I almost destroyed Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody by dog-earing the bits I wanted to try and remember. As many of those as I could two finger type are recorded below:

p39

There is obviously some value to both photographers and viewers in having photos available, but in many cases that value never exceeded the threshold of cost created by the institutional dilemma. Flickr escaped those problems, not by increasing its managerial oversight over photographers but by abandoning any hope of such oversight in the first place, instead putting in place tools for the self-synchronization of otherwise latent groups

p45

Our basic human desires and talents for group effort are stymied by the complexities of group action at every turn. Coordination, organisation, even communication in groups is hard and gets harder as the group grows. That difficulty means that whatever methods help coordinate group action will spread, no matter how inefficient they are, so long as they are better than nothing.

p47

The cost of all kinds of group activity - sharing, cooperation, and collective action - have fallen so far so fast that activities previously hidden beneath that (Coasean) floor are now coming to light. We didn’t notice how many things were under the floor because , prior to the current era, the alternative to institutional action was usually no action. Social tools provide a third alternative: action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive.

p49

You can think of group undertaking as a kind of ladder of activities, activities that are improved by social tools. The rungs on the ladder, in order of difficulty, are sharing, cooperation, and collective action.

p51

All group structures create dilemmas but these dilemmas are hardest when it comes to collective action, because the cohesion of the group becomes critical to its success. Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user’s identity to the identity of the group

p59

Digital means of distributing words and images have robbed newspapers of the coherence they formally had, revealing the physical object of the newspaper as a merely provisional solution; now every article is it’s own section. The permanently important question is how society will be informed of the news of the day. … What holds a newspaper together is primarily the cost of paper, ink and distribution; a newspaper is whatever group of printed items a publisher can bundle together and deliver profitably. The corollary is also true: whatever doesn’t go i9nto a newspaper is whatever is too expensive to print and deliver. … The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurisation of publishing and a switch from “Why publish this?” to “Why not?”.

p65

The change isn’t a shift from one kind of news institution to another, but rather in the definition of news: from news as an institutional prerogative to news as part of a communications ecosystem, occupied by a mix of formal organizations, informal collectives, and individuals

p79

…Globally free publishing is making public speech and action more valuable, even as its absolute abundance diminishes the specialness of professional publishing … if everyone can do something, it is no longer rare enough to pay for, even if it is vital.

p91

On the web interactivity has no technological limits, but it does still have strong cognitive limits: no matter who you are, you can only read so many weblogs, can trade e-mail with only so many people and so on.

p98

We have lost the clean distinctions between communications media and broadcast media. As social media like Myspace now scale effortlessly between a community of a few and an audience of a fe million, the old habit of treating communications tools like the phone differently from broadcast tools like television no longer make sense. The two patterns shade into each other, and now small group communications and large broadcast outlets all exist as part of a single interconnected ecosystem.

p103

The twentieth century, with the spread of radio and television, was the broadcast century. The normal pattern for media was that they were created by a small group of professionals and then delivered to a large group of consumers. But media, in the word’s literal sense as the middle layer between people, have always been a three part affair. People like to consume media, of course, but they also like to produce it and they like to share it. Because we now have media that support both making and shareing, as well as consuming, those capabilities are reappearing, after a century mainly given over to consumption. We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. now though, we can do big things for love.

p106

We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race. More people can communicate more things to more people than has ever been possible in the past, and the size and speed of this increase, from under one million participants to over one billion in a generation, makes the change unprecedented, even considered against the background of previous revolutions in communication tools.

p107

We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the media business, but their suffering isn’t unique, it’s prophetic. All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the management of information for two audiences - employees and the world.

p111

Cunningham (Ward, inventor of the Wiki) made a different, and radical, assumption: groups of people who want to collaborate also tend to trust one another. If this were true, then a small group could work together on a shared writing effort without needing formal management or process.

p122

Wikipedia continues to grow, and articles continue to improve. The process is more like creating a coral reef, the sum of millions of individual actions, than creating a car. And the key to creating those individual actions is to hand as much freedom as possible to the average user.

