Here Comes Everybody: Great Perspective on This Whole 'Wisdom of Crowds' Business

As a rule I don't read books about business, especially digital business. Not that I have nothing to learn, it's jsut that so many of such books have dead nuthin to say that cannot be deduced by reading the bookflap and table of contents. But occasionally a book comes out that totally captures my imagination and attention, and "Here Comes Everybody" is just such a book.

Written by Clay Shirky, he of the faculty of the Interactive Communications Program at NYU, this title really goes well beyond "business" to discuss how participatory media are changing our world, and indeed improving it.

Here's what Publisher's Weekly had to say about it:

From Publishers Weekly
Blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 accoutrements are revolutionizing the social order, a development that's cause for more excitement than alarm, argues interactive telecommunications professor Shirky. He contextualizes the digital networking age with philosophical, sociological, economic and statistical theories and points to its major successes and failures. Grassroots activism stands among the winners—Belarus's flash mobs, for example, blog their way to unprecedented antiauthoritarian demonstrations. Likewise, user/contributor-managed Wikipedia raises the bar for production efficiency by throwing traditional corporate hierarchy out the window. Print journalism falters as publishing methods are transformed through the Web. Shirky is at his best deconstructing Web failures like Wikitorial, the Los Angeles Times's attempt to facilitate group op-ed writing. Readers will appreciate the Gladwellesque lucidity of his assessments on what makes or breaks group efforts online: Every story in this book relies on the successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users. The sum of Shirky's incisive exploration, like the Web itself, is greater than its parts.

My favorite aspect of the book is how Shirky inserts truths about the human experience almost constantly -- the sort of comments that make me stop and think about the nature of social life, communications, and cultural participation and indeed help me make sense of the more baffling aspects of digital.

Shirky effectively uses storytelling to communicate the sometimes complex points he makes - and the device really makes processing and remembering the information and ideas much easier and long lasting.

Equipped with the insights in this book, you will be able to think more broadly about developments in the space, and how they relate to one another and the larger public.

I recommend the book highly. Get it here at Amazon.com.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.