.

In fact, let’s raise the stakes. If you read Post X, a reasonable reaction is, “Hmm, I wonder what else this writer has produced about the subject.” And then, googling backward from the date of the post (or even forward, I suppose), a reader can rather naturally inspect associated posts through the prism of both the tone and substance of the first one s/he encountered, recontextualizing the actual historical record from the point of encounter of Post X. That method of reading privileges consistency over evolution of thought, particularly if a reader disagrees with what s/he encounters.

In ten years, computers will only be a small percentage of how we use our web. We’re going to be accessing it from nearly every device and appliance we own.

we should be willing to fire our communities every once in a while. We should look at those people providing comments and theories in topics we care about. We should look at them and see if they are really the ones that will guide us into our future. We should look at them and see if they are holding us back.

This is exactly why I am not sure finding old friends on Facebook is a good idea. While it may be fantastic to make contact with people from your past, you are reconstituting a community that you fired at one point or another. You are surrounding yourself with people who may no longer yield any new benefit for where you are headed. They are people that made sense for a given time and space. Trying to recreate that time and space is counterproductive for the one you exist in now.

Ben Wilkoff

If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read - and doing it for free - I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.

More important, I couldn’t conceive of a world of news and information without the aid of others helping me find the relevant links.

Nick Bilton, New York Times

[M]edia bosses haven't quite absorbed the full implications of what the web has done.

They are having a hell of a time monetizing it because it is too vast, too borderless, too fluid to carve out property on it. It's like trying to make a profit in a communist state. And yet its essential nature - its open source, link-friendly, conversation of humankind democratic spirit is what makes it different from the past - and so appealing to libertarian-inclined chaps like myself. Sealing an online product off from the core online experience seems to me to be a medium at war with itself and a business not fully aware of the actual product it is creating.

It is our misfortune to live through the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race, a misfortune because surplus always breaks more things than scarcity. Scarcity means valuable things become more valuable, a conceptually easy change to integrate. Surplus, on the other hand, means previously valuable things stop being valuable, which freaks people out.

Another great quote from Clay Shirky.

Consider this quote from a high-ranking book publisher who should know better, "We must do everything in our power to uphold the value of our content against the downward pressures exerted by the marketplace and the perception that 'digital' means 'cheap.' ..."

Hello?

You don't have the power. Maybe if every person who has ever published a book or is ever considering publishing a book got together and made a pact, then they'd have enough power to fight the market. But solo? Exhort all you want, it's not going to do anything but make you hoarse.

Movie execs thought they had the power to fight TV. Record execs thought they had the power to fight iTunes. Magazine execs thought they had the power to fight the web. Newspaper execs thought they had the power to fight Craigslist.

Here's a way to think about it, inspired by Merlin Mann: Imagine that next year your company is going to make 10 million dollars instead of a hundred million dollars in profit. What would you do knowing that your profits were going to be far less than they are today? Because that's exactly what the upstart with nothing to lose is going to do. Ten million in profit is a lot to someone starting with zero and trying to gain share. They don't care that you made a hundred million last year from the old model.

Will P-12 public education be immune from these outside forces? I'm guessing no...

Faced with concerns about Internet predators, cyberbullying, students’ sharing of inappropriate content on social networks, and the abundance of sexually explicit or violent content online, many school leaders and technology directors are placing tighter restrictions on Web access to shield students from potential harm.

Yet in Trussville and other like-minded school systems, educators and school boards are instead expanding access to online resources, including social-networking sites, for students and teachers. Instead of blocking the many exit ramps and side routes on the information superhighway, they have decided that educating students and teachers on how to navigate the Internet’s vast resources responsibly, safely, and productively - and setting clear rules and expectations for doing so - is the best way to head off online collisions.

“We are known in our district for technology, so I don’t see how you can teach kids 21st-century values if you’re not teaching them digital citizenship and appropriate ways of sharing and using everything that’s available on the Web,” said Shawn Nutting, the technology director for the Trussville district. “How can you, in 2009, not use the Internet for everything? It blows me away that all these schools block things out” that are valuable.

Justin Reich, a former high school teacher and a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, writes that filters are especially skilled at blocking out one group of Internet users at schools: teachers. Students, he says, know how to get around the filters, while teachers have no idea how to go about accessing blocked material online.