I’m a big fan of Clay Shirky. His book “Here Comes Everybody” is one of the best I’ve read about the sociology of participation on the Internet.

At any rate, through a tweet from my friend Eric, I came upon Alex Howard’s Gov 2.0 Week in Review post including a link to Clay Shirky’s presentation at the 2010 Personal Democracy Forum.

Any talk that features “The Association of Loose, Forward and Pub Going Women” and “Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf” is probably well worth watching.

Beside being entertaining, informative and insightful, what strikes me about Clay Shirky’s presentation is that it almost directly follows the format of an episode of This American Life (cue Ira: Each week we pick a theme…tell stories that fit with that theme…), but not only in the overall flow, but also in the flow of each story (action, action, reflection.)

The use of this structure and flow is not unique to this particular presentation. If you are interested, here is another example from his presentation at TED at State from a while back.

The reflection? It’s not necessarily profound, but here’s what I’ve got…Structure is important in storytelling. Good storytellers use structure as a tool to help them communicate.