TED Talk #4 Clay Shirky

In the beginning, the speaker talks a company named Ushahidi which started to map things in Kenya which has expanded into being a global company mapping things such as snowplowing in Boston to the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti.  Ushahidi is an open source project which allows people to give information about important events via mobile phone.  This concept is very interesting to me and I think it is very cool.   I like that it gives people who have experienced an event to map things out.  Overall I see this as a revolution in news tracking nd mapping places.  I also think that ideas like this should be used in education as it could be a fun way to learn about events and see what happened while still teaching kids the importance of the event.
  He also explains how the dumbest possible act of creativity is still an act of creativity such as wall cats (wall cats are humerous pictures of animals with funny captions beside them detailing what they are doing).
 In the speech, he also links Ushahidi and wall cats by explaining that they are both designs and creative.  He also explains how these designs differ from eachother.  In the speech, he describes the wall cats as being of communal value (created by the participants for the participants; more important ideas not likely to come from it) and the Ushahidi company as being of civic value (created by the participants for the whole society; could make an impact on society). Another main idea was how the implication of what would seem to be a punishment can actually make a problem worse.  When a fine was put in place for parents picking their kids up from daycare, the number of late arrivals skyrocketed.  Even when the fine was revoked, the number of late arrivals stayed the same because the previous culture had been broken and not returned to.  To end the speech, the speaker poses the idea that people can take the 365 days in a year to choose to create things with civic value which, in the end, could be the thing that helps change the world.  Overall, I did not enjoy the speaker was presenting things. It was very hard for me to follow and it seemed as if his points were close to being random.  I wish he would have used story in his speech because it could have given me something to grasp and compare to my life.  I also wish that his points would have been easier to follow because, in the end I though he had a great message but it was very jumbled and hard to impress upon people.