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Part of my ongoing collection of (apparently) unrelated quotes:

warrenellis I appear to gain more followers when I don't actually post anything. I consider this to be a valuable lesson about the internet, and life. 7 minutes ago from web

hrheingold 74% of the earth's population are social media strategists 17 minutes ago from web

mpesce Having massive brainwave. Had no idea it was coming on, then WHAM, there it is. Beautiful, terrifying, and will not be ignored. 7 minutes ago from web

Last summer, I was talking on the phone with Mitch Joel about an article I was writing and he kept telling me I should read Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody. I told Mitch I had read all these excerpts and all Clay's interviews in 999 blogs and that was enough for me. Did I say that Mitch really insisted? And that he is a convincing marketer? So I bought the book, kept it at my bedside and sipped maybe 2 or 3 pages at a time during these past months.
Of course Mitch was right. Of course the book is a must read. It's about how we all came to be there, in communities and social networks. While reading, I marked pages with 100 dollars bills of Monopoly money from a bundle a friend had given me (long story). Now I have finished the book and I just went through the 100 dollars pages. The following quotes are not representing Clay Shirky's essential book. Go buy it. They are just quotes I keep because they are great and I could write an article with each one of them. Consider I just wrote 8 posts.

How we have become filters:

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move. Filter-then-publish, whatever its advantages, rested on a scarcity of media that is a thing of the past. The expansion of social media means that the only working system is publish-then-filter.

Communities are good and feel good:

Anything that increases our ability to share, coordinate, or act increases our freedom to pursue our goals in congress with one another.

Journalism crisis:

Philosophers sometimes make a distinction between a difference in degree (more of the same) and a difference in kind (something new). What we are witnessing today is a difference in sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind.

People are important to people:

We gather together because we like to, and because it is useful. (...) cities don't exist just because people have had to be nearby to communicate; cities exist because people like to be near other people, and it is this fact, rather than the mere trading of information, that creates social capital.

Giving a platform and doing nothing:

Though it seems funny for a service business, Meetup actually does best not by trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things for one another.

Acting on a troll in Wikipedia (same process as with graffiti) :

... he or she had spent the better part of an hour lovingly crafting those three fake entries. I deleted all three in about a minute and a half; the prankster never returned, presumably disappointed by the speed with which fake entries could be undone.

Moderating communities 101:

... a basic truth of social systems: no effort at creating group value can be successful without some form of governance.

The individual is mightier than the marketing plan:

The transistor and the birth control pill (...) were pulled into society one person at a time, and they mattered more than giant inventions pushed along by massive and sustained effort. They changed society precisely because no one was in control of how the technology was used, or by whom. This is what is happening again today.

Mark Pesce continues to publish installments of his next book the human network. I quote here a few sentences related to collective intelligence and collective knowledge tools from his last chapter: Crowdsource Yourself.

The first problem in intelligence augmentation: how do you make a human being smarter? The answer: pair humans up with other humans.

Given that we try to make decisions about our lives based on the best available information, the better that information is, the better our decisions will be. (...) every time we use (----*) to make a decision, we are improving our decision making ability. We are improving our own lives.

Douglas Engelbart’s original vision of intelligence augmentation holds true: it is possible for us to pool our intellectual resources, and increase our problem-solving capacity.

----* mark Pesce had written "Wikipedia" here but, as he acknowledges a few lines further: ... Wikipedia is really only one example of the many tools we have available for knowledge augmentation. Every sharing tool – Digg, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, Twitter, and so on – provides an equal opportunity to share and to learn from what others have shared. We can pool our resources more effectively than at any other time in history.

back-to-the-landism.

Why are so many people suddenly entertaining the thought of the imminent death of Web 2.0? As I understand it, Web 2.0 is just beginning to be used by mass media and businesses: their managers are curious about it, they are giving contracts to explore how it could work for them. The light of dawn is appearing on the horizon, but the landscape is still bathed in Web 1.0 darkness.

So many of us are interconnected that I am sure we can find people proclaiming the end of Web 2.0 as soon as Tim O'Reilly coined the idea in 2004. A good overview of the present "crisis" is given by Scott Loganbill in monkey_bites.

It really comes down to what meaning you give to Web 2.0. In 2005, when Tim himself gave a very thorough and complex explanation, I had the idea of copyrighting a very simple one: "Web 2.0 is about people". I was working at the time on an urban community project with Sylvain Carle, now CTO of Praized. When I told him my copyrighting idea, he just typed the words in Google and, with his usual laid back attitude, turned toward me his laptop screen. There weren't 1690 results as there are today, but certainly a hundred.

Too bad for my (flawed) idea of owning this definition, but it is still the most simple, clear and useful one today: "Web 2.0 is about people": Web 1.0 is the Web of broadcasting sites, of one to many, of push. Web 2.0 is the Web where you interact with real people, one by one, whom you can identify, welcome, respect and memorize.

Web 1.0 is based on messages.
Web 2.0 is based on one person at a time.

