Interesting examples, terrible argument! No substantiated claims whatsoever! Shirky obviously thinks he is pretty smart and does not have to produce any real arguments based on evidence.
Hand-Crafting My FOAF
While at eTech, I attended a number of "social software" sessions. One thing I heard was a persistent call from folk like Marc Canter for all the vendors to support something called FOAF. FOAF is a standard for "Friend of a Friend" files, and is an attempt to make machine readable information about people, groups, companies, and other online resources. In particular, it is focused on representing the information that you might typically put on your personal home page in a form such that meta-data tools can interpret it.
"They are built to be human-usable (...) are targeted primarily for storage/retrieval of personal information and serendipitous discovery of group information . (...) The development communities for each are abuzz with ideas for exploiting the structure"
S. Bleul, T. Weise, and K. Geihs. (2006)Accepted for publication in the special issue on Engineering Design and Composition of Service-Oriented Applications.