Good post. Have been thinking a lot about influence and reputation lately, and the relative nature of both of them.
Products that only cater to the Quora early adopter crowd won't ever make it big, but ones that are able to siphon them off such that they feel like they're special might.
Agreed. My point is that there are certain people that would likely be predisposed to share anyway. And although the internet has provided new opportunities for sharing, other types have occurred in different communities (village, folk, scientific, etc.) for ages.
Basically, new opportunities don't mean that people wouldn't have shared or weren't sharing in other ways.
I'm not convinced that online sharing has caused offline sharing, although there are examples of online communities such as couchsurfing that have brought online communities offline.
This seems like a case of correlation not equalling causation. These are probably the people that are more likely to be trusting and sharing both online and off.
That said, people have been sharing for millennia, so are we just now learning to trust each other, and is it because of the internet?
I'm kinda over the whole .ly domain thing. Find a new cool-sounding TLD where there isn't the risk of having your domain seized because of possible violations of Sharia law.
Patents in the US are on a "first to invent" basis -- so if someone else has done it before, then you theoretically can't actually patent it. This is different than in Europe where it's a "first to file" system.
Now the problem is that lots of people patent things anyway that they shouldn't be able to because (1) patent examiners are underpaid (2) they're overworked (3) they spend less than 24 hours on each application and (4) they only check very limited databases for prior art, which do not include the internet. Crazy, I know.