Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is a social impact assessment of the power of emergent behavior – people self-organizing via the power of the new social networks – and how this changes things.

I have to admit that I’ve avoided Clay Shirky until now – the hype in the “2.0″ community was fairly intense, even cultish. The back cover didn’t help his case either – “…one of the new culture’s wisest observers” sounds very “legend in his own mind” to me. But I read it because it was there, and well, I liked it.

It is not the bible of all things social for the new millennium. It is not filled with cutting insights – some of the analysis of cause and effect works for me (the “let’s get Ivanna’s Sidekick back” phenomenon being an excellent example of the power of the net.mob) and some doesn’t work (the rise of social computing seeing the birth of real self-organizing groups – d00d, people have always self-organized).

Clay does make the point – several times – that social network users are not content to be traditional passive consumers of content – they are creating their own content, thank you very much – and they don’t want to be told what to read, what to buy, or who to vote for. Big “1.0″ business has had a lot of catching up to do (and those that haven’t got it are failing). In this, Clay Shirky is preaching to the converts that Seth Godin has made over the last decade (of which I am one).

Overall, if you are interested in how online community works (and want to avoid being seen as exploiting it in a bad way) then you should probably read this book. Please read it with an open mind but a critical eye.

Andrew Boyd is a co-convener of the Canberra IA Cocktail Hours, he is partial to good peaty single malt whiskey, touring, blurring social network boundaries between the virtual and the real, travel, fine dining, shiny sharp things, blogging, blogging on blogging, and Donna.