Clay Shirky has been in London this week promoting the paperback launch of Here Comes Everybody with a series of talks on social networks and digital democracy. Stephen Waddington got an autograph and posted a report on Shirky’s lunchtime address at the ICA:

“Here Comes Everybody tells how the social web is creating a new organisational model of mass collaboration that sits outside the private, public and charitable sector. Shirky calls it the social sector.

Whereas the motivation of public organisations (provision of public services), private organisations (deliver profit for shareholders) and charitable organisations (provision of not for profit services) is well understood, the motivation of the social sector is emotional.”

Benjamin Ellis and Annie Mole both made to the LSE for Clay’s evening talk, both picking up on the theme of mass collaboration in their respective posts here and here. On the subject of using social tools to bring about change, Benjamin writes:

“Clearly mass collaboration isn’t going to solve every problem. For the first time in public, Clay said, “I don’t think the technology is ready for the mass legitimisation of initiatives… …There need to be checks and balances applied”. That is a big, and wise, shift from his previously utopian view of what could be achieved. I’ve posted about crowds not providing the wisest answer for every situation before. When we think about the idea of direct access into the political process, we might want to think carefully about what exactly we are wishing for. The tools are fantastic for gathering feedback and generating content, but decision making requires a degree of sophistication that the tools do not provide, yet.”

David Wilcox also blogged the talk, with a bit of video as well.

Elsewhere on the web:

Yesterday was Facebook’s 5th birthday, an occasion which most bloggers were content to mark by sharing the frontpage design retrospective slideshow that Mark Zuckerberg linked to in his birthday post. Eric Eldon at VentureBeat delved into recent stats released by the social networking site, examining the drivers behind increased user engagement with the site.

Tim Windsor at Nieman Journalism Labs has a few pointers for how news organisations can embrace crowdsourcing in their reporting which are equally relevant to online community managers or any company or brand looking to engage with their audience.

Having played around with Google Latitude, Adam Ostrow at Mashable muses on the need for geolocation features in Facebook and Twitter, and suggests that now’s the time for canny start-ups to cash in on the huge revenue opportunities that geolocation offers, especially in the form of hyperlocal advertising.