At first you may think Clay Shirky is stretching the analogy between the industrial revolution and the interactive computer experience of the 21st century, commonly called Web 2.0.  But as he continues and fleshes out his argument in the second half of the video, and especially the example of the 4 year old, I flipped my interpretation and thought the industrial revolution example may still be the wrong analogy, but because it is not STRONG enough.

if the video doesn't show, right click and click on play in the context menu.

A couple of key quotes:

On comparing WOW and Gilligan's Island:
"However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure out if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter."

Television is the "heat-sink" of cognitive surplus:
"And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation."

Another quote:
"I was arguing that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into."

You can read the whole text at his website: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

ht: Clay Shirky on the cognitive surplus

It's a good list.

But let's take one category for instance.

Publishing:
They list 10 entries ranging from Picassa to WordPress.  The two problems with this list (and the rest of the categories) is that some are there due to size and first mover status (eg. blogger) and some are missing even though they might have superior flexibility and functionality (eg. typepad or blogEngine dotNet).

And with this list of 100, how in the heck is anyone supposed to make a decent evaluation of even one category.  I mean you should spend some decent amount of time fiddling with the app.  Could be hours or it could be days depending on the use.

So you'll end up using the app with a network effect in place or the one that is "coolest" but maybe sub-optimal.

Still...good list.

The folks over at Dolores Blog have put together a dataset of Wisdom-of-Crowd named colors.  Essentially asking what the people out on the intertubes would name each color.

They have also create a tool into which you can enter a descriptive word and which then returns the colors that are correspondingly titled.  Kinda neat.

Try It!

...umm that's it, if  you were looking for more...well...

ooooooh look kittens:

heh.

Here's a clip:

This is pretty funny.  In a way it reminds me of the Terry Tate - Office Linebacker campaign by Reebok.

This is an expansion on techRivet's series of advertising as content:

• Viral Advertising as Content: Fight for Kisses
• Update: Viral Advertising as Content
• Viral Advertising as Content

And elsewhere:

• Human Skateboarding - who knew?

Virgin is using Flickr photographs without first contacting the people that took the photo.  They are getting free images to use as they please.

From all appearences Virgin did everything legally, if a bit ham-handedly. The pictures they used were up on Flickr under a Creative Commons License which allows broad usage guidelines. But they could have done better and leveraged the personal involvement of some end users...how about a free phone or even some shwag would have done wonders. Anything would have been better than just pinching some free pics.

At least one other company has done something like this in the past, Nikon: nikonstunninggallery. But they did it with user involvement and not to simply use Flickr as a free inventory of photos a la Virgin.  Smart of Nikon, less smart of Virgin.

Millenials

This flies right into the face of the millenial generation. The kids these days are unconcerned with putting their entire life out and up on the web. Here is an example of a company taking advantage of this free public content.

What other content types are available to use like this I wonder?

Will this change any attitudes of the millenials? I think not. They (and most everyone else too I might add) don't care and will just shrug this off as unimportant. In fact if Virgin had been a bit smarter, they could have run a contest around this and made it a net benefit.

BTW Virgin is putting a link to each of the photographers Flickr page for the photo they used. For instance this photo belongs to this guy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eudg/. I wonder if he knows he's in the advert campaign.

There is a lively debate going on over here: Dump Your Pen Friend

Hat tip: MIT Advertising Lab - Can You Use Flickr Pics in Ads?

PEOPLE ARE SOYLENT GREEN!

At least I think that's what he was saying. A very interesting article today by Chris Anderson where he equates spare cycles to online content.  What's the next content channel to be tapped?

People wonder how Wikipedia magically arose from nothing, and how 50 million bloggers suddenly appeared, almost all of them writing for free. Who knew there was so much untapped energy all around us, just waiting for a catalyst to become productive? But of course there was. People are bored, and they'd rather not be.

Sometimes he really has his finger on the pulse of what's going on...

If you remember seeing this video:

Well Frank [linky] claims to have unleashed it upon the world. Not that he created it, but that he discovered it and blogged it and that got dugg and the rest is history.

He posted a follow up video from the professor of anthropology at Kansas State University: Michael Welsh who created the first video.  In it he explains the video.

Pretty dang cool professor Welsh, way to go.

Update: One of the professor's inspirations: We Are the Web by Kevin Kelly.

I'll be leaving tomorrow morning for ad:tech San Francisco.  I'll give some updates over the next couple of days and a review on Friday.

For now here's the link: http://www.ad-tech.com/sf/

And some basic info:

ad:tech San Francisco will examine the "content explosion" occurring between channels, devices, brands and consumers, and many of the new strategies and practices this environment is demanding - from social networking to digital television.

There are some interesting seminars: http://www.ad-tech.com/conference-sf.asp

And the blog: http://www.adtechblog.com/

I keep getting invitations to join Twitter. It's apparently all the rage. Stop. No really. Stop. I'm the guy who won't even use IM because I hate being interrupted. Why in the hell would I use something that's even more invasive, less timely, and less helpful? Do I really have to know that you're at the movies? Good for you. Tell me about it the next time we hang out.

I just did a Google search for "Twitter demo" trying to find a good link for this post. The top result was a twitter post from a guy who was doing a Twitter demo back on March 6th. Twitter is full of helpful (sarcasm intended) information just like this. Hey Allen, how about sending me a copy of that demo you did on March 6th?

