Viewing profile — clay_shirky

Perl hacker who tried to switch to Ruby before adopting Python here: Of _course_ boring is better. How could it not be? If you are trying to solve a problem, the last thing you wan…

You cannot possibly know how much this delights me! Most of my writing was about social media, back when the web was young, but "Ontology is Overrated" is actually my favorite thin…

Yep, it became a spot for all your erectile dysfunction needs. And the constant pattern of "I fix it, spammers break it' wore me out, so, despite media savvy, I just stopped caring…

Was this it: https://www.wired.com/2006/11/meganiche/ "Now that more than a billion people have access to the Web, there is no longer a trade-off between size and specificity. The …

This whole thread is giving me feels, but to the basics, I'll tell you how it happened. I'd been writing about what we came to call social media since the early 90s (alt.culture.us…