A brand's palpable sense of its higher purpose must be communicated to its customers. Service or enhanced value offerings that simplify, enable, or that help customers navigate information are key. The opportunities afforded by richness and reach of digital platforms in conjunction with other forms of media can deliver that differentiation.

- Alan Moore, SMLXL, Differentiate or die

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things; because the innovator will have for enemies all who have done well under the old conditions and only lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new
- Machiavelli

Ain't that the truth...

via Johnnie Moore's Weblog

Yes, Oprah is still far more powerful than Yahoo. But at the same time, Drudge and Jeff Bezos and Doc Searls are way more influential than their offline cousins.
- Seth Godin

What is a blog? It’s personality. A prosthetic device for your entire being.
- Henry Copeland at iBreakfast on 22nd September 2004

From the comments to a post on blogs and journalism at Harry's Place:

I read this and a number of other blogs. Some of them are frighteningly good, with an extraordinary amount of information in them and often very well-written. It seems to me that there is a kind of information and opinion continuum of which we paid people are now only one end. And not always the better end.

So sayeth David Aaronovitch, Guardian and Observer journalist and the What the Papers Say awards' Columnist of the Year. If Aaro ain't Big Media, I don't know who is. He is also a credit to his profession, and entirely correct in what he says above. The faster other Big Media types learn to accept this, the better off Big Media will be. See also: It's the blogosphere, stupid.

And this one comes from a meeting held right here at tBBC HQ:

I have a PR budget, but I haven't spent one penny of it yet. I really do not see the point of paying a PR agency when you are already doing your own PR, using your blog.

So said a high-level executive of a certain software company when we spent some time with him earlier today. Agree or disagree, this is the attitude that many are taking once they see the power of the blogosphere and what it is possible to achieve when a company engages it. How the PR industry adapts to this shift in thinking is up to the PR industry.

Venture capitalist David Hornik writes on Ventureblog:

In Service Based Computing, devices are not the brains of the operation. They are just pretty little end nodes on a smart data network. The real horsepower is going to be delivered in the network through managed services...Fat pipes and elegant devices make it possible to deliver immense services to the edge of the network but the real work is going to get done in the network, not the device.

See also: The node is not stronger than the network. I find myself saying that a lot these days. It's nice to be in such esteemed company.

Is political blogging really a new form of journalism, destined to challenge the big boys? Or an echo chamber for the hyper-informed and/or over-agitated?

Our take: It doesn't matter. ... Blog software took the ideas behind e-mail lists, discussion boards and home pages and combined them into a relatively easy-to-run and elegant-to-read medium. For people eager to publish online, it was like inventing cheap paper – writing was possible before, but tools were more cumbersome and time consuming.
- Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry, Real Time Wall Street Journal

via BL Ochman

A corporate blog is just like a personal blog, except you don't get to use the word, "motherfucker."
- Mark Pilgrim explaining the difference between his personal and his corporate IBM blog.

via Crossroad Dispatches

Blogs aren't just blogs. They are anything their creators want them to be. They are content. They are interaction. They are media properties. They are advertising. They are tools. Let's not ghettoize ourselves.
- Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine

"[Channel9] was started to put a face on Microsoft, but the most interesting thing to me is that it put a face on our customers. That's better than most Web logs efforts. Include the customers in the conversation."
- Robert Scoble, Microsoft

Blogging has always been about ME - monetize elsewhere.
- Ross Mayfield, SocialText

Corporations just want to be loved, and when I think of the dark side, I think about fear. There's a continuum between openness and control. Companies need to think about what side they're on. Figuring out how to integrate social media so something good happens, figuring out how to encourage transparency and conversation is something corporations will need to do.
- Lisa Poulson, link via Micro Persuasion

Online communications aren't user-generated content for the same reason that phone calls aren't user-generated radio.
- Clay Shirky to a TV exec, Many-2-Many

Until a critical mass of users is reached, a change in technology only affects the technology. But once critical mass is attained, social, political, and economic systems change. This is what authors Downes and Mui call the Law of Disruption. It took about 10 years for radio to reach critical mass in the U.S.; television took longer. Each of these technologies transformed family, economic, and political structures once they reached critical mass.
- Charles Boyd

The Web isn't primarily a medium for information, marketing, or sales. It's a world in which people meet, talk, build, fight, love, and play. In fact, the Web world is bigger than the business world and is swallowing the business world whole. The vague rumblings you're hearing are the sounds of digestion.

The change is so profound that it's not merely a negation of the current situation. You can't just put a big "not" in front of Fort Business and say, "Ah, the walls are coming down." No, the true opposite of a fort isn't an unwalled city.

It's a conversation.
- David Weinberger in Cluetrain Manifesto.

via Doc Searls weblog

Consumer is an industrial-age word, a broadcast-age word. It implies that we are all tied to our chairs, head back, eating 'content' and crapping cash.
- Doc Searls

The magic is not in the tech alone: it is in how it meshes with society. The measure of any invention is not how good it is but how quickly people pull that off you and run with it. SMS wasn't developed for schoolgirls in Japan to chat with each other, it was invented for telcos to send you advertising.
-Andy Lippman, a senior researcher at MIT's media lab

Get this straight: When the revolution is over, the only kind of advertising that survives will be the kind customers want. And when it comes, it will bear zero resemblance to the advertising we've known and hated for the last hundred years.
-Doc Searls Weblog