The Internet has become a remarkable fount of economic and social innovation largely because it's been an archetypal level playing field, on which even sites with little or no money behind them - blogs, say, or Wikipedia - can become influential.

I'm not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I've flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.

The more Mommy blogs going nuclear over playground etiquette I read and birthday parties of glazed adults munching cupcakes like demoralized zombies I attend, I realize this is what my friends who conceived before me meant by, 'You just won't care.'

People seem to be losing their sense of boundaries more and more, what people are willing to put up on the internet, especially blogs. People seem to assume that only their friends are going to read it but anyone in the world could read it at any time.

Degree actually came to me and asked me if I wanted to be a part of their campaign, and I thought it was just really exciting and important, obviously to my fans, and growing up I had tons of OMG moments. I get to share my own moments through video blogs.

I do read movie blogs. I think what's really interesting - Probably everyone says this, but what's interesting is it, it takes away the power, from the newspaper magnates, so be it Murdoch or whatever. I mean, it's like the people taking it back. Isn't it?

First, I'd become an avid reader of blogs, especially music blogs, and they seemed to be where the critical-thinking action was at, to have the kind of energy that I associate with rock writing of the 1970s or Internet e-mail discussion lists a decade ago.

I used to work for an NGO called Transitions Online, and I was their Director of New Media. I was a very idealistic fellow who thought that he could use blogs, social networks and new media to help promote democracy, human rights and freedom of expression.

In the past, a writer had to go outside and get to know others before learning about their work, but the Internet has made humanity more accessible for misanthropes like me. I read blogs, tweets, Facebook posts and Reddit threads where people detail their jobs.

I had racially prejudiced comments directed at me on different blogs. People think that just because you're in the spotlight, you're fair game. It's hard, and I don't think you're ready at any age for it. Thankfully, I have some great fans who got me through it.

I had an advantage because people would post me on blogs because I had co-signs from Kanye West, Def Jam, and G.O.O.D. Music. Everything I put out, the blogs would put up. When I realized that, I used that to my advantage and helped build my following on my own.

While we can all access articles and information in so many places now - across blogs, in newspapers, on video - there is something very powerful about putting it all together into an edited format in a single issue that has a narrative stretching across the themes.

I'm steeped in the news because I enjoy the news - I like reading papers, I like reading the blogs, I love talking to newsmakers and pundits, for that matter, about their opinions. I'm an information gatherer by nature, so that's what attracted me about this industry.

Fans write to us via our publisher and more than ever via the Internet, blogs and fan sites, and good writers should be actively seeking out that interaction. Gone are the days when writers are dead or hidden away in dusty attics; nowadays, you've got to get out there.

You have very short travel blogs, and I think there's a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, 'Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.' Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.

The worst is when you read things on the Internet blogs, because people don't hold back. Sometimes you read wonderful things, but sometimes it's really awful stuff. Like on the Fashion Spot, for example, people always comment on you. They forget that we might read that stuff.

I don't follow other fashion blogs, but I do follow other fashionistas on Instagram. Many of them are my friends; it's really cool: they can inspire me, and they're also my friends. I also look for inspiration in the street; there are so many fashionable women walking around.

We went from journalism, in newspapers that gets heavily edited, to blogs, where you can express your opinions, to tweeting, where you can say anything, and it gets repeated and becomes fact when it isn't. It's something the entire world is going to have to come to grips with.

Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't recognise, an attitude that doesn't accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don't get or of which they don't approve.

The printed word will be around long after many of our digital creations are gone, either because books don't require monthly hosting, and blogs and websites do... or because the languages and platforms for which a particular digital creation was published will become obsolete.

We rely on editors of blogs or websites and television stations to supply us these images, and the filter is becoming very thin and very porous. The ratings race for TV and websites is incredibly fierce, and one of the ways of getting people to watch is through graphic violent images.

Ben Affleck exec-produced a documentary for HBO called 'Reporter' about my 2007 win-a-trip journey. I take the trip each year partly to encourage young people to think about global humanitarian issues: I think blogs by a student may be more compelling for that audience than my own work.

There's only so much you can do on a physical level trying to tour or pass out mixtapes. Although that matters, I realized that you can reach more people putting your music on Soundcloud and networking with blogs to write about you. It really comes back to the music and what you release.

Before the Internet, before BBSes and Fidonet and Usenet and LiveJournal and blogs and Facebook and Twitter, before the World Wide Web and hot-and-cold-online-everything, science fiction fandom had a long-lived, robust, well-debugged technology of social networking and virtual community.

I actually do think you're seeing this trend towards organizations just caring more about their brand and engaging. And so I think Home Depot will want to humanize itself. I think that's a lot of why companies are starting blogs, are just giving more insight into what's going on with them.

