I just read an awesome article by Clay Shirky about social change, gin, the cognitive surplus, and why televisions don’t come with mouses:

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.

Read it »

Here are some podcasts that I’ve been nerding out to recently (these are direct links to the feeds):

• Seminars About Long Term Thinking
• IT Conversations
• NPR: Intelligence Squared