As part of an interview series for the 18th German Multimedia Congress (DMMK) I had the pleasure of talking to keynote speaker Clay Shirky. Clay Shirky teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications program at New York University and is a well known thought leader through his work.

Download MP3 (40 min, 29 MB)

Between other things, we talk about

• the research which resulted in his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
• his 5 word synopsis: Group action just got easier
• what are relevant participation patterns?
• developped world and the challenges for the newspaper industry and the challenges for society out of this
• why the product department should adopt these new tools, not marketing
• we are in the infancy of use of social tools in companies
• if old organisations will not catch up, startups will do the job for them
• not all of the real world will fall away, but we will focus on which tool is best for the task at hand
• the days of distinguishing online and offline are long gone
• Europe’s potential is the cognitive diversity
• why even looking at the every day phone usage in Europe is so much more advanced than ‘mobile’ in the US
• copy cat mode: how to (not) direct your energy and why digital media reduces the costs of failure and why this may change the attitude towards failure tolerance
• newspaper used to have a monopoly on public expression and this is gone now
• Take a good look at your customers! It will not wait for you to get ready for the changes

At the end of the interview he lists a set of questions which you should be asking yourself – and if you work through these it will help you to figure out what your next steps should be. :)

You can find out more about him on him blog or his twitteraccount (@cshirky).

Find more tweets about DMMK in Twitter-Search or in German at the auf dem DMMK blog.

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