Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, talks about the economics of organizations with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. The conversation centers on Shirky's book. Topics include Coase on the theory of the firm, the power of sharing information on the internet, the economics of altruism, and the creation of Wikipedia.

Clay Shirky on Coase, Collaboration and Here Comes Everybody

Simson Garfinkel, in Technology Review:

An interesting thing happens when you try to understand Wikipedia: the deeper you go, the more convoluted it becomes.

Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observa­bility. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Verifiability is really an appeal to au­thority--not the authority of truth, but the authority of other publications. Any other publication, really.

Recently:

I was googling around and I learned that a reply I made to a blog post on Internet Music became an academic reference. Nice!

Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth

This book is for people who experience heartbreak over love notes with subject-verb agreements ... for anyone who’s ever considered hanging up the phone on people who pepper their speech with such gems as “irregardless,” “expresso,” or “disorientated” ... and for the earnest souls who wonder if it’s “Woe is Me,” or “Woe is I,” or even “Woe am I.”

Martha Brockenbrough’s Things That Make Us (Sic) is a laugh-out-loud guide to grammar and language, a snarkier, American answer to Lynn Truss’s runaway success Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Brockenbrough is the founder of National Grammar Day and SPOGG -- the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar -- and as serious as she is about proper usage, her voice is funny, irreverent, and never condescending. Things That Make Us (Sic) addresses common language stumbling stones such as evil twins, clichés, jargon, and flab, and offers all the spelling tips, hints, and rules that are fit to print. It’s also hugely entertaining, with letters to high-profile language abusers, including David Hasselhoff, George W. Bush, and Canada’s Maple Leafs [sic], as well as a letter to – and a reply from – Her Majesty, the Queen of England.

Brockenbrough has written a unique compendium combining letters, pop culture references, handy cheat sheets, rants, and historical references that is as helpful as it is hilarious.

Things That Make Us (Sic): The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar Takes on Madison Avenue, Hollywood, the White House, and the World

cruz (kroōz)

v. to sail about in an area without a precise destination. esp. for pleasure.

From the archive:

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea--"cruising", it is called.

Cruz - A Social Browser for Mac OS X Leopard

Inquisitor... speeds up your searches like no other.

Start typing and websites appear instantly, along with suggestions to help refine your search.

Inquisitor understands you, learning and tailoring your results as you search. You can also add more search engines with customized keyboard shortcuts.

Inquisitor is fast, smart, flexible... and free!

I have a feeling they'll be changing the name of this product.

Inquisitor

The language, these days ... !!!

The Short Versions of Great Movies

New work from Jon Kleinberg:

MemeTracker builds maps of the daily news cycle by analyzing around 900,000 news stories and blog posts per day from 1 million online sources, ranging from mass media to personal blogs.

We track the quotes and phrases that appear most frequently over time across this entire spectrum. This makes it possible to see how different stories compete for news and blog coverage each day, and how certain stories persist while others fade quickly.

MemeTracker: tracking news phrases over the web

We were on this five months ago, so the NYT is a bit late to the story, but the meme is still alive and well. (It seems to be missing from A brief history of all Internet memes ever.)

The meme of the parodies — the cultural kernel of them, the part that’s contagious and transmissible — has proved surprisingly hardy, almost unnervingly so.

It seems that late-life Hitler can be made to speak for almost anyone in the midst of a crisis.

The Burning Man one is quite good.

The Hitler Meme

Robert Wade:

As stock markets plunge and governments scramble to bail out the finance sector, Robert Wade argues that we are exiting the neoliberal paradigm that has held sway since the 1980s. Causes and repercussions of the crisis, and errors of the model that brought it to fruition.

What would Peter Drucker do?

Managers have to learn to ask every few years of every process, every product, every procedure, every policy: "If we did not do this already, would we go into it now knowing what we now know?" If the answer is no, the organization has to ask, "So what do we do now?" And it has to do something, and not say, "Let's make another study."

Financial Regime Change?

Orhan Pamuk:

In the age of westernisation and rapid modernisation, the central question - not just for Turkish literature but all for literatures outside the west - is the difficulty of painting the dreams of tomorrow in the colours of today, of dreaming about a country with modern values while also embracing the pleasures of tradition.

Recently:

While almost all under 25s dream in colour, thousands of over 55s, all of whom were brought up with black and white sets, often dream in monchrome - even now.

Just now:

Roger Catt, the retired Wisconsin farmer who said that “McCain is more of the same, and Obama is the end of life as we know it,” will be voting for the end of life as we know it.

The collector