Clay Shirky on Colbert

Hurrah for Clay Shirky for pulling off a masterful stint on The Colbert Report, promoting his new book Here Comes Everybody, one of the tightest, sweetest explanations of What The Internet Is For that I've ever read. Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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RichMan

Video Link
WoW Machinima, Sesame Street like song …

The Internet if for … Porn.
.. second major character is called “Shreky”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWEjvCRPrCo

Totally PG except for the use of the P-word
Funklord

A slightly less rosy view of Shirky’s book can be found here:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=401300
Geektronica

Saw this one when it aired, and I thought Shirky did manage to get some points in edgewise, which as Ridstowe said is hard to do.

I did think it was odd, though, that he never looked at Stephen or at the camera when he was talking.
Takuan

bah!

“Older citizens, the poor, the illiterate and the socially excluded” is accused, then the author proceeds to the same old elitism with a crack about “the long tail of proliferating mediocrity”.
shoesaphone

Erm, that seems to be the video for the You are the Best theme song.

The Clay Shirky video can be found here: http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?videoId=164882
Dead Robot

And Canadians are SOL.
costik

But we alredy know what the Internet is for. It’s for porn.
http://www.avenueq.com/videoclips.html
mindysan33

That was good stuff last night. I so want to read his book… I guess I’ll get around to it sometime.

Anyone seen any of those stickers on doritos bags? Or anything else for that matter?

Mindy
Frenetic

Why must you torture your fellow Canadians, Cory? :(
David

Why does the link to his book point back to BoingBoing?
joelt999

Fellow Canadians: just use one of the thousands of sites that offer free proxy servers to mask your IP and you can play all of the videos that the CRTC worries will destroy our “Canadian culture”!
beepy

So did anything “interesting” happen the next day with the Doritos stickers as predicted by Shirky?
notatoad

canadian viewers – watch the clip on TCN’s website here: http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/#clip43107
mikesum32

Good video, but Linux has a lot of commercial support, at least 50 per cent if these numbers are true.

http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2008/04/01/the-linux-lowdown-from-the-source/
yish

and here’s the MP3 from Clay’s recent London gig at the RSA:
http://www.thersa.org/audio/lecture180308a.mp3

(from http://www.thersa.org/audio/index.asp)
ridestowe

that was awesome, he did a great job handling colbert which from what i’ve seen, can be a hard thing to do ;)
Frenetic

Good video, but Linux has a lot of commercial support

It does now, but those companies would never have been interested (nor would there have been anything to be interested in) were it not for the global Internet-connected community of volunteers and enthusiasts that built up around that certain Finnish student and his hobby operating system.
tikal2k

MSG infusion? No thanks.
PygmyHippo

An interesting video from Nov 2005 of Shirky from one of the LongNow seminars can be found on YouTube at:

http://tinyurl.com/578rzv

Topic is ” Making Digital Durable ”
Also can be found at Google videos.