“Re: Jobs, maybe it’s better said that he changed people’s worlds rather than the world.”

Yes, it is better said that way.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

So wise. Watch the whole speech, in which he talks about getting on with the big things in life before it’s too late.

Here’s a quote from Dave Winer that got me thinking:

“The transcontinental railroad was a great idea because of its scope and its ability to transform human civilization. To make something like that happen you have to do a lot more than ‘have’ an idea. You have to develop it, make it work, and then convince everyone else to use it.”

Exactly. And the space to turn great ideas into reality is something many of us want badly, but are finding lacking.

And this is a shot of me, Nicole and Arlo the day before Noah was born:

I’m posting these pics for two reasons:

1) I’m proud of my family, which is comprised of two cute kids and their decent-looking parents;

2) I want everything for my kids, including a world where no single entity — neither the government nor a giant corporation — can stop them from being who they want to be, or from saying what they want to say.

The first point is just the honest truth. And while the second point might sound naive, or trite, it is also the honest truth.

That’s why I work with Free Press, a non-profit advocacy and policy group, to help reform the American media system so that more voices — from all over the political and ideological spectrum — are represented in our media, and so that giant corporations aren’t the ones deciding who deserves to be heard.

Sadly, the current state of affairs isn’t encouraging. Today, the FCC voted to pass rules that it claims will enforce “Net Neutrality” — the concept that all web sites and Internet services should be given equal treatment by providers like Comcast and Verizon. The trouble is, those very providers are the ones who wrote these rules, so they are full of so many loopholes that consumers like you and me — not to mention the Googles and Amazons of tomorrow — will be unprotected.

From the birth of the Web in the early 1990s to today, everyone has been an equal citizen on the Internet. That all changed today. Instead of the continuation of the open, wacky, and free Internet as we know it, we could get something more like cable: We’ll be forced to buy packages featuring websites that big corporations want you to see, with no easy way for you and me to access only the sites we want, and to make ourselves into the next Internet stars.

I don’t want Arlo and Noah to grow up in this world.

But there are some encouraging signs in the media reform world as well. Last weekend, after tireless advocacy from Free Press and allies like the Prometheus Radio Project, the House and the Senate passed the Local Community Radio Act, which will usher in thousands of low-power FM (LPFM) radio stations across the country, finally allowing communities to compete with the automated playlists and faceless DJs of corporate radio.

That’s the kind of world I want for my kids: A place where people of all stripes have access to communications of all kinds, without big companies acting as gatekeepers. If Arlo wants to start a radio station in our town, now he can. But if Noah wants to become the next Sergey Brin (Google) or Craig Newmark (craigslist), the path just got a lot hairier.

This is why I’m writing: To ask you to help Free Press change the course of this terrible future. We’re a non-profit based in Northampton, MA and Washington, DC that takes no money from corporations or government, and depends on donations from folks like you to keep our work going.

We’re known as some of the smartest and most effective thinkers, advocates and researchers in the world of communication policy. We get stuff done (like the LPFM bill) and we move the ball forward on issues like Net Neutrality thanks to tireless advocacy and policymaking inside the Beltway and grassroots activism across the country.

If you agree with me that things like Net Neutrality and community radio are worth fighting for, please consider donating $5 or $10 to Free Press. You can donate using the following link (please be sure to select my name from the “I am making this gift in support of the following member of staff” dropdown menu*):
https://freepress.actionkit.com/donate/staff_challenge_2010/

Such a small donation is equivalent to the cost of a couple of beers, a burrito or two, or a movie ticket. But I’d like to think the value is just a bit more than any of those things.

*Because we lobby for media policies in the public interest, contributions to Free Press Action Fund are not tax-deductible as charitable contributions or as business expenses under IRC §162(e).

Number one:

Power is the opportunity to build, to create, to nudge history in a different direction. There are few satisfactions to match it for those who care about such things. But it is not happiness. Those who seek happiness will not acquire power and would not use it well if they did acquire it.

Number two:

It is interesting that when we use power ourselves, we see it as a good force and wish we had more. When others use it against us, particularly when it is used to thwart our goals or ambitions, we see it is–as an evil. A more sophisticated and realistic view would see it for what it is–an important social process that if often required to get things accomplished in interdependent systems.

Take that, power.

Yesterday a friend of mine suggested I start a petition to get a large group of people to commit to leaving Facebook. So I started one.

The request didn’t come out of nowhere. This week, a few early adopter-types — the kind of people who took up Facebook years before your mom did — decided they’d had enough of Facebook’s evolving terms of use and privacy issues and hit delete on their accounts (take a look at EFF’s overview of Facebook’s eroding privacy policy for more). This might not yet qualify as a trend, but something’s definitely brewing among the techno-scenti.

The problem starts and ends with privacy. It seems that every few months, the itchy folks at Facebook launch yet another iteration of the site — er, platform — exposing even more of your private information to the world, and making it harder to keep your personal life close to your chest (or at least limit it to a few hundred friends).

Read the rest here.