Marshall Kirkpatrick

. . . the lack of uptake of RSS reading software by consumers and businesses is among the turns of events in recent technology history that’s most disparaging of the state of humanity. That a personalized, centralized repository for updates from dynamic streams of information delivered by free trusted sources of democratic publishing all over the world has had its tech-lunch eaten by mind-rotting casual Flash games on Facebook is as depressing as the way that public education dreams were dashed when the promise of television became its reality. It’s like the psychedelic dreams of Harvard’s Dr. Timothy Leary becoming the wretched, heartbreaking narcotic drama of the TV show The Wire. It’s terrible. It’s reason to pack it all up and go home.

- Marshall Kirkpatrick, in review of Glassboard, new venture for Nick Bradbury and other rockstars of the RSS reader world

Tiffany Shlain

In the past 10,000 years, we have been struggling to make sense of our world by breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces. We’ve dissected, and looked into microscopes, and specialized in our knowledge. This reductionist approach has been extremely successful: It brought us the clock, calculus, electricity, the Theory of Relativity, so many of the brilliant ideas and breakthroughs you learned here at Cal.

“Divide and conquer” has been our primary strategy for centuries. But now it’s time to focus on how to put things together. It’s time to look for connections, to look for information to help us understand connections and build connections.

As we spend so much time these days searching, looking and finding all this information, what becomes that much more important is understanding context for that information you find. The good news is that a great education at UC Berkeley provides that context that you need. And looking at how the world is connected is exactly the context we need to find solutions with this perspective, and all these amazing tools are at our fingertips to connect the dots. We can find new ways to share ideas to help solve the problems facing our planet and our species. New, bold ideas will come from engaging all different perspectives and different minds in solving these problems.

…

I truly believe we are at the beginning of a new Zeitgeist. Today, we are seeing that shift in action. We are shifting to this way of thinking, of looking at the world as a system—a system in which everything affects everything else. We need to look at the world this way.

- Tiffany Shlain at UC Berkeley Commencement address to class of 2010

Sarah Lacy

Either a dating site solves your problem and you stop using it, or it doesn’t and you stop using it.

- Sarah Lacy

Nick Paumgarten on 9/11 Memorial

the sight of the names themselves, inscribed in bronze, linked together by happenstance and blood, calculus and font size, is a little like the faint silhouette of a cosmic plan, or else of the total absence of one.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/05/16/110516ta_talk_paumgarten

Feature Creep

- via Yves Béhar on Aesir.

Tron

From jtnimoy on Tron Legacy CG design

Finland

From my flickr stream.

Stowe Boyd

It’s our dancing that makes the house rock, not the planks and pipes. It is us that makes Twitter alive, not the code.

- via Brian Solis at Gnomedex

Anon on Statistics

86% of statistics are made up on the spot and the remaining 24% are mathematically flawed.

– Anon (via johathanmacdonald.com)

Conan O’Brien

Success is a lot like a bright, white tuxedo. You feel terrific when you get it, but then you’re desperately afraid of getting it dirty, of spoiling it in any way.

– Conan O’Brien speaking to the Harvard Class of 2000