Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky keynote PICNIC08

OK, a little late to get this post up which I’ll blame on the quality of the PICNIC drinks reception held by LBi Lost Boys at the end of the day. A chance to see some fantastic work (live in a week or I’d like to it now…) for Mitsubishi as well as to lay into more of the local cheese and beer.

But that said, Dom’s already covered Clay Shirky quite comprehensively here…

…and there are also some good interviews up on YouTube courtesy of PICNIC TV.

Interesting note on both those interviews - chatting to PICNIC TV’s interviewer (urging her not to post the interview she did with me on day #1) at the Lost Boys drinks last night, she noted that Clay used the same “this wind might disturb my hair” line before he started talking with her, and then before starting the next interview, and before the next…

So only a quick personal note on Clay’s keynote. Wiped the floor with Charlie Leadbeater’s performance, and a particularly trenchant introduction gave some hint as to why.

Shirky had noted, apparently, during day 1 that everyone was still ‘discussing the basics’ and this audience ought to be above this. So he’d rewritten his originally planned talk. As a result, he presented 4 (and a half) stories relating to the new design challenges that need to be met.

As I say, Dom covers this all in detail, but the points that really stood out were:

- The need for all digital creators to be digital cops

- The manner in which true communities of practice don’t ‘gather and share’, rather they ’share then gather’. Clay’s example of HDR photography on Flickr is particularly convincing here.

- I’ll avoid a huge digression on Buffy here, (suffice to say that I’m Joss Whedon’s biggest fan, and can’t wait for Dollhouse) but the example of early fan community Bronze Beta (of which I have personal fond memories) predictably appealed.

In a nutshell, when Warner Brothers was selling the show to UPN, they offered them the ongoing bulletin board they ran as part of the deal, only for UPN to say ‘we’re in the TV business, not the community bsusiness and it looked like the board would be shut down. But then the fans (as much, importantly, out of a love grown and developed between them all as much as for a love for SMG’s vampire slaying skillz), raised the money to give it their own revamp. Key to this revamp? Removal of all the ‘features’ - the voting, the rating, the recommendation… All they wanted was the core functionality…

- This leads onto the observation that social software is starting to launch with fewer and fewer features. A comparison (fish in a barrell though, let’s face it) is made between CMS systems like Interwoven back in the day and the original blogging software out of Pyra labs: guess which one was stripped down and purely functional?

- People obsess about features, but something like the Bronzebeta.com runs not on Perl but in the minds of its users. Comes down to your lens ultimately - if you consider the PC to be a box, then the more toys you can stuff in it the better. If you see it as a door, however, you need to simplify things: “No one wants a door with 37 handles.”

- To be honest, the story about the Galileo page on Wikipedia passes me by a little, but it’s notable for the very amusing description of the church’s issues with Galileo (as still borne out on Wikipedia) as a “500 year old flame war.”

- The story of HSBC trying to shaft their student audience (read about it here) only to be shafted in return by a Facebook based campaign (here) made the very good point that when HSBC gave in, they didn’t give in because their customers were upset, but because their customers were both upset and co-ordinated. The traditional information advantage and co-ordination advantage that an organisation has over it’s customers gets reversed once communities of interest come together.

A final thought? Publishing is for acting.

Nice.