Photos from the Fucking Daphne Kick Off Reading at City Lights Bookstore are up in Marlo Gayle's Flickr Stream. You can't tell from the photos but I am completely chuffed to be reading at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's shop.

A recording of my portion of the reading is available at DubLit

When people ask me what I do without a TV, I should just send them to this article: Gin, Television & Social Surplus.

She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So 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. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.

...but incidentally, Clay, your MT commenting script is broken, so I can't use my surplus effectively, so I'm posting this instead.

This calculation alone is pretty mind blowing. I was talking to someone a while ago about why US soccer fans aren't as ravenous as soccer fans just about everywhere else in the world. For me, it came down to american TV consumption. Soccer fans everywhere else - or even in newly-emigrated populations here - grown men are going out on their lunch time or days off to play the sport that they are interested in following. They are invested because they are involved, even if it is only in their neighborhood game, while here in the US, most of the time they are just watching it passively. If we could get American politics to be more like soccer everywhere else, things would probably look a lot brighter. I'm not pessimistic about this ideal, but I'm not holding my breath either.

My project, EPA Superfund Mashup: Exposing Environmental Hazards In Your Area is in the NetSquared Mashup Challenge. Nonprofits and other social-change agents are expressing their visions of how data can be recombined to advance social missions. Mine is V2 of, StopNewNukes.org. I’ll be extending it to include all EPA Superfund (environmental hazards and disasters) sites so you know who to blame when you find yourself hanging out with Blinky, the three eyed fish.

Vote for me and help determine which of the other 120 projects that were submitted to the NetSquared Mashup Challenge will go on to the 3rd Annual NetSquared Conference (N2Y3). The top 20 projects will have an opportunity to discuss and display their projects at the Conference. Conference attendees will vote to select the top three projects. All 20 projects will receive a share of $100,000 in prize money.

Possibly you’re like me and wondering what happened to TypePad & LiveJournal. I was too, until I got a message from AlertSF.org saying that power was out in some of southern and central San Francisco. Knowing that the Six Apart offices are in the SOMA (South of Market) section of SF, my guess is that these are related.

So, everyone calm down, save your blog entries for later and wait it out. You can check the SF Chronicle for updates. The initial story, “20k Without Power in SF” is here.

Not surprisingly, BoostUp.org is sponsored by the U.S. Army. They learn you real good in the Army.

Click here for the original picture

Peace Action West: Stay Strong!

This is something I set up for Peace Action West this week. I think it's pretty cool. It's essentially a prettified LiveJournal Blog, with VoicePosting enabled, thanks to some friends at LiveJournal.

Yesterday, Peace Action West sent out an eAlert to all of their members (around 40,000 of them) and gave them VoicePost instructions. You can also get instructions and post, by signing up on the page (this also signs you up for the mailing list, so there is a bit of marketing involved too. But isn't there always?).

I've been monitoring all the posts as they come in, and we've been transcribing them too. It's been pretty amazing to hear everybody, especially the people in places I would otherwise never really hear from...
...like from Lexington, Kentucky.
107K 0:32

The clips from the first two weeks of the Peace Action West Audio Petition is getting sent off today - all three hours of audio!

It got a nice writeup in the Post Conflict Resolution Blog as a good example of Web 2.0 advocacy.

"Today's new cool example of these technologies in practice is from Peace Action West and their online audio petition to Representative Pelosi and Senator Reid regarding President Bush's threatened veto of Congress's Iraq war supplemental funding package. Whatever you think of the current debate on the direction of the Iraq war, we're sure to see more of this type of advocacy work."