For the second time this year I was at the Web 2.0 Expo and missed Clay Shirky’s presentation, but thank God for the Internet!
Here are Clay’s presentations. They are both worth watching but if you’re a publisher, and you only have time for one, invest the 16 minutes and 20 seconds needed to view the San Francisco talk.
In SF Clay discussed our natural human propensity to consume, produce, and share.
Publishing and media have traditionally only addressed consumption. Production was too complicated and expensive to enable mass participation. Sharing was severely limited by time and space.
Web 2.0 technologies have begun to address production and sharing by minimizing those constraints.
In New York, the topic was “Filter Failure.” Since the first day the number of books available exceeded the amount a person could read in their life, there has been an information explosion.
His point is the filters we have traditionally applied to regulate the information we choose to consume have failed. They can’t simply be scaled. They must be re-architected.
Special bonus feature: Shirky at Harvard.
Amen to that Mary Ann. “Going digital” is so five years ago!!
Hi Ann, thanks for sharing these. I noticed a similar theme from the socialdev folks at a recent conf. here in Phila. As a publishing person, the message I’ve been getting is that our notion of what a product is will either change radically, or it just won’t be relevant. Publishers need to be thinking way beyond just “going digital”.
Hi Benjamin!
No – being good won’t be good enough. If you have the 45 minutes to invest in the last link to the Harvard presentation (or the time to read Clay’s book) I think he makes some valuable observations about how things might go.
What I find interesting (another post perhaps) is that the common theme at the Web 2.0 Expo on Friday, the other two conferences I attended in the week prior to that, and new products I’ve been playing with is the idea of offering a platform and a process as opposed to a static product that only appeals to consumption.
It’s really quite fascinating to think about.
Maybe I’ll get to catch up with you in London in early December!
Ann
Thank you for the pointer, and sorry to have missed you in New York.
It is going to be an interesting time for publication – how do you market in a filtered world? Being good won’t actually be enough.