BusinessWeek

Pierre Omidyar on "Connecting People":

"Everywhere, people are getting together and connecting. And using the Internet, they're disrupting whatever activities they're involved in. It's because it's a fundamental shift in power toward the bottom, toward the people as they organize themselves, and away from a small group of people who want to impose a policy top-down. That's really the promise of the technology, and we're seeing it in all these fields... What I'm really focused on is connecting people around shared interests, so together they can make good stuff happen. I'm more focused on helping people discover their power as individuals, but through those connections with one another... We want to explore and support these new models that are bottom-up and empowering to people and hopefully advance the state of the world in that process." -- Pierre Omidyar

See also "The Power of Us":

"What's driving all this togetherness? More than anything, an emerging generation of Net technologies. They include file-sharing, blogs, group-edited sites called wikis, and social networking services such as MySpace and Meetup Inc., which has helped everyone from Howard Deaniacs to English bulldog owners in New York form local groups. Those technologies are finally teasing out the Net's unique potential in a way that neither e-mail nor traditional Web sites did. The Net can, like no other medium, connect many people with many others at the same time." -- Rob Hof, BusinessWeek