The Case Against Micropayments

Micropayments are back, at least in theory, thanks to P2P. Micropayments are an idea with a long history and a disputed definition - as the W3C micropayment working group puts it, '... there is no clear definition of a 'Web micropayment' that encompasses all systems,' but in its broadest definition, the word micropayment refers to 'low-value electronic financial transactions.'

Shirky, Clay. OpenP2P (2000). Design>Web Design>E Commerce>Micropayments

Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

A lot of people in the weblog world are asking 'How can we make money doing this?' The answer is that most of us can't. Weblogs are not a new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward. Instead, weblogs mark a radical break.

Shirky, Clay. Shirky.com (2002). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Folksonomies Plus Controlled Vocabularies

We need a word for the class of comparisons that assumes that the status quo is cost-free, so that all new work, when it can be shown to have disadvantages to the status quo, is also assumed to be inferior to the status quo.

Shirky, Clay. Corante (2005). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Controlled Vocabulary

Situated Software

I'm seeing is a change in the software ecosystem which, for the moment, I'm calling situated software. This is software designed in and for a particular social situation or context. This way of making software is in contrast with what I'll call the Web School (the paradigm I learned to program in), where scalability, generality, and completeness were the key virtues.

Shirky, Clay. Shirky.com (2004). Articles>Education>Programming>Technology

The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed

The RIAA is succeeding where the Cypherpunks failed, convincing users to trade a broad but penetrable privacy for unbreakable anonymity under their personal control. In contrast to the Cypherpunks "eat your peas" approach, touting encryption as a first-order service users should work to embrace, encryption is now becoming a background feature of collaborative workspaces. Because encryption is becoming something that must run in the background, there is now an incentive to make its adoption as easy and transparent to the user as possible. It's too early to say how widely casual encryption use will spread, but it isn't too early to see that the shift is both profound and irreversible.

Shirky, Clay. Shirky.com (2003). Articles>Legal>Security

The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview

The W3C's Semantic Web project has been described in many ways over the last few years: an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, a place where machines can analyze all the data on the Web, even a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful. The problem with descriptions this general, however, is that they don't answer the obvious question: What is the Semantic Web good for? The simple answer is this: The Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms.

Shirky, Clay. Shirky.com (2003). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Semantic

Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content

The failure of micropayments, both past and future, illustrates the depth and importance of putting publishing tools in the hands of individuals. In the face of a force this large, user-pays schemes can't simply be restored through minor tinkering with payment systems, because they don't address the cause of that change -- a huge increase the power and reach of the individual creator.

Shirky, Clay. Shirky.com (2003). Articles>Publishing>Online>Micropayments

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things.

Shirky, Clay. Shirky.com (2003). Articles>Collaboration>Online>Social Networking

Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

A lot of people in the weblog world are asking "How can we make money doing this?" The answer is that most of us can't. Weblogs are not a new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward. Instead, weblogs mark a radical break. They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity. It's intuitively appealing to believe that by making the connection between writer and reader more direct, weblogs will improve the environment for direct payments as well, but the opposite is true. By removing the barriers to publishing, weblogs ensure that the few people who earn anything from their weblogs will make their money indirectly.

Shirky, Clay. Shirky.com (2002). Articles>Publishing>Online>Blogging

Communities, Audiences, and Scale

Communities are different than audiences in fundamental human ways, not merely technological ones. You cannot simply transform an audience into a community with technology, because they assume very different relationships between the sender and receiver of messages.

Shirky, Clay. Shirky.com (2002). Articles>Web Design>Community Building>Online