Tag : Clay Shirky

A few of us went to see Clay Shirky last night at the Royal Society of Arts. Some stuff we heard him talk about before, and some new stuff. I had sprinted from Embankment tube to make the 6pm start time, and I couldn’t face using Twitter — and so I tried the visual notetaking methods we enjoyed so much from SxSW (and some inspiration from awesomeist Len Kendall). My first attempts are a bit sh*t by comparison but I found it to be a much more thoughtful way of interacting with a talk than making snarky comments on Twitter. Not that this will stop me in the future…

I wrote a week or so ago about what I wanted to get from South by South West.

Now it’s all over, the hangover has faded but the jetlag is lingering longer than would be ideal, there are a few observations from my first sxsw that I would like to share.

The standout moment for me was Clay Shirky’s talk “Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data.” He captivated the audience for an hour, weaving together seemingly unrelated topics and themes (underwear, weather balloons, spherical trigonometry, Napster and the printing press, amongst others). He created a beautifully articulate argument for how abundance breaks more things than scarcity and raised the question around how much value we can get out of civic sharing.

Clay Shirky’s “rant about women” has been on my mind this weekend. Although the blog post is intended to advice women on how to become more successful, there’s something about it that made me feel very uneasy.

Clay’s rant about women begins with his former male student’s request for a recommendation. Clay asks the student to write down what he thinks Clay should say about him. The student returns with his draft peppered with praise, which Clay then tones down a notch “…so that it sounds like it’s coming from a person and not a PR department” before sending it off.

Right. If you ask me, this whole practice of writing your own letter of recommendation is dodgy, but that’s entirely another discussion.

That was the title of a talk at the SxSW Interactive Festival here in Austin, Texas, that a few of us went to yesterday afternoon.

We were all looking forward to it. We’ve got some form with newspapers in the UK, having designed sites and blogging platforms for UK broadsheets and tabloid newspapers as well as creating a hugely successful blog-based community site for the UK’s leading quality broadsheet The Daily Telegraph. We’re also long-time fans of NYTimes.com. The site delivered 20 million unique users in October 2008 (okay, it was the election but even so…) and was the fifth-ranked news site on the Internet in terms of total visitors. Consistently brilliant interactive and information graphics, and restless experimentation with new technologies and new models led us all to expect a great deal from this talk. Like many in the packed conference room, I was sadly disappointed.

Clay Shirky was at the LSE a couple of days ago speaking about his book Here Comes Everybody and how change happens when people come together. I’ve read the book and wasn’t surprised when he started off mentioning a couple of examples that he’s gone into detail in in the book. But then he used the Obama campaign (which gathered momentum after the book came out) and the May 12th 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China (which only occurred after the book released), to illustrate his central thesis that Group Action Just Got Easier. I think he had some sort of mnemonic to remember that last bit because he flicked his fingers up as he said that! 

Isaac’s been known to repeat the maxim ‘We demand perfection!’ when collaborating with our CSS Ninja, Sarah, on projects. 

Now, whilst visual perfection is something we strive for at MxM, we also strive for maximum engagement with our users. So I was interested to see this mini-interview with Clay Shirky who espouses a bit of rough to make sites that require interaction more friendly.