A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Thanks to Hugh McLeod for pointing this out:

Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy: “This is a lightly edited version of the keynote I gave on Social Software at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara on April 24, 2003

Good morning, everybody. I want to talk this morning about social software …there’s a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I’ve seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: ‘A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.’ “

Something to think about as we trounce forward through the murky and undrained swamp of large scale social technologies (especially as marketers)…