Closeups in Nature
©1987 by John Shaw
AMPHOTO, an imprint of Watson-Guptill Publications, New York. ISBN0-8174-4051-8.

A successful picture unites both your technical and poetic skills. One side of you must be a rational, scientific clinician who sets up the camera, chooses an exposure setting, and goes through the mechanics of photography. The other side should be a sensitive, mystical artist who intuitively reacts to a subject and decides on matters of composition and design. Good photography synthesizes these two approaches to the world while not allowing either to dominate. A technocrat without emotion is clinical and soulless, while a poet without order is bound within personal imagery and cannot convey his or her feelings to others.

Song of Myself: Personal Publishing on the Net
by Matthew Hawn
MACWORLD, August 1996, p. 131

Forget Marshall McLuhan. The real patron saint of the Internet ought to be Walt Whitman. Whitman claimed his Leaves of Grass was "an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being . . . freely, fully and truly on record." I can't think of a better guideline for creating personal Web pages. Without personal pages, the Web is just another place to buy cubic-zirconium necklaces and designer chocolate. If the Net is going to be the virtual town hall promised by politicians and technology mavens, we need to populate it with the voices of individuals. We have to become creators as well as consumers of information.