Much of the user content on the web is posted publicly, but really meant for a small select group. Because we are heretofore unused to seeing public content that isn't addressed towards us (as in advertising or traditional media), much of this looks like drivel to us.
It is a fallacy to think that conversations can scale to the level of broadcast media. Once a person or entity becomes famous, they by definition have more inbound views than they can possibly respond personally to. This is a social, and not just a technological, limitation.
This is why corporate communication sounds so bland and impersonal. True mass-personalization is severely limited by scale. One way to address this is to flip the problem around: Impose a strong culture and have your audience self-select and self-tune to it.
The limiting effect of scale on interaction means that everyone cannot interact with everyone else. The limits of human cognition will mean that fame happens.
Although equipped with smaller guns and lighter armor than their French counterparts, the German Panzer tanks successfully carried out the blitzkrieg with the help of radios. Their new strategy, enabled with radios, made the Panzers a coordinated, nimble force vs. the French Char B's which were used as soldier support platforms.
YM (Young Miss) magazine shut down their online forum because Pro-Anorexic (Pro-Ana) girls were using it to swap tips, and they didn't know how to handle the controversy.
"Bonding capital" is the deepening of connections within a group. "Bridging capital" is the broadening of connections between groups. A focus on only the former and not the latter can lead to exclusivity or even an echo chamber effect, as happened in the 2004 Howard Dean presidential campaign.
how does shirky distinguuish between an organisation and an ecosystem with reguard to open source movement?
Meetup is successful at "discovering" successful groups like Stay-At-Home-Moms because it can tolerate a high number of failed groups, and allow resources to flow to the successful ones. The cost of trying is essentially zero. Its success is due to the high rate of trying.
Linus Torvalds started Linux with a very casual post. The openness and lack of pretense in this post was essential in getting people involved quickly. The later adoption of the GPL also ensured that contributions would not be wasted even in the event of Linus's departure from the project.
Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in 1983 and created GNU, but open source didn't really take off until the advent of the Internet a decade later.
The open source projects on SourceForge follow a power law distribution, with the top few garnering millions of downloads, and those below the 75th percentile with zero downloads.
Open source threatens commercial software because it is out-failing them. Companies have an incentive to pick "safe" projects to pursue because the cost of failure outweighs the cost of passing on a success. However, the open source ecosystem does not have this asymmetry and can try riskier things. Moreover, unlike a company, the ecosystem does not have to spend resources evaluating the likelihood of projects before pursuing them.
I'm not sure if open source projects has been more "innovative" than commercial projects. Flagship projects such as Linux and Open Office are essentially clones of other projects (GNU and Office), but which happen to be free. What is true though is that open source allows the creation of projects (e.g. Bit-torrent client Azureus, currently #1 on SourceForce) that would not be viable as a commercial enterprise (due to legal costs or lack of a revenue stream).
In business, the investment cost of producing anything creates a bias to "stick with it" even if substandard, if only to avoid admitting to a mistake. This further raises the cost of business.
Businesses cannot afford to hire people with only one good idea or contribution ever, because of high transaction costs. However, open source projects thrive on aggregating the efforts of this very sort of contributor. "Why forgo the last 20%?".
Groklaw was created by Pamela Jones, a paralegal, to aggregate information on the SCO vs. IBM (Linux) case. This allowed the community to find obscure material that was instrumental in defeating the lawsuit.
Bill Joy: "No matter who you are, most of the smart people work for someone else."
Genome Science Centre (GSC) was first to sequence the SARS virus in 2002 by collaborating openly using Genbank, a public database of genetic sequences.
When the author's old firm, Site Specific, contracted with AT&T, they had a hard time justifying their use of Perl (supported by a "community") vs. C++ (which was invested and supported by AT&T). Ironically, the community around Perl has subsequently outlasted AT&T the company.
"Do people who like it take care of each other?" turns out to be a better predictor of success than "What's the business model?".