This is a good mind-stretching book. Birthday Paradox, Prisoner's Dilemma, flash mobs, forming a Stay at Home Mom's group. There's a lot of diversity in the book but it all comes together under its aptly named subtitle: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Shirky gives interesting examples where technology has been used to bring people and ideas together. As an entrepreneur, it made me think twice about the ideal size of a business.

If you like this type of light business plus fun examples, you will also like Ori Brafman's Starfish and the Spider. If you can just read one, I pick Starfish.

This is a thought-provoking, intellectually-stimulating book. A must-read for executive leadership of any company.

I am not one to read books on technology, strange as it may seem. Especially ones that talk about current issues as they will become dated in a few months, or less. However, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, by Clay Shirky, works for me on several levels. You could read this book a year from now and still gain valuable insight into the blogging, Twitter, and social media arenas.

Contents:
Chapter 1: It Takes a Village to Find a Phone
Chapter 2: Sharing Anchors Community
Chapter 3: Everyone is a Media Outlet
Chapter 4: Publish, Then Filter
Chapter 5: Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production
Chapter 6: Collective Action and Institutional Challenges
Chapter 7: Faster and Faster
Chapter 8: Solving Social Dilemmas
Chapter 9: Fitting Our Tools to a Small World
Chapter 10: Failure for Free
Chapter 11: Promise, Tool, Bargain
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

The premise of the book is laid out in Chapter 1, where Shirky relates a 2006 story of a stolen Sidekick, a smartphone lost in a New York City cab. The owner offered a reward for its return, sent to the phone itself, but it was not answered. From there, a friend of the owner started a blog, relating his adventures in recovering the phone. From the blog, and the attention that it received, the owner was able to recover the phone. It was done through e-mails, pressure on the New York City police, and the networking between people that cared enough to create an issue of recovering the phone. Blogs, wikis, social networking sites, IRC, and Twitter are enabling people to create communities and organizations without formally meeting or requiring a bricks-and-mortar locations. Examples Shirky uses includes political activists in Belarus and Leipzig, East Germany, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), and activists in Egypt. These examples, and others, show that Shirky may be right in his assessment that what we are seeing now in "Web 2.0" is as important as the invention of moveable type (the printing press) in 1439. It may be years before you will be able to confirm this, but you can tell that there is a shift happening, using the internet, that was previously impossible to surmount (geography, primarily, but also the connections that we all enjoy due to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and others).

Here Comes Everybody is a very enjoyable book. For those people that need an introduction to the power of blogs, wikis, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other technologies, this book will serve you very well. While not an exhaustive expose on any of the technologies, Shirky explains the rise of them (including a little background on the founders) and how we have adapted them to our specific use. E-mail and text messaging allowed East Germans to help bring down the government in 1989. Twitter, seen as a micro-blogging platform, has been used by democracy advocates in Egypt to notify others of police actions and also to garner support for those jailed during protests. Wikis, especially, are given a high position in the book, as the standard of global collaborative thinking. Wikipedia's origins are shown, as well as why it works as well as it does. But those aren't the only items of interest. One of the more fascinating discussions concerns "fame" and participation. There is a marked imbalance in all of the tools he describes. Some people post more pictures to Flickr, write more blog posts, or use Twitter more extensively than others in the population. This leads to a measure of "fame" in the communities. This is called the "power-law distribution" and actually allows these technologies to flourish. It also allows the major contributors to enjoy a measure of "fame." Reading this, I finally understood why there are so many people that do not contribute to wikis, blogs, or on-line forums. But while those people may not contribute the majority of the work, they do contribute, and they care about the success of the wiki, blog, or forum (for example) as much as those that contribute the majority.

There are lessons within this book for everyone that blogs, contributes to wikis, or tweets. Further, if you are working for a large organization, there is a clear understanding of how these technologies can leverage internal and external experts. It may help your organization to find better ideas from your employees, from sources that you never considered. One of the highlights for me was reading "For any given piece of software, the question 'Do the people who like it take care of each other?' turns out to be a better prediction of success than 'What's the business model?'" As I look at the particular area of technology that I inhabit, I would have to answer with a resounding "Yes" to that question. Which also explains why I think that it is doing so well and will continue to do well.

