some clay shirky for your enjoyment

Updated February 22nd, 2009.

I was inspired by one of Gen’s posts and I thought it would be worth it to make a post that contains some links to some great Clay Shirky talks.

Clay Shirky on institutions vs. collaboration at TED in 2005. Even though this was filmed back in 2005 (before everyone knew what flickr was) he’s clearly talking about Mozilla. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is. As Mozilla is an organization that is an open source project, non-profit corporation and volunteer driven organization all the same time I think that we have come to know as instinct what Clay is talking about here.

Clay Shirky on Love, Internet Style. A short but fun video about Love as a building material. It’s great. Watch it.

Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008. Clay talks about the Cognitive Surplus that exists in our modern society. It contains this fantastic one-liner: “Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink – dissipating thinking that otherwise might have built up and caused society to overheat.” I’m not sure if it’s the first mention of what has become a famous fact about the amount of person-time required to build wikipedia, but it’s certainly put into great context and is worth watching for this reason alone.

That perspective made me think about how I spent my time at home and is one of the reasons I stopped watching TV and instead created whoisi. I guess you can thank Clay for it. Or blame him. Up to you.

Clay Shirky talking about his new book: Here comes everybody. He talks about the revolution of the Internet, the building of two-way groups and group action. It’s another great talk.

Clay Shirky talking about brands and keeping things human. Lots of good thoughts here on brand and identity and the right way to think about product design and how people interact with your company.

(Feb 22nd, 2009) Clay Shirky talking about low cost coordination and group action.  Talking about releasing data vs. releasing apps on your own for others to consume, changes in labor patterns, experimentation and a pile of other stuff.