This PSA should help you understand the upcoming switch to digital television. (via)

Clay Shirky recently posted a transcript of his Web 2.0 Expo keynote.

…If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project — every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in — that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

Then Shirky asks us to compare that to television. He says we Americans collectively spend about 200 billion hours of our time each year watching the tube (the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2006 and NHAPS in 2004 both concluded the average American spends 5.7 hours watching TV daily).

Put another way, now that we have a unit, 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.

This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Interestingly, the Television Bureau of Advertising reports that while TV viewing among adults has increased by double digits since 1988 (12% for women, 15% for men), viewership by teens and children has been basically flat.

And that’s scary news to those who’d previously thought the internet was a passing fad, that YouTube and Wikipedia would fade away. A 2005 Pew Internet Project study revealed demands by teens for participation and sharing in all media. Their suggestion: “Think of [your] relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship.”

Shirky points to lolcats. The “cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions” are exemplary of a new, participatory form of entertainment — exactly the kind PIP’s teens were demanding.

When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some fancy sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that message — I can do that, too — is a big change.

The takeaway? “Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.” That’s where people find the time for Wikipedia, lolcats, linux, and countless other endeavors. And this is all just beginning.

I’m a newcomer CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, I started watching it with season six while suffering a flu that immobilized me for what seemed like a week or more. Dumb with illness, I went searching for a diversion at the iTunes store and stumbled into the series. I had the entire season downloaded quickly; it took me two marathon days to watch them all.

I got hooked.

Now I’m following season seven, again via iTunes. It’s more convenient than Tivo — each show arrives on schedule and free of commercials — and with the savings I get by going with DSL (naked, $30/month) versus cable (internet + TV, $100/month), a “season pass” on iTunes looks like chump change for the little bit of television I want.

And there’s a chance that consuming my media that way gives me a greater sense of ownership.

So when I say that CSI has jumped the shark, understand that it’s a rather considered opinion. I’m not alone, though some (35) people claim it jumped it as soon as Jorja Fox was cast and others (171) point to the plushies and furries episode (season four, I’ve been catching up on the back seasons via Netflix). Whatever the moment was, it became clear it had already passed a few weeks ago when they did a clip show reviewing the miniature houses subplot, loosely stitched together around lab rat Hodges.

csi, crime scene investigation, jumped the shark, television, decline, tv

On demand internet TV has been just around the corner since the dawn of the popular internet, but like flying cars, it’s still not here. The problem is how TV streams clog the internet’s tubes. Bandwidth may be cheap, but there’s still never enough of it.

Well, that’s true if your metaphor for the internet is a hub and spoke system. Not so if you think of it as a mesh.

Kazaa and Skype creators/founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis are mashing up peer-to-peer distribution with the mainstream media and turning our computers into expensive TV tuners.

Joost (pronounced “juiced”) is graphically beautiful and very easy to use, though surprisingly slow on my Mac Mini (it runs fine on my MacBook Pro). Zach set me up with an invite when he heard I had no cable in my new home (“ahh, look at the media deprived dork, give’m an invite”). And when he flipped to World of Stupid I couldn’t resist.

Sandee’s not altogether pleased, though there is other content. Some.

At least it’s easy to use. A drag and drop install, launch, login, browse, watch. In the background the software is streaming the program in from other peers on the network — people like you — and back out to even more people. It’s watching your viewing habits, and though the few commercials running now won’t reveal it, you have to imagine the ads will become more targeted as advertisers start to understand the service.

Joost, tv, television, old media, ptptv, peer to peer, p2p, video, on-demand, streaming

The folks at WMUR’s Chronicle are featuring my friends Joe and Wendy and their dog sledding tonight. The photos above are of Justin in a race a few years ago (video of the finish also online). Warren hasn’t been so proud since we put the rocket up.

dog sledding, warren, winter, snow, wmur, television, wmur tv, new hampshire, warren nh, media, media attention