I’m a terrible book reviewer. So this isn’t a review. It’s just a bullet point burst through what’s in my mind having just put the book down having galloped through it over the last 24 hours.
So - my plus ponts

• He’s terrifically readable, and very quotable. I found myself making marks in the margins of all the bits that I’m planning to drop into presentations etc. That doesn’t happen that often these days.

• We’ve had most of the examples before: Wikipedia, Flickr, Twitter, Trent Lott, Flashmobs et al (more on this later), but he weaves all of this together with a pretty compelling narrative grounded in reasonably accessible economic and sociological theory.
• He’s obviously a great believer in the world he describes - but he’s not blind to its shortcomings - eg open source software projects that fail, the ‘poor quality’ or some blogs etc. In fact, rather than paper over these issues, he explains how they’re an integral part of the phenomena.
• The chapters most relevant to media/ journalism - ‘Everyone is a media outlet/ and ‘Publish first, filter later’ should be required reading for pretty much everyone currently sitting in a newspaper/ broadcaster. It’s certainly the best thought through thing I’ve read on this, and the comparison to the decline of the scribes when the printing press came in is really well draw.

• My big, big take away (but by no means the biggest point in the book) - is how some of the most remarkable phenomena of this era - Linux, Wikipedia, Blogger and (although he doesn’t make the direct point) Craigslist have started with remarkably small ambition. Not big ideas. Not vision. Just a ‘I thought I might…’

• Good for him for playing down the importance of his original essay on power laws at work in blogging, which kicked off so much thinking.

And my not-so-plus points

• Like lots of these books, by the end you feel it’s flagging and repeating itself just to make it to the required 300 pages. It’s not like a Seth Godin book - where you can get all the good stuff just from the intro and the rest is exposition that you can take, leave or just dip in and out of; it’s worth persevering with - but it could have been 50 pages shorter and no worse.
• This rehashing of the same examples is starting to grate a bit. Linux, Wikipedia etc - we’ve been chewing over this stuff for a while, we need fresh meat!!!
• * I think at times he’s a little too forgiving of Wikipedia - in particular the way that a single credible but erroneous fact can make it into there, be overlooked and then be replicated. Once it’s discovered, then the whole credibility of Wikipedia as a serious research tool starts to be undermined. My personal hunch is that we still don’t know whether Wikipedia is going to make it from being a phenomena of our times to a widely trusted resource.

Some of my favourite quotes

I like this

Now that there is competition to traditional institutional forms for getting things done, those institutions will continue to exist, but their purchase on modern life will weaken as novel alternatives for group action arise.

And in a similar vein, on the way some professions face threats..

Sometimes those threats are also threats to society; we do not want to see a relaxing of standards for a surgeon or a pilot. But, in some cases, the change that threatens the profession benefits society, as did the spread of the printing press; even in these situations the professionals can be relied on to care more about self devense than about progress. What was once a service becomes a bottleneck.

Anyway - I could go on, but you really should get hold of a copy.

Buy it at Amazon. Read the blog. Watch the video.