Where do people find the time?

Nobody who works in television has the right to ask that question.

– Clay Shirky

I’ve mentioned before that one of the common responses I get when encouraging people to give blogging a try is that they don’t feel they have anything worth writing about. Although I honestly believe that, no matter how mundane our lives and musings might appear, we all have somebody out there who’d be interested to read about them, I can accept that some people just aren’t in touch with their inner writer and will either figure it out one day or they won’t. Good luck to ‘em, I say.

Others claim that the only stuff they’d care to write about is so deeply personal that they couldn’t bear to share it so openly. Fair enough – I’ve used that excuse myself at times when personal circumstances have caused me to temporarily abandon my blog. The way I see it, if you’re trying to choose between sharing deeply personal thoughts you’d really rather keep to yourself and writing about stuff that’s really not important to you just so you can post something (something that isn’t deeply personal thoughts you’d rather keep to yourself), posting nothing is an acceptable third option. I’m waaaaaaaaaaaay too young to cut my ear off just so you’ve got something to read during your morning coffee.

Then there are the deluded, self-important assholes who smugly claim that they simply don’t have the time to blog and can’t understand how I manage. It’s hard to ignore the implicit accusation that the time I spend tinkering with my various online projects (blogs I maintain, communities I belong to, wikis I contribute to etc) is somehow wasted, a sink into which I pour my otherwise productive time.

I found the clip below about a month ago, showing author Clay Shirky speaking at a web 2.0 conference earlier in the year. It’s an insightful and well-delivered perspective on where this shift to online is taking us, starting with the wry observation that if gin was the critical technology of the industrial revolution (numbing the upheaval of transitioning to an industrial society), the critical technology of the post-war years must have been the sitcom.

Shirky makes a brilliant point in that we – individually and as a society – have a massive ‘cognitive surplus’ that we just don’t have a use for (if we did, there wouldn’t be a surplus). Throughout history this had never been a problem, because we used to spend all our time hunting mammoths, tending fields, and slogging it out in Mr Bumble’s work house. The dawn of the 40-hour week may have freed us from servitude in many respects, but it also created a problem we’d never faced before – what to do with all that spare time? For decades, television has been the sponge that soaked up all this latent time and energy, but now we’re finding new and better things to do with our time. Many of these new pastimes – such as playing elf warrior in Warcraft, or trading pictures of kittens with amusing facial expressions – might not be considered productive in the traditional sense, but it’s something, and watching television is nothing. And as the man says, it’s better to do something than nothing.

The numbers are astonishing. The estimated 100 million man-hours that have gone into Wikipedia to date may seem like a hell of a lot, but bear in mind that the Internet-connected population watches a TRILLION hours of television per year – enough to build 10,000 Wikipedias. That’s one hell of an asset, if we could only figure out how to use it – imagine the possibilities!

No, seriously, please imagine the possibilities. How do I find the time to create things online? How can you not?

Click here to watch part 2. If you’d rather just read about it, Shirky’s written account of the talk can be found here.

The funniest thing I’ve read in ages

Techmeme served up this story this morning, a pretty interesting piece about how ABC has started letting advertisers take makegood inventory (definition below) from ABC on its ABC.com video player during episodes of specific shows.

A makegood is defined as: Credit given to an advertiser (or advertising agency) by a publication or broadcast medium for an advertisement or commercial spot to make up for an error or unavoidable cancellation on the part of the publication or broadcast medium. The credit is usually in the form of a rerun of the advertisement or commercial.

The main point of the article was that some TV advertisers were being given free digital ad space in lieu of an airtime credit when something went wrong with an ad they had paid for, and in many cases the digital credit was more valuable. This is a pretty new development and one that makes sense for advertisers and the networks – if your TV ad schedule is packed but you have latent digital inventory then it makes sense to give the latter away, regardless of its book value. The alternative – underselling airtime to allow for all the freebies you owe to disgruntled advertisers – is damn costly, and is becoming something of a nightmare for networks battling viewer erosion.

The thing that really grabbed me though, was this fantastic passage mid-way through the article. I’ve maintained for some time that ad execs and their TV counterparts have their heads in their asses, but I never imagined one of them would be stupid enough to state it for the record (albeit anonymously). Of course, I should have known better:

More than a few media executives were astonished that some marketers would agree to [substituting digital makegoods]. “What have we come to?” asks one disgruntled executive. “How can this beat full-screen television? We don’t even know if they can measure the Internet properly, let alone giving us a demographic breakdown.”

Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Are you fucking kidding me? Let’s respond to each point in turn, shall we?

“What have we come to?” It’s called the twenty-first century. You might have heard of it? It started about 70 years after the birth of the TV industry, and ten years after the end of the decade you, your colleagues and the entire advertising industry are stuck in (in case you’re still hungover from yesterday’s coke-and-Dom-fueled “lunch”, I’m referring to the 80’s). Were the 90’s that scary? Was grunge so terrible you all just decided “Fuck this, we’re going back to the 80’s. Shoulder pads, Miami Vice and Flock of Seagulls. Woohoo!” If and when you do decide to catch up with the rest of the world, brace yourself: OJ killed somebody but got away with it, Magic Johnson got HIV but it didn’t kill him, America invaded Iraq (twice), Michael Jackson molested a bunch of kids, and to make matters worse they made a Sex and the City movie!

“How can this beat full-screen television?” Um, by being relevant, interactive, measurable and less intrusive. You should give this Interweb-thingy a try sometime, dude – it’s really swell!

“We don’t even know if they can measure the Internet properly, let alone giving us a demographic breakdown.” WTF? Of course we can measure the Internet properly! We can measure everything, that’s what’s so damn cool about the medium! Sure, some analytics tools are better than others, but even the crappy hit counters we used to stick on our FrontPage sites in the 90’s were more accurate than anything the TV networks have. I mean for God’s sake – do any of you know someone with a people meter? Talk about the pot and the fucking kettle!

What the hell, I needed a laugh today. Sweet.