Highly recommended.

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is a great primer to understand the modern internet phenomenon. He calls internet "the biggest revolution in human expression", and that it used to be that "Little things happen for love and big things happen for money", but now the thresholds for collaboration and expression are minimal so both things can happen.

The first five chapters is a great introduction to the evolution of media and organizing groups. Even if for my part little was new, it was a great read. The mid part of the book is a long and boring repetitions. The book end with discussing social dilemmas and open source software, which and there were great pages. I just wish Shirky could have trimmed the book 100 pages in the middle.

Since I am in the software world my biggest interest was the discussion around open source software (OSS). Shirky is a great believer in OSS, and states that "In the open source world, trying something is often cheaper than than making formal decisions about whether to try it". OSS means, according to Shirky, that massive amounts of people will try and develop things and many will fail, but thanks to the volume new discoveries are made. He gives the analogy of the arid desert where companies stick to the first oasis they find, but in the world of OSS the whole desert is explored, and therefore new values are found and created.

I think Shirky misses two important things: first, that just because it is accessible (and maybe free) people will not work with it, there needs to be an incentive. Some people work out of anger towards a giant (used to be Microsoft) and some because they want to show off or learn, but miracles need some coordinating party in my eyes (look at Ubuntu, GTK, and Webkit, big successes of open source).

Secondly innovation is not only comprised of technology. Working with innovation processes I would say that simplified there are three parts: Market Fit, Consumer Experience, and Technical Feasibility, where open source is great at the last one, but usually bad at the first two.

To summarize: a great primer about how Internet changed media and human communication, but I think it glorifies "loose collaboration".

I've read almost all the books on how social media is changing business and I can say that "Here Comes Everybody" is the very best. Don't even think of blogs, communities or social networks as part of your marketing strategy until you read this book. Why? It explains clearly -- yet oh so thoroughly -- why people want to connect and contribute(or not)to communities and groups.

It also puts the tools discussion into the proper context: First establish the group's promise, and then select the tool to support the promise. In my experience too many companies are investing in the tools and then trying to figuring out how to create business communities with those tools.

Clay also provides some fascinating insights into what makes a community coalesce: you don't need huge numbers of highly-active people for a community to be effective. Because today's tools remove barriers to participation a small number of highly-involved people can do most of the heavy lifting and "people who care a little can participate a little, while being effective in the aggregate."

Bonus points -- the book is well written, rich in illustrative stories, and well organized.

What is behind the explosion of Internet-based social networking in all its forms, from shared book reviews on Amazon, to e-mail, listservs, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter? And more important: what does this new wave of truly participatory media bode for the future?

Clay Shirky takes on these big questions in "Here Comes Everybody," and the result is an engaging, eye-opening book that draws upon social change theory, economics, and psychology. Shirky contends that the Internet, cell phones and other two-way communications technologies have lowered the barriers to group formation, such that people are organizing to great effect in ways that would have been impossible just a few years ago. This is taking place in all sorts of ways: social groups, political action groups, photo sharing, news and information sharing, lifestyle support groups, the list goes on and on.

Shirky believes that the power of these new tools at our disposal will be harnessed collectively in a positive direction. He acknowledges that many individuals seek to disrupt cooperative efforts (look at spammers, or "trolls" on mailing lists, for instance). Tools that are overrun by those seeking to disrupt them, though, were flawed in some way, and will fall away in favor of tools such as Wikipedia that correct for such vandalism.

What of corporate and governmental entities trying to screen/censor Internet content? Shirky believes that such efforts are doomed to failure: due to the nature of the technology itself, people will find a way around those attempted impositions. So far, world events bear out his perspective.

Shirky doesn't deal much with inequities in access to these communications tools. But that may be peripheral to his point: after all, not everyone had access to a printing press, yet its relatively widespread availability led to great change all over the world. And anyway, Shirky isn't crazy enough to say that the new ease of organizing will eradicate inequality throughout the world.

"Here Comes Everybody" is an important counterpoint to those who think that social networking is just a popularity contest for kids, or who bemoan the "narcissism" of people who put their information into MySpace. There's a whole lot more going on there, and people of all generations are beginning to figure that out.

