“Gin, Television, and the Social Surplus”
I’ve been off the blogging grid for some time now. It’s been an absolutely amazing period of my life since my last blog, filled with incredible people and incredible growth. I’m humbled by the successes I’ve had an opportunity to be a part of over the last year. And, I’m hoping to put the proverbial pen to paper over the coming months to get back to putting my thoughts and ideas out into the blogosphere.
Last week I spoke on a panel at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Expo called Comparing Social Platforms, with some great people like David Recordon, Jessica Alter, Allen Hurff, and Patrick Chanezon. If the media from the session becomes available I’ll be sure to post it here.
I then had the opportunity to attend the keynote session, where Tim O’Reilly gave an inspiring speech on the power of collective intelligence and the need to go after “big, hard problems,” Max Levchin delivered compelling advice for entreprenuers, and Clay Sharky gave an absolutely genius talk on what he calls the “cognitive surplus.” His talk was so good, in fact, that I wanted to post it here. Trust me, its worth your time:
Can you imagine what the future of the internet will look like if we can move the needle even 10% from where we are today?
April 29th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
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.
May 9th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Glad to see you back my friend.
May 19th, 2008 at 5:58 am
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
May 22nd, 2008 at 8:45 am
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!
June 1st, 2008 at 12:07 am
Man, this is inspiring.
June 3rd, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Can I Borrow You For A Moment? The New Cognitive Surplus…
I’ve had a lot of conversations recently about crowdsourcing - using web tools to engage the public (or other large groups) to solve problems. Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research provides an example of how crowdsourcing helped improve a conference s…
June 4th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
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.
June 13th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
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!