Here Comes Everybody & Text2MindMap
I’ve just finished Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, an interesting book describing the impact of online social networking tools like Flickr, blogs and mailing lists on top down and bottom up organisations.
The basic idea of the book is these tools dramatically lower the transactions costs associated with running a complex organisation (which Ronald Coase, Shirky notes, highlighted a long time ago). We see bottom-up organisations and ‘happenings’ like flash mobs, meetups for single moms, helping mailing lists for software, and open source software development.
Crucially, these online networking tools provide us with the ability to fail much more easily and cheaply, while allowing some projects, businesses, and other online entities to become superstars, something Arthur DeVany and Nassim Taleb are experts on.
The book is entertaining, witty, and a quick read. If you’re interested in this area at all, pick it up.
Also, I’ve been messing around with data visualisation tools after reading Edward Tufte’s latest book, and here’s a tool which creates mindmaps out of simple indented text. This will be great for making lecture notes. It’s free. For nuthin’. Here’s my first go at a mindmap of Shirky’s work using the Text2mindmap tool.
Click on the link below to take a look at Here Comes Everybody.
