In an interview with Caterina Fake co-founder of Flickr at CNet, Fake is asked the following question
Jeremy Neumann (from the audience) asks, "At South by Southwest Bruce Sterling was very down on blogs, podcasting, videos and other participatory media, comparing it to folk art which he said was really, really bad. Is it the taking part and the sharing that counts or are we raising the bar with user-generated content?"
It used to be when you wanted to hear music, you didn't go turn on the radio and listen to Christina Aguilera. You went down to the living room and grabbed cousin Joe and played the banjo. There's nobody trying to be The Rolling Stones down there, or even Whitesnake. The "audience" for this stuff is usually friends, family, people like that. It's not meant to be judged by, ahem, Whitesnake standards. So I'd have to disagree with Bruce Sterling there. On the other hand, there are gems in all those family snapshots and MP3s of people noodling in their basements. And social networks are great ways of surfacing those really amazing things.
Fake also said
the scarcest, most valuable resource in an industrialized country is your time and attention.
And here is another quote we have been using for quite some time
What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention ...The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.
HERBERT SIMON - ECONOMIST.
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