After hearing about this book on NPR, I quickly ordered it, thinking its content would provide valuable marketing insight for us and our clients. The book provides great perspective on the social changes that have come about and are still emerging as a result of the Internet. However, for readers in the Internet age, the writing may sometimes seem a bit slow and repetitive. Good information, but could be crisper. Love the title.

Clay Shirky's book on social tools such as Meetup, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. discusses insightfully the conditions in which they are being successfully employed to achieve group goals. In this regard,the book's a useful manual on how to organize in the digital age, where "worse is better," where the relevant sequence is no longer "gather and share" but rather "share and gather" and where since "more is different" failures are recognized for their useful role of bringing about more successes.

A side benefit of the book for me is the very accessible discussion of the relevance of the power law distribution in describing many social facts, such as the number of active participants (few) compared to occasional contributors (most) who may nevertheless be a source of important, if rare, understandings.

Clay Shirky has written an important book that is a good read. He tells the story of how the new social technologies of the web lower the barriers of cooperation so that individuals can share, create, and act together in new ways. This book should be read by anyone who want to more about how today's technological innovations are and will shape society and the organizations that comprise it. Shirky also write well. He is a good story teller. Best book I've read in at least a year.

The effect of the Internet on our culture has been the subject of several interesting books over the last few years: Wikinomics, The Long Tail, etc. Here Comes Everybody is much in the same vein as these, it has the usual requisite topics...six degrees of separation, tragedy of the commons and so forth.

Each author brings their own fresh insights to the discussion, two ideas that stand out for me from this book are the concept of Social Capital, and that of a "Coasian Ceiling" to the size of an organization. Author Shirky utilizes the concept of Social Capital (you scratch my back, I scratch yours) in order to help explain the growth of social networks in light of such obvious challenges such as geography and plain old self-interest. A 1937 paper by Ronald Coase entitled "The Nature of the Firm" is used to explain how The Internet has succeeded in changing the nature of work by reducing the cost of exchanging labor. In other words, people do not have to get together under one roof in order to work efficiently.

These are certainly stimulating ideas and this book has many more examples of the how The Internet is affecting our day to day productivity. Somewhat more disturbing are several examples of group action that result from Internet communication. One example is how The Internet is employed in vigilante, albeit non-violent, justice. Another example is related to flash mobs and civil disobedience. Hopefully these are just tales from the long tail and The Internet will remain more related to the exchange of information than as a tool for achieving political and legal ends.

Brilliant synopsis of what's happening - right now. Features that are important to every individual, every organization, every government, and which can no longer be ignored. Clay lays out the case, example after example, and ties it all together. Highly recommended.

If you read enough, you just have to be wary of "Here Comes Everybody" and its ilk. If you're the sort of person thinking of reading Shirky's book, you've probably also read Larry Lessig (Code), Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks, not to mention essays like "Coase's Penguin"), Shapiro and Varian (Information Rules), maybe Weinberger (Everything is Miscellaneous), and on and on. You've used the Wikipedia. You may well use Linux. You've learned about "the wisdom of the crowds" (Surowiecki). You've got "the long tail" in there somewhere too.

What does Shirky add to this cacaphony? He adds one important special case of all of the above: the Internet lets us form groups effortlessly. Now we can work together on projects that we wouldn't have known about otherwise. We can find other people for fun in the real (non-Internet) world. We can find people with remarkably obscure interests matching our own. Previously these would have taken far too much time and effort. And the payoff is far too low for any company to be interested in connecting, say, lovers of ancient Chinese art. What the Internet has given us is a set of tools that allow us to create and find these groups.

This comes with its downsides. For instance, at the same time that it becomes easier for me to find blogs devoted to 18th-century ship-in-a-bottle designs, it becomes easier for you to find backwoods militias. The example Shirky gives here is a web bulletin board devoted to encouraging anorexia among its teen members. (This was the only part of the book that actually horrified me.) In the real world, these sorts of groups succumb to social pressure and go into hiding. The web makes it possible for them to find one another; they are no longer alone.

