I'm thrilled to announce that Clay Shirky has joined our research advisory council. Clay is a writer, consultant and teacher who has spent years talking about the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He teaches New Media as an adjunct professor at New York University's (NYU) graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technological networks, how our networks shape culture and vice-versa...

...Clay has written extensively about the internet since 1996 and he speaks frequently on emerging technologies at a variety of forums and organizations. Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net_Worker, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer.