Given the content of the last few podcasts, I thought the Dean and Chapter of the Word diocese might be interested in this:

in which Mr Clay Shirky, a noted commentator on internet activities, comes to the striking conclusions that:

Americans spend 100 million hours a weekend watching advertisements on TV, which is the amount of time the whole internet has invested in getting Wikipedia to the state it is in now.

That:

It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.

That:

This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And that

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.

In case anyone fears that I transcribed this myself, there is a readable version. There is even a story about a four-year-old and a DVD that Mark Ellen can raise his eyebrows at.