Tue

Jul 10
2007

Jimmy Guterman

Jimmy Guterman

Clay Shirky, a Shinto Shrine, and the Sentence of the Year

If, like me, you were unable to attend Supernova this year and you're still kicking yourself, you can stop now. Conference organizer (and former Release 1.0 editor) Kevin Werbach has begun posting videos of the proceedings. I've only seen one so far, a dizzying presentation by Clay Shirky in which he likens the guardians of a Shinto shrine to the perl community. It also includes one of the best sentences I've heard all year, one that will ring true for anyone who's tried to convince entrenched thinkers of the value of innovation: “They didn’t care that they’d seen it work in practice because they already knew it wouldn’t work in theory.”

I look forward to viewing the rest of these, especially the David Weinberger/Andrew Keen face-off ... and I intend to go to the event next year.


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  brian d foy [07.11.07 12:30 PM]

Actually, I think Clay was trying to compare UNESCO and AT&T (your quote refers to AT&T), and everything else is tangential to that. His comments on Perl are off base, and comp.lang.perl.misc is a sickly shadow of itself nowadays. That's pretty poor support for his point about Perl, if he has one.

At the top of his slide about comp.lang.perl.misc is one of my posts to that group. :)

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