Recently in Book Category

The folks at Penguin UK invited me to put up a guest blog post on some of the themes in the book, and I decided to excerpt the section explaining why the label 'user-generated content' doesn't make sense in a lot of cases:

Most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public forum. Because of this personal address , it makes no more sense to label this content than it would to call a phone call with your mother "family-generated content." A good deal of user-generated content isn't actually "content" at all, at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience. Instead, a lot of it is just part of a conversation. Mainstream media has often missed this, because they are used to thinking of any group of people as an audience.

Read the whole post here.

We're done giving out copies, but thanks to everyone who has responded.

Here Comes Everybody isn't in stores for another month, but the good folks at Penguin Press (US and UK) are letting me send review copies to people doing the kind of experimentation the book is about. I've got a handful of copies to give to anyone reading this blog, with the only quid pro quo being that you blog your reactions to it, good bad or indifferent. If you're interested, drop me a line (clay@shirky.com), with your blog and real-world address, and I'll get you one (though there are only a few to hand out, so it's first-come, first-served.)