The Web 2.0 Expo, co-produced by TechWeb and O’Reilly Media, is a global annual gathering of technical, design, marketing, and business professionals who are building the next generation web. It just wrapped up it’s East Coast run today. The conference featured a number of phenomenal keynote and general session speakers.

Among the keynotes was one of my favorite authors and presenters: Clay Shirky. Shirky is an adjunct professor at NYU who studies social media, and author of the book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. During his keynote Thursday at Web 2.0 Expo in New York, Shirky examined the problem of information overload. His premise was the fact that the problem is not that we have too much information to process. The problem is that our filters are inadequate. And privacy breakdowns are a similar problem — privacy is threatened because the filters we relied on to keep our private data confidential are broken, and we haven’t evolved good mechanisms to replace those filters yet. I thought that it was one of his best presentations and I’ve shared it below.

For a thoughtful summary and evaluation of Shirky’s presentation, take a look at Mitch Wagner’s post on Information Week’s Digital Life Blog titled: Clay Shirky Busts The Myth Of Information Overload At Web 2.0 Expo.

To take a look at other great presentations from the Web 2.0 Expo, take a look at the videos here and the speakers presentation files here. Definitely looks like it’s a well run and worthwhile event to attend.

As many of us know explaining exactly what social media, community and online collaboration is and how/why it’s different from what existed previously is sometimes challenging and more often than not frustrating. I just learned about this video, of Clay Shirky at this years Web 2.0 expo where he really breaks it down and makes sense of it all. One of the key takeaways is that media (both current and future) is not uni-directional but rather bi-directional. It’s no longer about simply consuming it, it’s really about consuming, creating and sharing. Another is: “Where is the mouse”. If you don’t know what that means, take a look at the video or at the very least read the transcript of Clay’s speech, I think you will get it.

My thanks to Jack McKee for posting about this video on his blog which brought it to my attention.