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 enlarge | Author: Clay Shirky
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Rating:  30 reviews
Sales Rank: 1950
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.4
ISBN: 1594201536
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4833
EAN: 9781594201530
ASIN: 1594201536
Publication Date: February 28, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
 Communication Effects Society September 12, 2008
Jared Hanson (Berkeley, CA)
Citing scientific theory and narrative accounts, Clay Shirky, in Here Comes Everybody, engagingly distills the impact of new communication tools on both life and business in modern society. As he notes: "when we change the way we communicate, we change society."
With the advent of the Internet, and tools like wikis, blogs, and Twitter, the way we communicate is clearly changing, and changing quickly. Our ability to share and cooperate with one another has dramatically increased, while the cost of doing so has dropped to zero.
Many of the examples highlighted in the book center around grassroots efforts, enabled and supported by these new tools. The effect of these movements on traditional societal organizations, including governments and corporations, is markedly different today than it has been in the past.
Here Comes Everybody is recommended reading if you want to understand the context of these changes, both now and in the future.
Everybody should read it September 6, 2008
Bojan Tunguz (Greencastle, IN USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Unless you've been living under a rock over the past few years, you would have noticed an explosion in ways that people interact, collaborate and exchange information online. We are probably undergoing the greatest technological shift since the advent of e-mail, and it'd probably hard to grasp all the ramifications that profound new change is heralding. Every year now, or sometimes every month, several new information terms and products enter our collective consciousness, terms like blog, Twitter, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, collaborative filtering, crowdsourcing, online social networking, and many, many others. It becomes harder and harder to keep track of what each one of them means, little less of how to use it or whether to use it at all. Many of them may just be passing fads, but it is hard to deny that put together they are part of some larger trend. However, it may not be so obvious what this trend is all about and one often can't see the forest from all the trees. From that point, Clay Shirky's book "Here Comes Everybody" can be best understood as a field guide that will take you on a guided tour of this new forest and explain its immediate implications for how we live our lives, work or play. It is a very well written book, written in an easy-going journalistic style. It brings forth many real-life stories and case analyses that help with explaining these recent trends. The book is informative without being bogged down in technical jargon. It is also a very gripping read, and once one starts reading it is hard to put down. I would recommend it to everyone who is interested in getting a big picture of where we are headed in terms of collaborative technologies.
 Good mind-stretching book August 24, 2008
Caroline@SixFigureStart.com
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a good mind-stretching book. Birthday Paradox, Prisoner's Dilemma, flash mobs, forming a Stay at Home Mom's group. There's a lot of diversity in the book but it all comes together under its aptly named subtitle: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Shirky gives interesting examples where technology has been used to bring people and ideas together. As an entrepreneur, it made me think twice about the ideal size of a business.
If you like this type of light business plus fun examples, you will also like Ori Brafman's Starfish and the Spider. If you can just read one, I pick Starfish.
 Outstanding Book August 23, 2008
C. Smith (Ann Arbor, MI)
This is a thought-provoking, intellectually-stimulating book. A must-read for executive leadership of any company.
An Excellent Discussion of Changing Group Dynamics July 21, 2008
Gregg Eldred (Avon Lake, OH USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I am not one to read books on technology, strange as it may seem. Especially ones that talk about current issues as they will become dated in a few months, or less. However, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, by Clay Shirky, works for me on several levels. You could read this book a year from now and still gain valuable insight into the blogging, Twitter, and social media arenas.
Contents:
Chapter 1: It Takes a Village to Find a Phone
Chapter 2: Sharing Anchors Community
Chapter 3: Everyone is a Media Outlet
Chapter 4: Publish, Then Filter
Chapter 5: Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production
Chapter 6: Collective Action and Institutional Challenges
Chapter 7: Faster and Faster
Chapter 8: Solving Social Dilemmas
Chapter 9: Fitting Our Tools to a Small World
Chapter 10: Failure for Free
Chapter 11: Promise, Tool, Bargain
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
The premise of the book is laid out in Chapter 1, where Shirky relates a 2006 story of a stolen Sidekick, a smartphone lost in a New York City cab. The owner offered a reward for its return, sent to the phone itself, but it was not answered. From there, a friend of the owner started a blog, relating his adventures in recovering the phone. From the blog, and the attention that it received, the owner was able to recover the phone. It was done through e-mails, pressure on the New York City police, and the networking between people that cared enough to create an issue of recovering the phone. Blogs, wikis, social networking sites, IRC, and Twitter are enabling people to create communities and organizations without formally meeting or requiring a bricks-and-mortar locations. Examples Shirky uses includes political activists in Belarus and Leipzig, East Germany, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), and activists in Egypt. These examples, and others, show that Shirky may be right in his assessment that what we are seeing now in "Web 2.0" is as important as the invention of moveable type (the printing press) in 1439. It may be years before you will be able to confirm this, but you can tell that there is a shift happening, using the internet, that was previously impossible to surmount (geography, primarily, but also the connections that we all enjoy due to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and others).
Here Comes Everybody is a very enjoyable book. For those people that need an introduction to the power of blogs, wikis, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other technologies, this book will serve you very well. While not an exhaustive expose on any of the technologies, Shirky explains the rise of them (including a little background on the founders) and how we have adapted them to our specific use. E-mail and text messaging allowed East Germans to help bring down the government in 1989. Twitter, seen as a micro-blogging platform, has been used by democracy advocates in Egypt to notify others of police actions and also to garner support for those jailed during protests. Wikis, especially, are given a high position in the book, as the standard of global collaborative thinking. Wikipedia's origins are shown, as well as why it works as well as it does. But those aren't the only items of interest. One of the more fascinating discussions concerns "fame" and participation. There is a marked imbalance in all of the tools he describes. Some people post more pictures to Flickr, write more blog posts, or use Twitter more extensively than others in the population. This leads to a measure of "fame" in the communities. This is called the "power-law distribution" and actually allows these technologies to flourish. It also allows the major contributors to enjoy a measure of "fame." Reading this, I finally understood why there are so many people that do not contribute to wikis, blogs, or on-line forums. But while those people may not contribute the majority of the work, they do contribute, and they care about the success of the wiki, blog, or forum (for example) as much as those that contribute the majority.
There are lessons within this book for everyone that blogs, contributes to wikis, or tweets. Further, if you are working for a large organization, there is a clear understanding of how these technologies can leverage internal and external experts. It may help your organization to find better ideas from your employees, from sources that you never considered. One of the highlights for me was reading "For any given piece of software, the question 'Do the people who like it take care of each other?' turns out to be a better prediction of success than 'What's the business model?'" As I look at the particular area of technology that I inhabit, I would have to answer with a resounding "Yes" to that question. Which also explains why I think that it is doing so well and will continue to do well.
Highly recommended.
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