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.