Reviewing the Groundswell

One danger of reviewing a book is the reality that the reviews ultimately say more about the reviewer, and the book he or she wishes had been written, than they do about the book which actually was written. It’s in that context that I offer this review of Groundswell, by Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, published by Harvard Business Press (note: disclaimers at the end of the post).

To start with the positive: This is a really solid business book, which sets out a clear methodology (including the Social Technographics Profile and the POST method with which Forrester clients / subscribers are already familiar), walks through a broad range of well explained case studies, and situates the business benefits of the different approaches.

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Things are going to get wierder

Via Jake McKee I just discovered this video of Chris Heuer interviewing Clay Shirky:

Clay’s long been a favorite speaker of mine - Perl as an act of love and the cognitive surplus being two other videos featured here - and Chris does a great interview here.

My favorite quote, as you might suspect given the tagline of this blog: “Things are going to get wierder before they get saner.” We’re in the midst of a long transformation - we’ve left point A but point B won’t be clear for some time.

Preparing for the Future(s) of the Internet

Lots of good quality discussion on the question of the Future (or Futures) of the Internet. There’s the upcoming conference to celebrate the 10th year of the founding of the Berkman Center, which is titled “The Future of the Internet.”

There’s Jonathan Zittrain’s new book, The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It. (In addition to buying a print copy, you can download the pdf version under creative commons license). Presenting on that book, there’s video of Zittrain at Princeton on March 26th, at ISOC-NY on April 11th, and at the Berkman Center the following week. You can also read and comment on the book.

Finally, via Biella Coleman I found this fascinating video from an event April 16th (between the above two videos), from a meeting of the NY Chapter of the Internet Society, talking about “The Futures of the Internet.” The discussion was sponsored by the NYU Information Law Institute, Free Culture @ NYU, and ISOC-NY. (Shirky’s presentation is on the same cognitive surplus theme from his web 2.0 expo keynote I recently blogged about).

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Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus

You may have seen my link to a transcript of this talk if you follow my ma.gnolia feed or johneckman.com.

Now (via LaughingSquid) you can watch the video. It’s Clay Shirky’s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, on the “cognitive surplus” as a characteristic fueling mass collaboration.

Interestingly, this seems to break my facebook app. No longer resizes the iframe to the right size? Something is trying to call location.toString() and getting denied - my guess is that Blip.tv is trying to track where the video was embedded and facebook doesn’t allow apps inside iframes to access parent location.

You can see all the Web 2.0 Expo videos at Blip.tv or put this rss url into Miro and get a channel: http://web2expo.blip.tv/rss

Clay Shirky on Colbert Report

(via BuzzMachine) comes this video (just under six minutes) of Clay Shirky being interviewed on the Colbert Report talking about Here Comes Everybody.

As you might imagine, Colbert has some difficulty with the “who is paying them?” notion.

Good fun for a Friday afternoon.