by Clay Shirky
Page 224: bonding and bridging social capital Robert D. Putnam followed up his 2000 book Bowling Alone with Better Together: Restoring the American Community, which he cowrote with Lewis Feldstein and Donald J. Cohen, Simon & Schuster (2003). Better Together extends the ideas of bridging and bonding capital in the debate about the decline of social capital in the U.S. context and what to do about it.
Page 224: social networks and divisions in American class structure These observations first appeared in danah boyd’s essay “Viewing American Class Divisions through Facebook and MySpace” (www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html). Though boyd is careful to note that she is offering an anecdote of the class divisions manifesting themselves in MySpace and Facebook, rather than a quantitative analysis, her essay has ignited an enormous (and enormously important) discussion of the ways in which our new social tools are bent to the foibles of the users occupying them.
Pages 225-228: #joiito and #winprog Internet Relay Chat (ÌRC) is an unusual social tool in that there is no good general-purpose access to IRC channels through the Web (unlike usenet or mailing lists). IRC requires special software to be downloaded and run on your PC; however, many long-lived IRC groups also maintain webpages. Information about #joiito can be found at joi.ito.com (where else?); information about the #winprog group is at winprog.org.
Page 229: “The Social Origins of Good Ideas,” Ronald S.Burt, American Journal of Sociology (2004) and at web.mit.edu/sorensen/www/SOGI.pdf.
CHAPTER 10: FAILURE FOR FREE
Page 233: Failure for Free This argument first appeared in Harvard Business Review (February 2007) under the title “In Defense of ‘Ready. Fire. Aim.’”
Page 240: Open source software There is an enormous amount of material trying to explain open source software, most of it mediocre. The most rigorous overview on the topic is Steven Weber’s The Success of open source, Harvard University Press (2004), which provides a detailed description of the development of Linux, as well as an excellent theoretical analysis of what makes open source projects work.
Page 242: “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” As noted for chapter 1, Eric Raymond’s seminal 1998 essay on open source software, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” is at catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/. Raymond’s writings on software and other topics is at www.catb.org/~esr/writings.
Page 244: Sourceforge Sourceforge, at sourceforge.net, is the largest repository of open source projects; the list of projects sorted by “activity” (a composite metric of various different gauges of programmer and user engagement) is at sourceforge.net/top/mostactive.php.
Page 247: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Portfolio (2006).
Page 250: Nick McGrath McGrath’s comments can be found in Robert Jaques’s 2005 VNUnet article, “Linux security is a ‘myth,’ claims Microsoft,” at www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2126615/linux-security-myth-claims-microsoft. .
Page 253: Groklaw Groklaw’s mission statement is at www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20040923045054130; in it, she notes that “we are applying open-source principles to research to the extent that they apply. Our community includes those with a technical background and others with legal and paralegal training, as well as journalists, educators, and many end users who care enough about their operating system of choice to work to defend it.” SCO, the company that has so far unsuccessfully tried to sue IBM, became so frustrated with the work Groklaw was doing that they accused Pamela Jones, the founder, of being funded by IBM. Jones categorically denied this charge, and called out the idea of nonfinancial motivation in her response to SCO: “Groklaw is a labor of love. SCO seems to find it hard to believe that I would do this as a volunteer. But I do. They don’t understand wanting to pool knowledge period, being a bit old-fashioned in their thinking.” (“Letter to the Editor: No IBM-Groklaw Connection,” news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-5170485.html. ).
Page 254: SARS Dr. Yang Huanming’s lament about the obstacles to their work can be found in translation at the YaleGlobal journal, in “Chinese Scientists Say SARS Efforts Stymied by Organizational Obstacles” (yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=1745. ). Martin Enserink has a broader review of the Chinese performance in “SARS in China: China’s Missed Chance” Science 301 (5631), July 18, 2003, and at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/301/5631/294).
CHAPTER 11: PROMISE, TOOL, BARGAIN
Page 267: The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, James Surowiecki (Doubleday, 2004)
Page 276: equality matching The idea of equality matching (and the other listed forms of social participation) come from Alan Page Fiske’s Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, Market Pricing, Free Press (1991). Fiske also provides a brief account of these ideas in “Human Sociality” at (www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fiske/relmodov.htm).
Page 281: “Sluggy Freelance” Jessica Hammer was a graduate student in 2002 at the Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU, when she did this research.