Criminy. This is the top result for that search? Talk about persisting non-useful data. Going through the whole first page of Google results I did not find a legitimate demo. This just goes to show that even the mighty Google can be brought to its knees by the voices of thousands of inane, highly intertwined, conversational snippets.

And yes, I do realize the irony of the fact that I like to blog. Here's the deal though, it takes me a long time to write the average post and I'm generally not infusing it with boring personal details (except for this present post, of course). I generally try to provide value or debate, and I can't do that if I hear blips and bloops every few seconds or have crazy pop-ups or dancing messages all over my screen.

I think I understand the Twitter impulse. We all want to feel like people care what we're doing, like we're the center of our own little clique, our own little universe, that people are going to be intrigued by our trip to the shopping mall. I just think there are more productive ways of spending time. We could start, for instance, by actually hanging out together (gasp!), although you might not like me as much when I slap you silly when you read your mobile and tell me that "Sasha just got home" or "Brandon's taking Corky for a walk." I'll warn you now, if you dare send a message saying "hanging out with Eric" I can guarantee you next message will be "Eric is cranky and took off. Who wants to hang out?"

*in case you've been following along at home, this post really was written by Eric and not by Greg.

So in this post over at BoingBoing [linky], our intrepid poster, Cory Doctorow, posted an interesting link regarding the DMCA.  It is an interesting article, but what was interesting to me was a derivitive on the post, the problem and his call for help and the response of his readers.

...(McGill University's crazy media player won't play the video in my browser for some reason, and they don't have a direct download link -- someone rip/post this and send me the URL?)

Link, Link to video

Update: Here's the Windows stream -- still won't play for me, but maybe someone can transcode it to something less brain-damaged. -- Thanks, Whiteg!

Update 2: Thanks to Jason Turgeon for ripping this video to something easier to see. Here's the whole thing, and here's Bruce Lehman's bit.

The "crowd" jumps in and solves the issue.  This is the benefit you get by ceding unnecessary control to your audience.  Excellent example.

Jeff Han blew people's minds last year at the TED conference with this presentation on multi-touch computing. He showed us what could be accomplished when interfaces just get out of the way and we get to manipulate our data with our own hands, rather than through crufty intermediary devices.

So, while the Han video is insanely cool, I was trying to come up with an idea of how this technology could help me in my day to day work environment. I don't use maps. I don't need an interactive lava lamp or to manage mountains of photos all day. I sit in a cubicle in front of three separate computer monitors (2 for my laptop - the onboard and a separate one, and one for my desktop development box). My work revolves greatly around email, Microsoft office products (blech), and some organizational webapps that I use to remember and manage what's important. In general, I think I have pretty good systems for what goes where, especially on my computer and network drives.

As I looked at the mess that was my desk, however, an idea finally began to emerge. I could use the new interface to completely replace my entire desk! Now that a sizeable screen has the ability to access any amount of virtual space and I have the ability to navigate that space with simple gestures there is no need to keep mountains of paper (half of them with huge "confidential" reminders printed all over them) stacked out in plain view or in little file folders.

It also opens up the possibility that I can use smaller interfaces to access my virtual workspace remotely. As long as an input device is large enough to gesture and the scaling technologies allow us to navigate at any scale, there's no reason I can't use an iPhone or an ereader during a meeting to access files on the network, distribute them to others in the room, and generally replace all the paper cruft which would normally be going on. No more printing PowerPoint decks, OK?

What I'm really talking about is the merging of multi-touch computing with something like the 3D BumpTop Desktop below:

Maybe the combinations of these new interfaces spell the death of my messy real-world desktop and the birth of my messy virtual desktop? Dare to dream.

This was a very good event.  Dare I say awesome. 

Web 2.0 Bootcamp.

The speaker is Dion P. Hinchcliffe who writes for ZDNet : Enterprise Web 2.0 search

I went with my company's VP of engineering and we came out of this energized to build new things and make changes to process and goals.  We feel vindicated that we are doing some of the things brought up by Dion already, but we also felt a bit nervous that some of the key elements are missing from our company's web presence.

I won't go into details because I believe wholeheartedly that the information imparted to us by Dion holds significant industry advantage and our company paid for it.  I will recomend that you take this course.  It is quite enlightening.

Two things emerged from this speech that I can tell you. 

1. The internet is going through a complete paradigm shift (hackneyed phrase though it is).  If you don't get in front of it now, TODAY, you will be out of the money by the end of 2008 if not sooner.
2. If your product is mediocre, you will be crushed.

Besides that you're gonna have to go listen to Dion Speak.

I will be attending this [linky] on Wednesday.  Look for a complete round-up to follow. 

I am going into the conference with a healthy dose of skeptisism.  I believe that the success or failure of an online business (or any business) has much more to do with a solid business plan and a revenue stream behind it.  

Web 2.0 is merely chrome on top of your machine.  It can add value, but beware of making it an engine for success.

Lede:

Designed for those building next-generation products and services online, this intensive, day-long course provides a thorough grounding in the revolutionary world of Web 2.0, a set of design patterns and business models that are reshaping the face of the Web today. Web 2.0 describes the most successful rules for doing business online by uncovering the power of using the intrinsic strengths of the World Wide Web that have only recently been fully understood.