Results tagged “clayshirky”

A couple Clay Shirky links for you today, one of which I just linked to, one of which I should have linked to last week, and all worth reading.

• In Defense of Ready, Fire Aim, a piece Clay wrote for the Harvard Business Review's list of breakthrough ideas for 2007. I really am a sucker for the Annual Ideas Lists that more and more publications are putting out, but a few of the items in this list seem particularly valuable. I linked to Clay's essay in yesterday's post about Yahoo Pipes, referring to his concept of open source being based on a principal of embracing failure:

In open systems, by contrast, the cost of failure is reduced, partly because less coordination is required among the various players and partly because each player is willing to accept some of the risks of failure directly. This means that worrying about whether a new idea will succeed is unnecessary; you simply try it out. The institutional barrier between thought and action—the need to convince someone that your idea is worth giving a whirl—doesn’t exist. The low cost of trying means that participants can fail like crazy as they continue to build on their successes.

In systems where anyone can try anything, the good has to be filtered from the bad after the fact. The cost of trying to prevent bloggers from saying stupid or silly things, for example, would be high, whereas the cost of allowing anyone to publish anything is low.

• A Clay Classic: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. I was actually at the Etech conference where Clay delivered this speech; Stewart and Ben had just debuted Flickr a short while earlier, and the application was (at that point) a weird Flash community application that could do some image stuff in addition to working as an IM gateway. Clay was talking about group behaviors as exhibited on LiveJournal and The WELL and MetaFilter, with his points being especially relevant after the recent Yahoo logins hubbub on Flickr.

This pattern has happened over and over and over again. Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.

This passage is especially resonant after the launch of Pipes:

We've gotten weblogs and wikis, and I think, even more importantly, we're getting platform stuff. We're getting RSS. We're getting shared Flash objects. We're getting ways to quickly build on top of some infrastructure we can take for granted, that lets us try new things very rapidly.

I was talking to Stewart Butterfield about the chat application they're trying here. [Speaking of Flickr.] I said "Hey, how's that going?" He said: "Well, we only had the idea for it two weeks ago. So this is the launch." When you can go from "Hey, I've got an idea" to "Let's launch this in front of a few hundred serious geeks and see how it works," that suggests that there's a platform there that is letting people do some really interesting things really quickly. It's not that you couldn't have built a similar application a couple of years ago, but the cost would have been much higher. And when you lower costs, interesting new kinds of things happen.

• A response to Henry Jenkins about Second Life. Clay has been taking a much-needed hard look at Second Life for some time, but I really am just linking to this because, as a student of social communication technology, Clay is uniquely qualified to create howlingly funny and yet still somehow polite and refined jabs at his debate partners. It's like the world's most dignified flame war. Witness:

You compare Second Life with the Renaissance and the Age of Reason. This is approximately insane, and your disclaimer that Second Life may not reach this rarefied plateau doesn’t do much to make it less insane. Using the Renaissance as a reference point links the two in the reader’s mind, even in the face of subsequent denial.

• And then finally, as Andre started experimenting with Arduino (film at 11!), who should pop up as the author of the source code for the Dimming LEDs tutorial but one Mr. Clay Shirky:

/*
* Code for cross-fading 3 LEDs, red, green and blue, or one tri-color LED, using PWM
* The program cross-fades slowly from red to green, green to blue, and blue to red
* The debugging code assumes Arduino 0004, as it uses the new Serial.begin()-style functions
* Clay Shirky <clay.shirky@nyu.edu> 
*/

// Output
int redPin   = 9;   // Red LED,   connected to digital pin 9
int greenPin = 10;  // Green LED, connected to digital pin 10
int bluePin  = 11;  // Blue LED,  connected to digital pin 11

// Program variables
int redVal   = 255; // Variables to store the values to send to the pins
int greenVal = 1;   // Initial values are Red full, Green and Blue off
int blueVal  = 1;

int i = 0;     // Loop counter    
int wait = 50; // 50ms (.05 second) delay; shorten for faster fades
int DEBUG = 0; // DEBUG counter; if set to 1, will write values back via serial

(Thanks to Cory Doctorow for the image.)

Mike at Techdirt (that's the popular tech news blog which actually deserves its popularity) mentions that Sony is now rewriting history, trying to take credit for the success and popularity of the DVD format.