Page 281: Usenet Usenet was one of three great global experiments in social tools prior to the invention of the Web. (The other two were e-mail discussion lists and online communities such as the WELL and ECHO.) At the height of its popularity, in 1994, usenet was at the core of most users’ experience of the internet. (Though still in operation, its subsequent decline was a result both of a shift to the Web and because it had no built-in defenses against the tragedy of the commons that is spam.) Usenet is organized into “newsgroups” (in quotes because most are not devoted to anything that could be called news), loosely categorized by topic (comp. lang.perl, for example, is about the Perl computer language.). The easiest way to get to these newsgroups is through groups.google.com, which provides a Web-based interface to the groups.
Page 282: civic bicycle programs Interestingly, many accounts of the failure of the original White Bicycle program include an unsubstantiated accusation that the bicycles were confiscated or thrown in the canals by the police. These stories create the sense that uncontrolled bike-sharing would have succeeded but for this intervention by the authorities; such stories, however, are hard to make sense of in light of the collapse of uncontrolled programs in subsequent eras. You can get some sense of the universality of the problem of theft by looking at antitheft instructions at contemporary community bike Web sites like ibike (www.ibike.org/encouragement/freebike-issues.htm#TRACKING. ).
Pages 287-288: sending nuts and flowers The campaign to save the TV show Jericho, including sending CBS nuts, was coordinated at jericholives.com. The protest was an echo of General Anthony McAuliffe’s one-word reply—“Nuts!”—to a German request that U.S. forces surrender during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. (Amusingly, NutsOnline also hosted a page on the campaign, at www.nutsonline. com/jericho.) The antiwar flower protest in Michigan was a way of doing “something positive to deliver our message,” as one protester put it (“Flowers Used to Protest War,” www.statenews.com/index.php/article/2006/04/flowers_used_to_protest). Similarly, the flowers sent to the U.S. State Department were often referred to as Ghandigiri, which is to say “in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi” (“Say It with Flowers: Gandhigiri for US Green Cards,” in.news.yahoo.com/070710/48/6hwnn.html ). In all these cases, the delivery of actual objects did triple duty: the physical delivery increased attention, the nature of the object underlined the message (opposition with the nuts, nonviolence with the flowers), and the cost of sending the object communicated real commitment on the part of the sender.
Page 290: Digg Revolt Kevin Rose made his remarks on the official Digg weblog in “Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0,” at blog.digg. com/?p=74.
EPILOGUE
Page 304: lump of labor fallacy The lump of labor fallacy is well described (and eviscerated) by Paul Krugman in “The Accidental Theorist”
(web.mit.edu/krugman/www/hotdog.html ).
Page 309: Sicko audience Josh Tyler wrote about this in “Sicko Spurs Audiences into Action” (www.cinemablend.com/new/Sicko-Spurs-Audiences-Into-Action-5639.html. ).
INDEX
Abd El Fattah, Alaa
Adamic, Lada
airline passengers
Akinola, Archbishop Peter
America Online
American Airlines
Anderson, Chris
Anderson, Philip
AT&T
audience, the former
audiences
average (mean)
Axelrod, Robert
bargains, role in groups
Barlow, John Perry
Belarus
bell curve distributions
Benkler, Yochai
Berners-Lee, Sir Tim
Birthday Paradox
blitzkrieg
Blogger (product)
bloggers. See weblogs
Boing Boing
Bomis company
bonding capital
Boston Globe
bowling
boyd, danah
Bradner, Scott
bridging capital
broadcast media
Brooks, Fred
Brown, John Seely
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV show)
bulletin boards, online. See also webpages
Burroughs, William S.
Burt, Ronald
camera phones
Carvin, Andy
Catholic Church
cell phones. See mobile phones
Chandler, Alfred
channels, IRC
Chirapongse, Alisara
Chui, Howard
Clohessy, David
Coase, Ronald
collaborative production
collective action
Catholic priest scandal as example
vs. collaborative production
flash mobs as
vs. individual action
overview
rapid and simple group formation
removing obstacles
sharing information
Tragedy of the Commons example
as type of group action
communications media
communications tools. See also social tools
vs. broadcast tools
many-to-many
modern
negative effects
now vs. then
one-to-many
one-to-one
as substitute for travel
technological vs. social change
communities
consumers, use of social tools
conversation
Cool, Jeannie
cooperation, as type of group action
corporations. See Microsoft; organizations
cost factor. See also transaction costs
Craigslist
Crowley, Dennis
Cunningham, Ward
cyberspace
Dasburg, John
Dean, Howard
del.icio.us service
Digg
discussion groups. See also mailing lists; weblogs
distributions, power law vs. bell curve. See also power law distributions
Doctorow, Cory
Dodgeball
Duguid, Paul
Dyson, Esther
e-mail. See also mailing lists
as asynchronous
flash mobs and
as form of publishing
as many-to-many communication pattern
scale issue
sharing news stories
as social tool
stolen Sidekick and
as tool for lobbying Congress
transaction costs
eBay
Edyvean, Bishop Walter J.
