New Trade Routes

Drawing digital pathways on the new trade maps.

Seattle, WA USA

Trade drives the way people interact.  People, products, money, and ideas follow the trade routes and impact everything in their path.  Keeping pace with the way trade routes are changing is essential to success or even survival.  New Trade Routes is working to better understand the changes so we can help our clients, investees, and grantees improve their chances of success.

 

Filtering by Tag: Clay Shirky

Finding the Time

October 11, 2010  /  Jay Leon

Since starting this blog I have stopped using time constraints as an excuse.  Reinforcing the fact that I have control over my time is one of the benefits of writing regularly for fun.  Clearly this activity is not essential -- so if I have time to write on my blog every day, I must have time for a lot of other things.

This weekend I started reading Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus.  Right in the beginning he sets up a very interesting contrast:  Volunteers editing Wikipedia vs watching TV.  Shirky estimates that the cumulative time spent on Wikipedia writing/editing is something like 100 million hours of human effort.  Say what you will about Wikipedia, but I find it quite useful.  I would trade 100 million hours of everyone's TV watching time to get a Wikipedia.  

It turns out that Americans watch about 100 million hours of TV commercials -- every weekend.  Can you believe that?  We could create something as valuable as Wikipedia -- every weekend -- just by not watching the commercials on TV!

4 Comments
categories / New Media
tags / Clay Shirky, Wikipedia