Ethan Zuckerman

There's no locality on the web - every market is a global market.

Increasingly, I'm inspired by entrepreneurs who run nonprofit organizations that fund themselves, or for-profit organizations that achieve social missions while turning a profit.

Now if you're using Twitter or other social networks, and you didn't realize this was a space with a lot of Brazilians in it, you're like most of us. Because what happens on a social network is you interact with the people that you have chosen to interact with.

Engineering serendipity is this idea that we can help people come across unexpected but helpful connections at a better than random rate. And in some ways it's based on trying to reassess this notion of serendipitous as lucky - to think of serendipitous as smart.

A common language is a first step towards communication across cultural boundaries.

On the Internet, information from Indiana and India is equally cheap and easy to access.

The Internet has not become the great leveller that it was once thought it could be.

Reading the text of my blog itself is not really the interesting part. The exciting part is how the Internet allows me to be the eyes and ears for the people sending me postings from Africa.

For countries such as Kenya to emerge as economic powerhouses, they need better infrastructure: roads, ports, smart grids and power plants. Infrastructure is expensive, and takes a long time to build. In the meantime, hackers are building 'grassroots infrastructure,' using the mobile-phone system to build solutions that are ready for market.

Creativity is an import-export business.

Wikipedia is a victory of process over substance.

It's fine to have social media that connects us with old friends, but we need tools that help us discover new people as well.