Reading Twitter today I saw a reference to this blog post by Clay Shirkyon.
It's a lightly edited transcription of a speech he gave at the Web 2.0 conference in April.
He compares the early days of the industrial revolution to the early days of TV, when we spent endless hours watching sitcoms.
"If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom."
Then came the Internet and the ability to produce and share content online.
To the question - where do people find the time to produce all this online content, he figures that if 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 content online, that one percent would be enough to do 100 Wikipedia-sized prjoects every year.
"If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen? I'm betting the answer is yes," says Shirkyon.
