Tag Archives: Seth Godin

We Are Weird

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“Ten minutes on Boing Boing reminds me that the world is changing, moving, and getting weirder. It eggs me on. Ten minutes on ESPN puts me to sleep.”

“If I can tell you that some group is wrong — not just different, but wrong — then I increase my power over you.”

“As choice and self-determination continue to triumph, you can’t profit from it by pretending you’re not a mass marketer. You actually have to stop being a mass marketer.”

“We watch the Super Bowl, no so much for the game as to remind us what it was like when we all did what everyone else was doing.”

“The reality of digital community is that people are now available for close inspection, and the ‘Net allows us to keep all of them in focus at once.”

From We Are Weird by Seth Godin

Seth on “The future of the library”

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I wasn’t one of those kids that spent lots of time in the library. I loved to read but hated searching for books. Yes, I was lazy. But the coffee shop reference in this post (excerpt below) by Seth Godin gave me a nice warm glow. Most Saturday mornings, a few of us get together at the Coffee Zone and trade info bits.

“The next library is a place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there’s always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don’t view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight–it’s the entire point.

Wouldn’t you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.”

“The new normal”

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“What’s actually happening is this: we’re realizing that the industrial revolution is fading. The 80 year long run that brought ever-increasing productivity (and along with it, well-paying jobs for an ever-expanding middle class) is ending. The promise that you can get paid really well to do precisely what your boss instructs you to do is now a dream, no longer a reality.”

From a post by Seth Godin.

Revolutions invent and destroy and only go one way

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Seth Godin on the internet revolution:

“The internet is like Ice 9. It changes what it touches, probably forever. We keep discovering firsts, the biggest viral video ever, the most twitter followers ever, the fastest bestseller ever… And we constantly discover nevers as well. There’s never going to be a mass market TV show that rivals the ones that came before. There’s never going to be a worldwide brand built by advertising ever again either. And Michael Jackson’s record deal is the last one of its kind… And there may never be a job like that job you used to have either.

Revolutions are like that. They invent and destroy and they only go one way. It’s like watching a confused person in a revolving door for the first time. They push backwards, try to slow it down, fight the rotation… and then they embrace the process and just walk and it works.”

Know anybody fighting that revolving door? Yeah, me too. And there’s no way to help them. I guess a revolution is good or bad depending on where you are. The Czar and the French aristocrats thought their revolutions sucked. The people on the ramparts had a different view.

“Self expression the new entertainment”

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Found this wonderful quote from Arianna Huffington on Seth Godin’s blog:

“Self expression is the new entertainment, We never used to question why people sit on the couch for seven hours a day watching bad TV. Nobody ever asked, ‘Why are they doing that for free?’ We need to celebrate [this desire to contribute for free] rather than question it.”

There you go. That’s it. That perfectly sums up why I can spend almost every waking moment doing what I’m doing right now. Even the most modest form of self expression is endlessly entertaining.