Shirky only gives the briefest treatment of these groups, and seems generally in favor of them for the same reason that people favor free speech: it protects the speech we hate as well as the speech we support. I would have liked deeper coverage here. In a lot of senses, the Internet is making us reconsider the foundations of democracy: now we're face to face with the consequences of truly free speech; what do we do about it, if anything? Do we still stand by the free-speech absolutism that we clung to when it was more or less hypothetical? Shirky doesn't really touch on this.

He's quite often a techno-idealist, which is a stance he assumes professionally. As a technologist, he's convinced that the spread of cheap communications technologies will allow protesters to connect and topple ruling elites; he uses protests within Belarus as an example. He doesn't really follow this up with counterexamples: Great Firewall Of China, anyone? More to the point: politics will exist even after text messages amongst flashmobs are a faint memory. I'd have liked this book better had Shirky cowritten it with a political scientist.

Had Shirky dug into this a little more, the whole tone of his book would have changed. Had he scaled out his historical perspective, he might not be as optimistic either. I've been reading about the revolutionary potential of technology at least since I started using PGP; it was supposed to have been used by freedom fighters in the jungles of Burma. This strain continued through O'Reilly's publication of its collection of essays on P2P. Within there were essays on, say, FreeNet, which was explicitly designed to create a censorship-proof peer-to-peer network. Only the occasional voice was brave enough to ask whether FreeNet would even be permitted within a repressive regime. If Shirky were interested in convincing me that technology might topple existing power structures, he'd go ask how those freedom-fighters are doing.

Shirky's is a valuable point of view, but it's a point of view that I've heard too many times. Nowadays, it's more courageous -- and ultimately, I think, more helpful to the world -- to write a book disagreeing with Shirky ("Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge," say, or "The Cult of the Amateur") than it is to write Here Comes Everybody.

Hey Clay, WAZZZZZZZZAAA?

I loved the book. Many thanks to Vanessa, Scott and Janet for the work they do. And now for my contribution-- and my only post on Amazon (Farzad a la Mode)

I thought your book was thought provoking all the way to the end. You respected the reader enough not to do what so many authors do today, which is to keep repeating the same thing over and over again in simple words.

I also keep seeing things that echo with the lessons of your book. Did you see the NYT article about the case of the stolen Skyline GT? Another nice example of how if there's love (in this case for a car) then online community action can be intense. www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/automobiles/13STEAL.html

BTW- you scared me with your Deaniac analysis- I sure hope that's not the case w my man Obama- but he's trading at 80c http://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/graphs/graph_DConv08.cfm so I'm still feeling good. (The newspaper headlines after PA should have read: "no new information in Clinton win- markets unmoved").

Throughout the book I kept scribbling stuff down, and thinking- I should send this section on web 2.0 tools for human rights to Saman, or the section on "implicit promise" to Jamie (Heywood), or the piece on loose networks to Les. Unfortunately, it's too much of a drag to scan and email. We need a better tool for this.

How's this for an idea? If while I was reading your book, how about if I could add some marginalia (like my random thoughts above), and other readers could see it too, and rank it. That way, I could choose to read not only your brilliant thoughts, but also the most highly regarded comments from all your readers. Kind of like the Talmud with commentary all around the original text (http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/TalmudPage.htm). Or alternatively, maybe I could only turn on my friends' comments, so reading a book would be social like watching a movie with a bunch of friends and kibitzing is.

Anyway, looking forward to talking to you soon- unless of course, you're too famous to get back to me. Cue "Stan" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_(song)

Farzad

To me, this book is a signal that we are ready for the National Initiative for Democracy (http://ni4d.org). This proposal would amend the Constitution with a process for allowing direct vote on bills. The powers of Congress remain as they are; the NI4D proposal would not replace Congress. If we can harness a small fraction of the surplus attention of this country for government administration, we will quickly become the best managed country in the world.

Clay Shirky has written a highly insightful, extremely forward-thinking, compellingly readable and absolutely brilliant analysis of the future of collective social intelligence, action and achievement. This is where the world is headed - buy it and read it now.

This book is interesting with some facts and figures that I like, but a lot of anecdotes to illustrate ideas, which I am not hot on. Prefer the facts and principles

Clay Shirky does a very good job documenting and explaining how new technological tools (e-mail, weblogs, wikis etc.) have, after becoming widely accessible, revolutionized how social groups can form, interact and achieve their goals.

