Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Here's a great talk by the always compelling Clay Shirky.

One of the key concepts I took away from it was this quote from Clay:

Every URL is a latent community. Which is to say: in addition to the value of having an individual being exposed to a resource that's available on the internet, there's additional value to be gotten by introducing those users to one another.

Quote on "aboutness" and tagging

"Things aren't about what they're about. "Aboutness" is also contextual and ambiguous. For example, if my blog entry on the JFK assassination links to the 1962 Sears catalog from which Oswald bought his rifle, the author of that catalog will not have labeled it as being about the JFK shooting. And if a scientist publishes a paper about a new polymer, she may in passing reject some closely related compound because it's too sticky -- but that may be exactly what you're looking for. So, for you the article is about what the author tosses away in a footnote. Not to mention that in much of the best writing, about-ness is an emergent property. So, while the author's intentions are an important clue, aboutness is ambiguous. Systems that too easily categorize and classify based upon a univocal idea of aboutness do violence to their topic."
-- David Weinberger at www.hyperorg.com/misc/unspokengroups.html

Quote about publishing

"As the internet and all its variant technologies become a bigger and bigger part of our lives, the comoditization of content will only increase. A blogger holding forth on the merits of his favorite brew has access to the same worldwide audience as a Pulitzer Prize-winning author ... As a publisher, our strength and our future lie in partnering with the best scholars ... making their work more accessible, meaningful, and useful ... We're no longer in the business of amassing content--quantity isn't the issues ... We will all be moving away from a just-in-case content development approach (it's all in there) to just-in-time, 100 percent relevant reference delivery."

--Ron Boehm, President & CEO, ABC-CLIO

As quoted by Cheryl LaGuardia in her e-Views and Reviews column (p. 26) in the May 15, 2005, issue of Library Journal (see www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA601030.html).

Tightly-coupled systems

Loosely-coupled systems is a concept in which I am interested. I recently read a good counter example of a tightly-coupled system that I want to remember for illustrative means. The scheduling of airline flights. Some quotes:

"In a less efficient era, the waste of simple back-and-forth scheduling might have meant an extra aircraft or two just waiting idly, costing the airline money, but luckily available to fill in for the out-of-service DC-10. Now, with scheduling approachign perfection, less than 2 percent of American's fleet lies fallow at any given moment. So the nearest replacement plane happens to be in Dallas. A crew must fly it to Chicago."

"The paradox of efficiency means taht as the web tightens it grows more vulnerable to small disturbances -- disruptions and delays that can cascade through the system for days."

"Networks like this are said to be tightly coupled. A complex construction project with a timeline scheduled with perfect efficiency, all the slack squeezed out of it, may be tightly coupled and a candidate for serious disruption."

"Charles Perrow, in his study Normal accidents, extended the concept to complex systems where the coupling connects not physical parts but abstract services, people, and organizations. 'Looselyl coupled systems, whether for good or ill, can incorporate shocks and failures and pressures for change without destabilization,' he notes. 'Tightly coupled systems will respond more quickly to these perturbations, but the response may be disastrous.'

Gleick, James. Faster: the acceleration of just about everything. Pantheon Books, New York, 1999, pp. 219, 223, 224.

Quote about technology to socialize

"Net Geners use technology extensively to network and socialize. In their personal lives, buddy lists, virtual communities, and social networks such as Flickr or Orkut are heavily used. 'When we poll users about what they actually do with their computers, some form of social interaction always tops the list -- conversation, collaboration, playing games, and so on. The practice of software design is shot through with computers-as-box assumptions, while our actual behavior is closer to computer-as-door, treating the device as an entrance to a social space.'"

Quote from page 2.12 of Chapter 2 (titled Is it age of IT: first steps toward understanding the Net Generation) of Educating the Net Generation by Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger (editors), 2005 EDUCAUSE (ISBN: 0-9672853-2-1).

Hack quote

Walking through our tech processing office today, I noticed the book Hacking RSS and Atom (ISBN 0764597582). I put a note on it to have it routed to me after being cataloged. While perusing it, I noticed a great quote on the back:

This book is not about the minutia of RSS and Atom programming. It's about doing cool stuff with syndication feeds -- making the technology give you exactly what you want the way you want. [snip] Tantalizing loose ends beg you to create more hacks the author hasn't thought up yet. Because if you can't have fun with the technology, what's the point?

 

There's a great lesson there.