I used to read the criticism on blogs about other people - mostly female actresses and singers - and even when they are extremely perfect and harmless, people still go after them. So I figure, if I'm going to get negativity regardless, why do I have to worry about what somebody thinks of me?

You know the green grifters have no argument when they start raising the 'no blood for oil' cry on the blogs. Excuse me, if Obama's make-sure-your-tires-are-properly-inflated administration would simply allow more energy production here in the U.S., that wouldn't be a problem very long, would it?

I feel sometimes and in some ways like Linda Romanoli and Monica Velour; I feel marginalized because I'm in my fifties. If you went online and you look at some of the blogs, which one can do on a lonely night, it's pretty startling what people will say about you just because you're in your fifties.

Actually, I never liked the idea of bags. I would say, 'Why do so many of my friends spend so much money on these bloody bags?' But once I started designing them, I was completely hooked. There are all of these blogs about bags. It's a whole other industry, and I'm really excited to be a part of it.

I think people who read Internet blogs are usually trying to fit it in during a busy part of their day, and there's only so much information that you digest. Whereas an experience with a book is a little more comfortable, and I think people are a little more willing to really delve into information.

What I'm interested in is how your career choices can affect your private life, romantically or with your mom, your relatives, your friends, your hometown, and how media manipulates information - not newspapers or blogs, but the magazines that people impulse-buy that tell you what's hot and who's not.

Do we value privacy in any real way? Thinking about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace... all these suggest we value exposure rather more. And instead of challenging this transformation, as they are supposed to - certainly at the more thoughtful edges of the art - novelists are buying into it wholesale.

I follow blogs, particularly all the main political ones - Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale, Coffee House, Paul Waugh, Iain Martin in the Wall Street Journal, and so on. And some American ones, like the Huffington Post, Gawker, Boing Boing; or Eater and Daily Candy, also American, which are about where to go to eat.

'Dependent web' platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Google and Yahoo are where people go to discover and share new content. Independent sites are the millions of blogs, community and service sites where passionate individuals 'hang out' with like-minded folks. This is where shared content is often created.

Listener and reader input is every bit as important as anything any of us can say. We'd be like crazy people chattering in the middle of that empty field that Joe Biden thinks we should stand in to be safe from swine flu if it weren't for the calls, the letters, the blogs, and the reaction from our audience.

I think the people who are sitting in their living room doing those, 'Let's take country music back' blogs and all that stuff, that's crazy to me. No one's saying that about rock & roll, and no one sounded like the Beatles since 1960. No one says that about R&B, and no one sounded like the Commodores since 1970.

Cory Doctorow should be too busy for lunch. He's co-editor of, and a prolific contributor to, one of the most influential blogs in the world, Boing Boing. Over the past decade the Canadian-born writer has published 16 books, mostly science fiction novels. He campaigns vigorously on the politics of the digital age.

I am obsessed with planning travel! Not just traveling, which I love, but the whole planning process and all the details that go into it. I subscribe to all these travel blogs and airline forums and research hotels and activities and destinations for hours on end, and I volunteer to plan trips for everyone I know.

Now an audience of more than 1 billion people is only a click away from every voice online, and remarkable stories and content can gain flash audiences as people share via social networks, blogs and e-mail. This radically equalizes the power relationship between, say, a blogger and a multibillion dollar corporation.

Importantly, companies are using social media to do things that go way beyond just chatting up existing customers on Facebook. Sales departments use social to nurture leads and close sales. HR posts job openings and vets applicants. Community and support squads mine networks, blogs and forums with deep listening tools.

Models can be people, too. But the only way to do that is to kind of step up and keep doing new things that no one has thought of, from new websites to new blogs, a newscast, doing speeches, talking to kids. It kind of opens a new headline every time: 'Oh, a model hasn't done this before; a model hasn't done that before.'

Right after September 11, 2001, there weren't really any blogs in China, but there were a lot of Chinese chatrooms - and there were a lot of conversations in which Chinese netizens were saying things like, 'served them right.' That was definitely not the official Chinese government policy - which condemned the terrorists.

I know this sounds weird, but I was into storyboarding when I was younger. I loved coming up with my own style through fashion blogs and magazines. But I've never liked trying things on. I don't know why. It was more about making mood boards. I've loved fashion my whole life, but more the imagery of it than actually wearing it.

There was kind of a no-nonsense parenting style that my parents had that was true of the time. Everything now... there are books, and there are websites, and there are blogs, and you're reading, and there's research. We're such an interconnected world now, and half the stuff they did was pretty terrible, but we somehow turned out fine.

I felt the call to this industry because I enjoy broadcast journalism. I'm steeped in the news because I enjoy the news - I like reading papers; I like reading the blogs. I love talking to newsmakers and pundits, for that matter, about their opinions. I'm an information gatherer by nature, so that's what attracted me about this industry.

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