One man's trash is another man's treasure

While I did enjoy reading Mr. Shirky’s book, I found much of it to be redundant.  I liked that I was a heck of a lot easier to comprehend than Benkler's book and I thought that the opening and epilogue chapters were strong; I found the stuff in the middle quite repetitive of the last chapter.  But upon thinking about it, this could have been a means of driving the collaboration point home. 

In this last reading we did I thought there were some unique points made.  I liked the small world part because it is true that this happens in life all the time.  This ties in then to how it is about how many kinds of people you know and not just who you know.  When we have these small world happenstances we then have the opportunity of broadening our network to people other than just in our area of expertise. 

Another valuable bit related to these connections was the whole “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” concept.  By knowing people outside our field we can talk about various things and share ideas to where we can collaborate to make the idea a reality.

Finally, it must be important, because Shirky brings up the publish then filter idea again.  And this time what I took away from it is that the whole collaboration concept allows for redefinition and enhanced knowledge of certain sites.  From this I thought of Facebook and how it started out as just a thing for Harvard students then eventually grew to the world.  I’m sure Zuck knew it could be big just not how big.  The Facebook team is always putting stuff out there and testing the water and then adjusts its site according to feedback from users among other things.  However just because it is new doesn’t mean it is better.