11:40 am CT - Austin
In Kenya, Ushaidi takes text messages from wartorn countries and puts them on a map - getting better information, says Shirkey, than the media and from NGOs. It was a better predictor of future violence. Ushaidi could report the attacks before they were fatal; media and NGOs arrived after the carnage. Again, openness and transparency trumps control and old structures. "I don't know how far Ushaidi or Patientslikeme.com will go to succeed, but at least they can try. Ten years ago they couldn't even try," says Shirkey. "We have the tools and the intrinsic motivations," says Shirkey. Now that all the difficulty and expense of putting something out in the public sphere is gone, we can do very big things for the public good.
 
 
11:30 am CT - Austin
Now to "lingerie and garbage". Clay Shirkey continues at SXSW on the economy of abundance and the sharing of information. One of the most ambitious entrants, says Shirkey, is www.patientslikeme.com. It gets patients to share symptoms in, um, painstaking detail. This flies in the face of everything the American medical establishment tells you about the need for privacy. The site believes if we share our symptoms openly, cures can be generated faster at lower cost. Openness and transparency is a public good: it translates again into the 'better cheaper faster' disruptive innovation.  
 
11:20am CT - Austin
Sharing of information is something that humans are biased to like - like much, much more than sharing goods or services. The music industry wants to "reintroduce spiteful behavior by law to end sharing we see around information such as file sharing". 
So what does all this mean for the future of media? Now to Darpa's "red balloon challenge", solved PDQ by the MIT folk. Darpa points to its formula on Wikipedia, not Britannica. At the encyclopedia you need to sign up for a free trial, an ad for Cheerios and links are broken. Why? "Because no one cares enough to raise a fuss," says Shirkey. But Britannica has built a reference work you cannot refer to. So in the same way Gutenberg "cause the scribes to write slowly", Wikipedia has made Britannica inaccessible. Wikipedia has changed the environment; it is not just a new competitor.
 
 
11:10 am CT - Austin
Clay Shirky says it's time now to talk "monkeys and balloons". When Napster launched it was the fastest-growing software in history. It had 70 million users in less than a year. The threatened music business explanation: "Young people today have become criminally minded". They were "stealing because they had no morals at all". But that was obviously false. It coincided with the largest fall in crime in recorded history. Except digital property, of course.
Human motivation changes very slowly, says Shirky. Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
Napster increased opportunity to share, and it changed motivations around sharing. It unearthed an old motivation for sharing. "Which brings me to monkeys", says Shirky. Primates don't have a behavior called sharing. Imagine you are walking down the street and you see an elderly woman. She asks you for money. Now imagine instead and she asks you to help her get across the street. A different feeling. Now imagine she asks for directions. A different feeling again.
Humans have three motivations for sharing - goods, services and information - all with different feelings and reactions associated with them. Potential bad feeling on both sides about sharing anything physical. But sharing services is easier - a calculation easy to make that makes people feel good about it, not "taken".
Information sharing is the easiest one of all.
All Napster did was to take a world of music where music is shared as a good or service and made it possible to share as information.
 
 
11:05 am CT - Austin
"It was a fight about sharing," says Clay Shirky. "Rainbow unicorn form of sharing" doesn't really change much in the outside world. But PickUpPal was doing "jackhammer sharing" - a disruptive innovation that doesn't happen all that often. But Shirky says it does tend to happen around "media revolutions".
First, to the Gutenberg printing press. He invented the printing press not to print the Bible, but to print indulgences. There was a high demand for indulgences. Imbalance of supply / demand to avoid purgatory spurs the invention of the printing press. Back then, you'd think this would have been great for the Catholic Church. But the opposite happened. There was "indulgence inflation". By 1600 it was "just a religion". 
Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. If scarce, put price up. If not scarce, put price down. But when really abundant, the price "goes away". What was once scarce is available to everyone. With spread of printing press, scribes seemed terribly slow. Now to the defense of the scribes: He has it printed instead of scribed, and the medium destroys the message.
 
11 am CT - Austin
Clay Shirky is talking about sharing. Buses and bibles, monkeys and balloons. He starts with the buses. Think congestion. Solution? More roads, or better alternative public transportation. But actually the fight shouldn't be between engineers, it should be about sharing of information. PickUpPal helps people ride-share, get where they are going faster - helps everyone, except bus companies. So a bus company hired a private detective to spy on PickUpPal. Then comes the affidavit: PickUpPal is breaking some obscure law for being "far too efficient to be legal". They fight the lawsuit, they lose, and then the population is so pissed the law gets rewritten.