Cognitive Surplus

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.

8 years in 1.5 mintues

-- Original: The Adaption to my Generation via: The Vancouver Manifesto
The basic idea is, take a photo of yourself every day in roughly the same position. Then compile them together and make a video of yourself aging. The result is really quite awe inspiring, seeing someone age 8 years in only a minute and a half. I think this would be an awesome idea to do for a toddler, and then when they are old enough, let them decide if they want to keep going or not. Watching the first 20 years of someones life like that would be incredible.

Fire and Motion

As is the norm now, Joel Spolsky has published another good article. It is the same article he has written a 100 times, just on a new topic. The topics are always interesting and insightful, always something that gets you thinking; however, I don't think that is what has lead to his popularity... it is the formula he uses. First, he is a good writer, he does cool things with the English language. This is the first step in any good article, if it isn't well articulated no one will care what you are talking about. Second, he talks about something complex in a simple analogy. He usually picks a good analogy, one that is related to his life, and that people can relate to. This makes people understand and be able to think about what he is talking about. Finally, he ends on a good note. You come away from the article thinking, "wow, that was really cool!"... but try not reading the last 3 sentences and see how your opinion differs. If this method wasn't covered in the technical writing course, it should be.

Cheers.

Google, something for everything

So, google can now host your web apps. This means that Google now hosts my: email, calendar, IM, documents, spreadsheets, photos and blog. I don't visit people's sites to read their blogs, I see it all through Google reader. Shortly most of my web sites / services will be hosted at google, using App Engine on the back end and Gears on the front. I use Maps for finding places and phone numbers, Transit to get around, and search to find anything...
Can anyone say Skynet?

Cheers,
Andy.
[Google Citizen 51348]

Sent to you by Andy L via Google Reader:

Developers, start your engines

via Official Google Blog by Karen on 4/7/08

Posted by Kevin Gibbs, Tech Lead, Google App Engine

We just launched a preview release of Google App Engine, a way for developers to run their web applications on Google's infrastructure. In the same way that Blogger made it easy to create a blog, Google App Engine is designed from the ground up to make it easy to create and run web applications.

With Google App Engine, developers can write web applications based on the same building blocks that Google uses, like GFS and Bigtable. Google App Engine packages those building blocks and provides access to scalable infrastructure that we hope will make it easier for developers to scale their applications automatically as they grow. This means they can spend less time dealing with system administration and maintenance, and more time building and improving their applications. (There's more detail on the new App Engine Blog.)

Google App Engine is free to use during the preview release, but the amount of computing resources any app can use is limited. In the future, developers will be able to purchase additional computing resources as needed, but Google App Engine will always be free to get started.

Today's launch is a preview release. We've got a lot left to do, and there are a lot of features we still want to add to the system. What we'd really like is to get your feedback on it, so we know which features are most important to you. We'll use your suggestions to keep improving the system.

This preview of Google App Engine is available for the first 10,000 developers who sign up; we will increase that number in near future. So, developers, please sign up, download the SDK, and start your engines.

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to Official Google Blog using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

Magic-eye - the text based version

All hail the hypnotoad