I almost admire the chutzpah -- when people ask what I do for a living, I sometimes say that I look for a parade of bloggers, and then try to get in front of the parade and pretend I was leading it. I keed! I keed!

Meanwhile, Clay Shirky was teliing the truth, too. His point may have been too subtle, buried as it was in plain English at the top of his post:

Mark Cuban doesn’t understand television. He holds a belief, common to connoisseurs the world over, that quality trumps everything else. The current object of his faith in Qualität Über Alles is HDTV.

Hmm, quality (in terms of resolution) isn't always that important. See also "I like the crappy videos" and, somewhat more broadly, Jay's long-running skepticism about freestyling being "superior" to written rhymes.

I'd started reading The Long Tail (You've read the blog, now buy the book!) by surprising myself with how excited I was to read the book; After all, I'd read the original article in Wired when it came out, and have been following Chris' blog since it started. Was there really anything new left? How could I still be interested in a topic that long ago became part of the scenery for the Web 2.0 and VC crowd?

In short, it's just plain good writing. My enjoyment of the book probably centers around the extensive amount of hard data used to gird the book's examples, as well as the pleasingly broad set of cultural influences and examples used to illustrate the effects of the Long Tail. I've criticized the technology industry often for its unrepentant insularity; The breadth of culture in The Long Tail amply evidences the fact that the phenomenon extends well past the confines of the traditional definition of "technology" as an industry.

Above all else, using a wider range of source material than even the seminal Wired article, along with the phenomenal amount of primary research into sales data, makes the book something very impressive and unique. The Long Tail is profoundly intellectually honest.

I'm on the record as a genuine admirer of Malcolm Gladwell, but I have to say that one of the most accurate of the persistent criticisms of his work is that it often substitutes qualitative anecdotes for qualitative evidence. Given that this is, to some degree, what Blink is about, I don't find this a particularly egregious habit. But it is nevertheless a valid point to raise, and The Long Tail is a stronger book for the near-scientific rigor of much of its analysis. (Informing this discipline, no doubt, is Chris's stints at Nature and Science.)

But here's an example of how the breadth of the narrative really got my gears turning. If you read this site back when I used to do my Daily Links, you might remember the history of house music I linked to. It's an encyclopedic and comprehensive resource that, along with the dictionary of samples, was one of my favorite links ever. Interestingly, house music comes up near the end of The Long Tail.

Now, I believe that, without hip hop and remix culture (of which house music is firmly a part), there would be no blogging. "Rip, Mix, and Burn" isn't merely a tenet of digital culture, it's among the fundamental principles of post-disco black music, which has consistently shaped contemporary culture. And that's important to note because The Long Tail isn't a book about business, or the Internet, or even economics. At least, it isn't merely about economics; It's a book about a change in culture.

Of course, The Tipping Point reached its, well... you know, after somehow morphing from being a book about cultural trends into being perceived as a business guide. So I'm not surprised that The Long Tail is packaged that way; The same audience might well purchase it for the same reasons. Indeed, Reed Hastings' back-cover blurb suggests that The Long Tail will sit on your shelf between The Tipping Point and Freakonomics. Presumably these books are all also bad and good for you.

But I digress. House music, you say? Let's go to the tape:

What was notable about the rise of house was that it was both a reaction to the bankruptcy of blockbuster culture and a vibrant culture of its own. DJs and clubs created a music industry that was radically different from pop music. Clubbing is really about surfing the Long Tail of dance music, and this ecosystem has seen the evolution of new models of innovation around it.

Naturally, there's a lengthier explanation of why this is so in the book, along with an acknowledgement of Umair Haque for contributions to the analysis. But what struck me as noteworthy in this, admittedly minor, part of the book was the pleasantly catholic set of influences. There's a lot of commonalities between the various long tail-based media that media hackers and culture jammers tend to gravitate towards.

I think it's no coincidence that many early bloggers (and, especially, many people who made blog-related tools) have been influenced by hip hop's remix culture, or by the multifaceted beat-matching culture of DJing. It's not just the methods of distribution that are similar; It's the aesthetic of mix-and-match, more lately referred to as Rip, Mix, and Burn.

Have I mentioned that, in addition to being an early investor in Six Apart and a skilled blogger, Joi Ito used to be a house DJ in Chicago? It's true.