Web 1.0 is the Web of products.
Web 2.0 is the Web of relationships.

Web 2.0 is not a trend, a fashion, a gimmick, a moment in time.
The Web is here to stay and more people are on the Web every day.
Opening real one to one relationships with readers and consumers is the revolution that is shaking all mass media and the whole marketing universe.

Mass media and marketing know how to push.
They are just beginning to learn how to welcome.

Web 2.0 is just beginning.

David Carr:

How much more powerful is (...) networked intelligence than a reporter with a phone, a Rolodex and the space between his or her ears?

As the former newspaperman and Web evangelist Jeff Jarvis (...) has been saying since before broadband, the Web is not just a way to shout, it is a way to listen, one that can lead to deeper, more effective journalism.

Iain M. Banks:

Part of the training of a Special Circumstances agent was learning a) that the rules were supposed to be broken sometimes, b) just how to go about breaking the rules, and c) how to get away with it, whether the rule-breaking had led to a successful outcome or not. Matter

Kevin Kelly:

Payment is
1) A way of connecting.
2) A sign of approval.
3) A vote.
4) It indicates an allegiance with the maker.
5) It feels good to the payer, to support.
People buy stuff, but what we all crave are relationships. Payment is an elemental type of relationship.

Jeff Jarvis:

Connectivity is a platform for society.

Paul Bradshaw:

Now I’m not peddling that old cliché that “everyone is a journalist” – but rather arguing that the process of journalism itself is increasingly open to deconstruction: the tools of researching, recording, publishing and distribution can now be broken up and distributed between teams of organised readers.

W.L. Gore (via Jean Fahmy):

3. Everyone can lead
Without rank, it gives every employee the opportunity to be a leader.

As could be expected from the Boing Boing gang, they have come up with a new set of policies that we all can use as a model. Cory says:

Our insurance company asked us to come up with a bunch of policies -- DMCA takedowns, privacy, etc -- and set us off on a quest for some legalese that didn't make us want to wash our eyes out with acid afterwards, but still passed muster with the lawyers. We worked long and hard and came up with some language we're pretty happy with. Check it out.

if you run a non-commercial site, you can even copy these policies since they are under a Creative Common non-commercial license.
They also mention TRUSTe as a resource.

Mitch Joel:

Think about it - what if everything we knew about Marketing and Advertising until now really was just an anomaly, and the new ways that are spurting up as we Blog is the way things were meant to be?
Human beings are often great at being able to adapt as situations unfold, but I think there is an opportunity now to be magnificent. To really embrace a new way in which Consumers and Producers blur all the lines and write new rules together. And who knows, maybe what we're really seeing with Social Media and Web 2.0 is how Marketing, Advertising and Communications was really meant to work... even as traditional agencies continue to clamp on to business as usual.

Tehanu:

I have yet to find a book that describes the rest of it-- why user profiles are good to have, why you want to make user feedback very easy, why you want people to have a way to see how useful or popular their contributions are, strategies for handling moderation and user disagreements. I would pay for a digital or paper book version of essays such as these.

Kevin Kelly:

Answering real FAQs is smart for several reasons:
* It forces you to face the problem.
* It forces you to face your answer.
* It's an opportunity to sell (yes).
* It projects your character and brand.
* You can control the answer.

Cheryl Barre:

If you think about the fact that industry sales are down this year, year to date, and when you think about fewer people being in- market, digital is even more important to be able to talk to those consumers who are in market.

Jeff Jarvis:

Do I trust you? The key is to make sure that I have control over my data.

Clay Shirky (via Jeff Atwood):

What we've got is a network that is natively good at group forming. In fact, this isn't just a fifth revolution. It holds the contents of the previous revolutions, which is to say we can now distribute music and movies and conversations all in this medium. But the other thing it does is move us into a world of two-way groups. Thirty years from now, when I'm presenting this book, if I had to describe it in one bullet point -- this is what the bullet point would say: Group Action Just Got Easier.

Roger Hobbs:

The Internet is not a separate place a person can go to from the real world. The Internet is the real world. Only faster.

In his new blog, Steph Lagrange reports a conversation we had last April about my work:

Proximity (i.e. “always available”) is another key concept to Bruno. Whereas in traditional media the distance between the ad and the store can be miles and/or days away, on the Web the distance has narrowed down to a mere hyperlink (i.e. URL). The call to action and the ability to take action are instantaneous, almost real time.

And this is exactly where most media companies miss the point. Too focused on page views and unique visitors to measure their online ad display revenue, media corporations miss the conversion to action stage.

To get your customer engaged enough to act upon an ad with the intent of following through, remains the biggest conversion whatever the media. And then, what happens?

Stephane is really impressive: there was a lot distractions around when we talked but he didn't miss a beat and he summarizes this whole concept beautifully. Thanks!

Makes me wonder if I shouldn't do like McLuhan: rather than spending months (years!) writing a book, I could just talk and collect the notes of people I am speaking with. :-)