Egyptian activists
80/20 rule
elections, and blogging
Encarta
Enron
Episcopalian Church
Estrada, Joseph
Facebook
Fake, Caterina
Falun Gong
fame
FAQs
filtering
Fiske, Alan Page
fitness landscape
flash mobs
Flickr
acquired by Yahoo
Belarus flash mob pictures
Black and White Maniacs
high dynamic range (HDR) photos
how it works
participation imbalance
power law distribution and
promise concept
role in breaking news stories
role in Coney Island Mermaid Parade
as sharing platform
significance
user-generated content and
Flyers Rights group. See also airline passengers
former audience
Free Software Foundation (FSF)
freedom
friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) networking
Friends of O’Reilly (FOO) Camp
Gabriel, Richard
Genbank
Genome Sciences Centre (GSC)
Geoghan, Father John
Gibson, William
Gillmor, Dan
Gladwell, Malcolm
GNU Public License (GPL)
Goldcorp mining
good ideas
Google
Groklaw
group action
collapse of institutional barriers to
collective action as
cooperation as
coordinating
sharing as
stolen Sidekick and
groups
advantage of “ridiculously easy group-forming,”
complexity
ease of formation
large vs. small
latent
net value argument
paradox
political value
role of bargain
role of promise
role of social tool
Gutenberg, Johannes
Guttman, Evan
Hackman, Richard
Hammer, Jessica
Hanni, Kate
Hardin, Garrett
Heiferman, Scott
heralding
Hewlett-Packard
hierarchical organizations
high dynamic range (HDR) photos
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
homeostasis
homophily
Honecker, Erich
Howard Forums
Howe, Jeff
HSBC bank
Huanming, Yang
Huberman, Bernardo A.
IBM
Indian Ocean tsunami
information cascades
instant messaging
Instapundit.com
institutional dilemma
institutions. See organizations
IRC (internet relay chat)
Ise Shrine, Japan
iStockphoto
Ito, Joi
Jaeggli, Erika
Jardin, Xeni
Jetblue
jibot
Jones, Pamela
journalistic privilege. See also news business
Joy, Bill
Keen, Andrew
Kinsley, Michael
Krucoff, Andy
latent groups
Law, Cardinal Bernard F.
Leipzig, East Germany
Lindbergh, Charles
Linux. See also open source software
literacy
LiveJournal
Belarus flash mob
I Love My Boyfriend group
Meetup group
promise concept
user-generated content and
as weblog tool
Lohmann, Susanne
London Transport bombings
Los Angeles Times
Lott, Trent
Lukashenko, Alexander
Luther, Martin
>
Mackinnon, Rebecca
Madrid train bombing
Mahmoud, Abdel Monem
mailing lists. See also discussion groups; e-mail
Mann, Merlin
Manutius, Aldus
many-to-many communications tools
mass amateurization
McCallum, David
McGrath, Nick
mean (average)
media industry. See also news business
broadcast media vs. communications media
mass amateurization and
revolutionary changes
Meetup
convening power
Dean campaign and
as example of Small World network
failure and
fitness landscape and
how groups form
launching
most active groups
social capital and
Stay at Home Moms (SAHM)
Mermaid Parade, Coney Island
Meyer, Chris
Microsoft
Miller, Judith
Misilim, Marion
mobile phones
as digital cameras
Dodgeball service
Howard Forums and
as revolutionary change
shift away from advance planning
as social tools
stolen Sidekick story
Twitter service
Moore, Michael
movable type
MoveOn.org
Muller, James
Murad, Abdel Fatah
MySpace
California school boycott
as example of Small World network
vs. Facebook
participation imbalance
promise concept
significance
stolen Sidekick and
user-generated content and
Nash equilibrium