"To be a poet at twenty is to be twenty; to be a poet at forty is to be a poet." Eugene Delacroix

"The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark." Michelangelo

"Never measure the height of a mountain, until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was." Dag Hammarskjold

Image: tHr3E by CeErRbBbiiIEeC. Awesome. Thanks for sharing.

Twitter in Plain English: Kudos to Lee LeFever. He created a 2.5 min video that explains the popular app. Find it here.

Reading the new Clay Shirky book. A good read; highly recommended...

"In a world where publishing is effortless, the decision to publish something isn't terribly momentous. Just as movable type raised the value of being able to read and write even as it destroyed the scribal tradition, globally free publishing is making public speech and action more valuable, even as its absolute abundance diminishes the specialness of professional publishing. For a generation that is growing up without the scarcity that made publishing such a serious-minded pursuit, the written word has no special value in and of itself. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, pointed out that although water is far more important than diamonds to human life, diamonds are far more expensive, because they are rare. The entire basis on which the scribes earned their keep vanished not when reading and writing vanished but when reading and writing became ubiquitous. If everyone can do something, it is no longer rare enough to pay for, even if it is vital.

The spread of literacy after the invention of movable type ensured not the success of the scribal profession but its end. Instead of mass professionalization, the spread of literacy was a process of mass amateurization. The term "scribe" didn't get extended to everyone who could read and write. Instead, it simply disappeared, as it no longer denoted a professional class. The profession of calligrapher now survives as a purely decorative art; we make a distinction between the general ability to write and the professional ability to write in a calligraphic hand, just as we do between the general ability to drive and the professional ability to drive a race car. This is what is happening today, not just to newspapers or to media in general but to the global society."

Here Comes Everybody. The Power of Organizing without Organizations. Chapter 3, Everyone is a Media Outlet. Amazon info here.

Bonus: Doc knocks the cover clean off the ball...

"I've maintained for some time that the most important step forward in the Net's recent history is not the generational progression from 1.0 to 2.0, but the branching of the Live Web off the Static Web. The big challenge is building out the Live Web, and it's not one we should leave up to the Big Boys, even as we run it over their glass.

That's because the critical enabling feature of the Live Web won't be technical. It will be the moral and political feature we call freedom. That's not something the Big Boys are going to give us. It's something that comes from ourselves."

Read the entire post here. Kudos, Doc!

Bonus 2: Jeff Jarvis The Times better change. Good post and discussion.

Thomas P.M. Barnett: The Man Between War and Peace via Esquire. Bravos, Tom!

Congrats & cheers: Microsoft on IE8! Google on releasing Google Contacts API. The smart ladies of wowowow.com Media wizard Michael Rosenblum opens Rosenblum Institute in the Netherlands.