He cites the usual suspects like e.g. Linux and Wikipedia as exceptional feats in free collaboration. But there are a lot of other interesting stories about small and large groups with vastly different objectives in the book you have probably never heard of.

And more importantly, while he explains how these projects and the tools they use work (in a way geared toward non-techies), the book is really about why they work from a sociological point of view. It is delighting to notice all those communities and group projects that have come out of nowhere to, seemingly without organization, build something for themselves and others. But it is really enlightening to read Shirky's well-written explanation of the underlying principles.

The book is fun to read and, considering its topic's impact on society, should be of interest to just about everybody.

Shirky writes like Malcolm Gladwell. If you liked "Tipping Point" and "Blink," and you want an equally intelligent and lucid explanation of how social technology is revolutionizing culture and the web, this is your book.

The writer creates some really eye-opening views into dynamics of groups, both in and outside of the Internet

In this book, Shirky describes three levels of group activities, made possible by social media:

1. Sharing with others, using del.icio.us, Flickr, Slideshare and other social tools. After September 11th, a professor of Middle Eastern history starts writing a blog that became a resource for reporters covering the battles in Afghanistan and Iraq.

2. Collaboration, perhaps using Linux or Wikipedia. Kite makers find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. So are architects.

3. Collective action, where groups form to pursue a larger purpose and use social tools, ranging from google or Yahoo! groups to free online social networks such as Ning to share news and tips, recruit others, support each other and remain unified.

Writes Shirky, "... one of the things I most hope readers get out of it, is an excitement about how much experimentation is still possible, and how many new uses of our social tools are waiting to be invented." Similarly the Internet changed how outraged Catholics could rally for changes when pedophile priests went on trial. The organizing clout of the Internet did not come in time for one of my heroes, Gary Webb.

In a controversial move, Shirky describes why he thinks MoveOn has not succeeded in three ways that Obama has, using social media, beginning with his "wide pockets versus deep pockets" approach to securing many little donations rather than a few big donations. Another example, fighting against the airline industry's resistence setting standards for passengers stuck on the tarmac, some angry passengers recruited, "tens of thousands of people in a few weeks" to join the Coalition for an Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights.

Each example in his book includes three vital elements: a credible and clear promise, use of the right social media tool(s) and an attractive bargain for and with potential participants.

Writing in sharp contrast to Shirky's view of social media as a collective experience for "us", Lee Siegel, in Against the Machine, believes the Internet mainly serves "me" and often brings out the banal in "amateurs". He calls it, "the first social environment to serve the needs of the isolated, elevated, asocial individual."

I was modestly disappointed to see so few references to pioneers I recognize, including Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Joe Trippi, and so on. Howard Rheingold and Yochai Benkler get single references. Seeing Stewart Brand's recommendation persuaded me I don't know the author well enough, and should err on the side of his being a genuine original.

Certainly the book reads well, and for someone like me who reads a great deal, I found myself recognizing thoughts explored by others, but also impressed by the synthesis and the clarity.

A few of my fly-leaf notes:

+ New technologies enable new kinds of groups to form.

+ "Message" is key, what Eric Raymond calls "plausible promise."

+ Can now harness "free and ready participation in a large distributed group with a variety of skills."

+ Cost-benefit of large "unsupervised" endeavors is off the charts.

+ From sharing to cooperation to collective action

+ Collective action requires shared vision

+ Literacy led to mass amatuerism, and I have note to myself, the cell phone can lead to mass on demand education "one cell call at a time"

+ Transactions costs dramatically lowered.

+ Revolution happens when it cannot be contained by status quo institutions

+ Good account of Wikipedia

+ Light discussion of social capital, Yochai Bnekler does it much better

+ Value of mass diversity

+ Implications of Linux for capitalism

+ Excellent account of how Perl beat out C++

Bottom line in this book: "Open Source teaches us that the communal can be at least as durable as the commercial.

Other books I recommend:
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World
Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised : Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

There is of course also a broad literature on complexity, collapse, resilience, diversity, integral consciousness and so on.