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Shirky goes so far as to calculate that Americans watch close to 200 billion hours of TV a year, each and every hour wasted potential. Nothing new there. But by contrast, he estimates Wikipedia — the entire, massive, impressive project of it — required about 100 million hours of thought. In other words, thanks to the Net, a tiny sliver of that cognitive surplus was finally put to use online, and look what a useful, powerful thing it created.
This smart guy took Wikipedia and mashed it up with Yahoo’s new location service, to give you a service that finds Wikipedia pages near you and delivers them to your cell phone. That took about 10 hours and 100 lines of Ruby code.