p128

To understand the creation of something like a Wikipedia article you can’t look for a representative contributor, because none exists. Instead you have to change your focus, to concentrate not on the individual user but on the behavior of the collective.

p139

The people most enamored of describing Wikipedia as the product of a free-form hive mind don’t understand how Wikipedia actually works. It is the product not of collectivism but of unending augmentation. The articles grow not from harmonious thought but from constant scrutiny and emendation.

p149

Now the readership for a particular (newspaper) story can be larger than the papers general audience..”

p225

Perhaps the most significant effect of our new tools, though, lies in the increased leverage they give the most connected people. The tightness of a large social network comes less from increasing the number of connections that the average member of the network can support than from increasing the number of connections that the most connected people can support

p231

Quote from Ronald Burt’s “The Social Origins of good ideas”: “People whose networks span structural holes have early access to diverse, often contradictory, information and interpretations which gives them a good competitive advantage in delivering good ideas. People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. this is not creatively born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be valuable insight in another.”

p235

Though it seems funny for a service business, Meetup actually does best not by trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things for one another. … Meetup is a giant information processing tool, a kind of market where groups are products and the market expresses it’s judgment not in cash but in expenditure of energy. failure is free, high quality research, offering direct evidence of what works and what doesn’t. … By dispensing with the right to direct what user’s try to create, Meetup sheds the cost and distorting effects of managing each individual effort. Trial and error, in a system like Meetup, has both a lower cost and a higher value than in traditional institutions, where failure often comes with someone’s name attached. From a conventional business perspective, Meetup has no quality control, but from another perspective Meetup is all quality control. All that’s required to take advantage of this sort of market are passionate users and an appetite for repeated public failure.

p245

The overall effect of failure is it’s likelihood times it’s cost. Most organizations attempt to reduce the effect of failure by reducing it’s likelihood. … Open source doesn’t reduce the likelihood of failure it reduces the cost of failure; essentially getting failure for free. This reversal, where the cost of deciding what to try is higher than the cost of actually trying them, is true of open systems generally. As with mass amateurization of media, open source relies on the “publish-then-filter pattern.

p247

Cheap failure, valuable as it is on its own, is also a key part of a more complex advantage: the exploration of multiple possibilities (fitness landscape).

p261

Every story in this book relies on a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the user. The promise is the basic “why” for anyone to join or contribute to the group. the tool helps with the “how” - how will the difficulties of coordination be overcome, or at least be held to manageable levels? And the bargain sets the rules of the road: if you are interested in the promise and adopter the tools, what can you expect, and what will be expected of you?

p268

By understanding the two basic constraints of group action - the number of people involved and duration of interaction - any given tool, new or familiar, can be analyzed for goodness of fit.

p279

Wikipedia has over a dozen separate collections of pages, for functions like the history of specific articles and discussions of them, the administrative functions of Wikipedia itself and so on. Only one of these collections is for the actual articles; the rest are all about running the site in one way or another. Wikipedia, which looks like a reference work to the average viewer, is in fact a bureaucracy mainly given over to arguing. The articles are the residue of the argument, being the last thing anyone declined to disagree about. Most of the collections of pages other than the articles, however are accessed by only the most committed users.

p284

EBay’s solution was to create a reputation system, allowing the buyer and seller in any transaction to publicly report their satisfaction with each other. The system was designed to cast the shadow of the future over both parties, giving each an incentive to maintain or improve their standing on the site. … Omidyar was right, with a caveat: people are basically good, when they are in circumstances that reward goodness while restraining impulses to defect. The rewards and restraints can be quite simple and small, but in big groups with relatively anonymous actors, they need to be there or behavior will decay over time.

p303

The mistakes that novices make come from a lack of experience. They overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere … But in times of revolution, the experienced among us make the opposite mistake. When a real once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we are at risk of regarding it as a fad.

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