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Well, burn my atomic-clock-powered new human renaissance platform

Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow! It's Quotes of the Year 2011

Grauniad: We're sure there's some news but we're too busy blogging to find out what it is


Some Silicon Valley guy: wants creators to pay him, so he can get even richer

“I am TechCrunch and TechCrunch is me”

Michael Arrington, founder of nontrepreneurs' bible TechCrunch, which was acquired by AOL in February. TechCrunch's speciality was passing on spoon-fed "scoops" from VC investors about their hopless web startups. Then Arrington decided to cut out the middleman by starting a hopeless web startup investment fund of his own. This opened up a glorious prospect that every story could directly benefit Arrington himself - a move of staggering genius. After insisting this was in no way a conflict of interest, Arrington departed AOL.


“We're sure there is some news in there, but we don't have time to watch it because we're live blogging”

The Guardian re-defines online journalism. Thanks!


“It’s like the Gaia Theory: a butterfly flaps its wings and a tsunami happens in another part of the world”

Sarah Hunter, Google's Head of UK Public Policy , has a go at explaining the internet. This inspired some terrific, Hunteresque rival theories.


“So the caesium atomic clocks are necessary to make all this technology work”

English graduate and Britain's leading voiceover artist Stephen Fry explains how the internet works, on the BBC. Apparently all these "packets" need to be delivered right on time. This spawned a number of reader-penned Fry-style Explanations of How Christmas Tree Lights Work, How TV works, and how How Lightbulbs Work - which are quite fantastic.


"You have to explain to them that that is the beginnings of a new renaissance in human civilisation and that they should not only, not even get out of the way, but they should join us in making the world a much better place."

Ben Hammersley, talking about the web. The prodigious Hammersley specialises in explaining the web to slack-jawed public-sector middle management, as this tour-de-force of childishness demonstrates. Quite appropriately, the Hamm was appointed as the 'Prime Minister's Ambassador to Tech City'. Look out, Stephen Fry.


“Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

Allegedly: the last words of the late Stephen P Jobs (1955-2011). The sole source for this, remember, is his sister Monica Simpson, a professional fiction-creator. We subsequently learned via his Official Biographer that Jobs dismissed dozens of nursing staff, making it likely that Jobs last words were really "You're fired, motherf..!" Still, the Simpson myth version is altogether kinder, evokes a prophet glimpsing a transcendental plane - or perhaps the iPad 3 - so let's go with that. ®

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