"Whatever you can identify with a URL is fair game. You can invent your own simple business logic by defining rules for what tags to use, and when and how to change them. You can monitor RSS feeds, in any feedreader, in order to be alerted when monitored items change. You can share or delegate the work by sharing or delegating access to the del.icio.us account. And last but not least, when you need to get a programmer to make use of this database you and your collaborators have built, that person’s job will be drop-dead simple."

"Whatever position we arrive at concerning the possible truth or falsity of a given economic hypothesis, it is plain that this cannot be understood as literal descriptive truth. Economic hypotheses are not offered as full and detailed representations of the underlying economic reality. For a hypothesis unavoidably involves abstraction, in at least two ways."

"The last six months — if not the last year — logged what felt like a decade’s worth of financial news. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that swings that normally would attract an enormous amount of attention have gone almost unnoticed. Like the near-total collapse of private capital flows."

"In the end, the question of whether anyone can be a designer comes down to the way in which design is defined. Professional designers think of it as a process which encompasses everything from consumer research and blue-sky concepting to the constraints imposed by manufacturing. In contrast, consumers tend to understand design as a noun, rather than a verb – something which is added to a product rather than something which fundamentally decides it. New manufacturing technologies, and the companies which are giving consumers access to them, will not turn consumers into designers. But they will allow consumers to act creatively to interact with a product and make decisions about its form and function. For me, that’s better than just shopping."

"We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street."

"I won't even get into what she has to say about the hell that is commercial publishing, with its ignorant editors and unkept promises, and the terrible financial pressure that makes writers stifle current work they're excited about to try and sell long-finished work they're bored or nauseated by, because it gets me too upset. Why do zillionaires give zillions to museums and operas and never think of, as she says, sponsoring an admired writer's travel expenses or offering them six months' writing time at a vacation home? If I were a zillionaire, that's the kind of thing I'd want to do… but of course to become a zillionaire I'd have to care about money and the making of same in large quantities, and then I'd be a different person and probably never think about the problems of writers. It's a conundrum."

"You might think that with the economy crashing, the free-labor business model would be crashing, too. Will people continue to invest in their personal brands during hard times? Gould is betting they will. Between investor visits during a late November trip to New York, he sips a soy latte and speculates. During the downturn, he says, firings are sapping loyalty to companies and steering people toward goals of self-sufficiency. In Gould's acerbic phrasing: "The only person I can rely on not to screw me—hopefully—is myself."

Beyond brand-hungry strivers, masses of free laborers continue to toil without ever seeing a payday, or even angling for one. Many find compensation in currencies that predate the market economy. These include winning praise from peers, earning an exalted place within a community, scoring thrills from winning, and finding satisfaction in helping others."

"I’m single. I’m childless. I cared for my mother at the end of her life and for a friend, years before, through 10 months of brain cancer. If, as the saying goes, everything that goes around comes around, someone will do the same for me.

But that’s magical thinking, not a sensible plan for the future. I’ll still have to ask a friend to take me home, or hire a car service, after my next colonoscopy. After almost a decade, I still shudder at the memory of my reconstructive wrist surgery, alone in a hospital where they mixed up my chart with someone else’s. Before the operation and after, I couldn’t even open a bottle."