Clay Shirky's long-awaited book, "Here Comes Everybody"

Pretty much everyone who's ever heard Clay Shirky perfectly analyze an online trend has said to themselves, "Damn, I'm gonna go buy that guy's book!"  Until  now, no such book existed.
  Your wait is over.

At the Supernova 2007 conference, organizer Kevin Werbach asked Clay Shirky to provoke the audience.  In a brief nine minutes, Shirky boiled the success of online communities like Wikipedia, open source software, and candidates like Ron Paul down to five simple words: the Internet run on love. Love of an idea, love of a person, even the unlikely love of a piece of software.  As silly as it may sound, the concept of love of software has proved itself beyond doubt with the success of everything from the Firefox web browser to the Apache webserver, both products that have active, well-funded corporate opponents trying to dislodge them.

To understand how these communities form, you need to read Clay Shirky's new book, "Here Comes Everybody".

Alongside my partner's book, "Media Rules", I cannot recommend Shirky's new book strongly enough as a method of explaining why everything is different now in the way that you speak to the public, your customers, and your donors.

I've known Clay Shirky as an acquaintance for over ten years from my time living in New York, and he's one of the people whose writing about online communities and the power of digital communication has always been in short supply.  He's been somewhat stingy with his prose, not publishing three books a year like Seth Godin and his ghostwriters, but instead lavishing his gems on small articles here and there that I don't always notice.

I can happily say that the things that Shirky says are miles more insightful than anything I might write.  Stop reading my newsletter for today and go order his book, you won't be sorry.

Links:

• Clay Shirky, "The Net runs on love"
• "Here Comes Everybody" on Amazon.Com
• Register for the 2008 Supernova conference

Comments

[Anastasi]

Shab - I saw Clay's talk, and I get it, I get it! Actually by the end of the video I was thinking that an analogy to perl and linux is communities of 150 years ago when there was barn raising and shared help with each other's farms. I hear complaints sometimes that the industrial revolution, the post WWII growth and the technology development all but eliminated the sense of community support. Clay Shirky is showing a full circle. And really I see it all the time with engineers when they are working on something that they love. Thanks for encouraging me to watch the video -