Dave Morin

I didn't see the talk, but enjoyed reading it. For the sake of providing a counterpoint, it's worth pointing out that Clay's point suffers a little bit if you recognize that one person's hour worth of cognitive surplus is not at all the same as another. I won't go as far as claiming that everyone who can be contributing to the communal intelligence of the internet already does, but I do wonder how efficient the self-selection process has been so far. After all, on a micro scale (as far as this talk is concerned anyway) my criticism holds: only 10,000 people or so really contribute to Wikipedia. Perhaps there aren't that many Wikipedia that would be constructed if we forced the sitcom generation to give up an hour a week for the internet community service. The counter-counterpoint is obviously that those with the vision and the skills should urgently get into the business (or community service) of constructing the tools to take fullest advantage of everyone's cognitive surplus hours.

Glad to see you back my friend. :)

Max, I think more people will participate as they get more familiar with how. This is very much an early stage still, and there are plenty of creative individuals of all ages who have not felt the need to explore and enjoy what is happening in the social media space yet. As they do, they will add further diversity.

I was myself a little put off by the messiness of early Web 2.0 and initially very sceptical as to whether to jump in. Now I'm involved I still feel very much at the exploration stage because there are so many options. Twitter for me, and many others I guess, is a new catalyst for forming connections of both different and like-minded people, and was what brought me here. I'm looking forward to when we start to hear some really big testimonials from that activity. The way the Chinese earthquake news broke seemed to foreshadow that something profound is happening.

Dave, thanks for highlighting the talk. It will be of interest to my blog readers too, I'm sure.

Tim

I think that the social space will explode once people figure out how to work with it and make it big.

It's good to see you back, hopefully you can make some more posts in the future. I'm trying to do everyday and it's tough, even when you do have things going on in your life.

Oh, by the way, congratulations on your continuous successes!

Man, this is inspiring.

I agree with Max that human hours are not fungible, but I love the idea of a cognitive surplus and agree with Dave that Clay's talk is absolute genius.

Dave's own remarks this evening during a Web 2.0 Strategy panel discussion were thought provoking and inspiring.

Thanks.

Awesome video, I really like how Clay was able to give a frame of reference to the audience so they can understand how much time and thought it took to produce WikiPedia versus how much time we waste watching one-way, non-interactive media. Very compelling!

Clay's talk was thought provoking and Max brings up a good point about it, one that bears further exploration. Knowing that the surplus is there is a fairly obvious idea. Clay's talk gives shape and dimension to it, and holds out the promise of all that 'unproductive' time turning into productive time. So we got that goin' for us ; )

But it begs the more crucial question: How will behaviors change?

After all, sitting in front of a screen is sitting in front of a screen, whether you're telling Dora what to do, or whether some screenwriter told her ahead of time. A mouse click is not that different from a channel change. Gilligan's Island molded Clay and he seems not to have suffered because of it. Maybe the urge to 'leave the island' has carried him to his current status. Perhaps because he had wise parents, good teachers, inspiring mentors, a helpful local librarian -- good human guides of one stripe or another -- he escaped the basement and DID SOMETHING to change the world.

I want to know what people are going to DO with the surplus. (How has behavior changed because of the crime wiki? Has the Brazilian professor made people safer or more fearful? That's the question Clay did not address, one with answers that are more important than the quantitative assessment of efficiency of crimelogging via Google Maps vs. the crimesheet provided by local cops.)

The new cartography is cool and all, but it is a skeleton. Flesh and blood and free will and calls to action will be required for the adventure to occur. A map does not make decisions or choose directions. People do.

Thanks for the post, Dave!

Great talk.

Lets look for the mouse in Washington. We've been locked out of there for decades.

Thanks for the post. I've been passing it around. And well said, Mark.