The idea of putting the spare time of the masses to better use has come up a couple times over the last couple days and I think it is worth mentioning here. Boing Boing has a good article on just how much of this free time is available.
Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year [spent watching tv]. Put another way, 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.
It is those hours not wasted on TV that produce projects like apache (which now out flanks Microsoft IIS 2:1) and wikipedia. It is harnessing the 5, 10 or 20 minutes of spare time thousands of people are willing to spare that allows these mammoth projects to be completed freely and openly and for the benefit of everyone. There was a great TED Talk on Open-Source economics that delves deeper into the social and economic ratifications of this model.
Pick your favorite project and donate your spare minutes... or for that matter pick a hobby... just turn the TV off and you'll be amazed at how much "cognitive surplus" you have.
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