Pages 20-50

Shirkey is emphasizing the impact of mangerial and organizational costs needed to get a group together. Before this social networking age, in order for a business to accomplish anything, a considerable amount of overhead costs were required in order to get employees to work how you want them to.



Today, the cost of organizing has dropped to basically zero. Anyone can pulish news on blogs, can communicate instantly from anywhere in the world using instant messaging, micro blogging, and social networking, and the need for a physical location to do work, i.e. an office, is also rapidly declining.



Because many of these overhead costs are gone, we can accomplish things as a group that in the past, were not possible because of high organizational/managerial costs. Shirkey gives the example of Flickr and people posting picutres from a parade in New York, and an example of the victims and bystanders of the London bombing posting quickly posing pictures taken on scence when reporters were not able to. The costs of organizing these photographers before the actual events would have been too high to get it done professionally. Since Flickr is the platform and the public is already motivated to contribute, the photography happened, and it was organized through tagging.

First Chapter

I am not very far into the book yet because it took a while for the book to finally arive. What really stands out to me so far from the book was the point that human beings are inherently social. Shirkey talked about how people have always worked in teams, from hunters and gatherers many years ago to employees working on a group projects in a conference room, to online social networking and collaboration today.

This is why the revolution of social networking is having such a big impact on our society. since we are social beings, the implementation of a better tool to stay connected to our network of family, friends, and peers can dramatically improve both our social lives and our businesses.

Why I chose to read Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

I chose to read “Here Comes Everybody” for my ITO class because it covers the significance of blogs, wikis, and other Web 2.0 features, which will be helpful for increasing my own understanding of Web 2.0. I chose it becayse it seemed to be the most relevent book to our class out of the 3 books (also Groundswell and Wikinomics).