Clay Shirky just posteda transcript of his Web 2.0 conference speech entitled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus . Well worth a read.

He’s done some fascinating math for us. Observe:

…if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.

…

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 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

I’d wager that yes, it is going to be a big deal. Collaborating with people via the internet has already enriched my life tremendously. I’m certain that’s not going to stop. What a great future to look forward to!

This might be a good time to just go ahead and ask if anyone wants to collaborate with me on the San Diego local food map.