Clay Shirky reports on a conversation with a TV producer, after describing a flurry of activity on the Pluto page:

She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So 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. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

100 million hours sounds like a big number, but as Clay goes on to describe, it’s tiny. 100 million hours is about 20 minutes per US citizen - roughly the amount of time collectively spent watching advertisements in a typical weekend. (That’s Clay’s number: I’d have guess it only took an evening for each American to watch 20 minutes of adverts, but I am clearly a TV-pessimist and out of touch.) HT: Virtual economics.

Update: My TV pessimism was correct - see Comment No 2 from Gerald, below. Thanks, Gerald!

The technology is here, HT Seamus:

TimeMachiner is a new mini-app that lets you email people in the future. Use it to remind yourself to do something that you’ll more than likely forget, keep your future self on the straight and narrow, even wish your friends happy birthday…

Useful for reminding yourself of last year’s resolutions, but beyond that, what economically-interesting applications can y’all suggest?

Update: A loyal reader comments:

I can suggest one interesting experiment. Put up a website which provides this as a service. On the front page, put an easy-to-use form. Make the service free and open. Then have no privacy policy at all, so you can do what you like with all the email addresses you harvest. Then all the helpful bloggers will do your marketing for you. (Step 3: Profit!)

Good point…

I wrote about the dilemma of passwords here: they must be impossible to remember, change frequently and never be written down. Now a kind fellow called Sean Gilbertson has sent me a pamphlet on his “Cryptogic” system. He suggests combining a fixed password section (eg TimFT) with a variable password. For instance an Amazon password might be 3TimFT3 because Amazon has three syllables and three vowels, while an eBay password would be 2TimFT2 because eBay has two syllables and two vowels. Pick your own simple rule for deriving a variable password.

It’s a nice enough system, and does deal with the important problem of using different passwords for different sites - which was the original question! Still doesn’t help much with the requirement to change passwords constantly, alas…

A longer piece from Scientific American on Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, virtual world economist:

Just as in real-world markets, in-game prices are sensitive to the law of supply and demand. Prior to Guðmundsson’s arrival, a new asteroid belt was seeded with an abnormally high level of the usually rare mineral zydrine. Prices dropped for six months until the ore sold for half its normal cost. The developers then updated the game so that less zydrine could be refined from other compounds. In the meantime, players began to stockpile the mineral until the price leveled out, which Guðmundsson points to as proof of a working economy.

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution is quoted as a sceptic in the article:

“What makes experimental economics work is that you truly have a controlled experiment. When you have these virtual worlds, as I understand, people are not conducting controlled experiments. They’re running these onetime simulations. Whatever result you get is interesting, but you don’t know what to make of it. You’re stuck.”

That seems to be true of Guðmundsson’s work, at least. It is doesn’t have to be true - see my discussion of Ted Castronova’s virtual world experiments.

Picture: CCP Games

I recently wrote about migration to virtual worlds. Now the BBC interviews an economist whose job is to analyse the economy of Eve Online:

Dr Eyjo Gudmundsson is the lead economist, a virtual Alan Greenspan, who works to make sense of all the data.
He said: “Within the game I supply players with economic information so they can make decisions about their own production, what they are going to produce and how they are going to produce it.
“It’s basically the same economic questions as in real life. It’s about strategy and an important part about strategic decisions is logistics and having access to the resources you need to win your war.
“It’s like a real war in the sense you have to plan ahead. It’s about long-term planning and long-term strategy.”
Every quarter Dr Gudmundsson and his team produce an economic newsletter analysing trends inside the game.
“We are looking at markets, at production and long-term trends that show the movements of the players.”

Seamus McCauley has an interesting thought, inspired by, um, me. In The Logic of Life, I write:

"the experimenters offered the subjects a snack: fruit or chocolate. Seven out of ten subjects asked for chocolate. But when the experimenters offered other subjects a different choice, the answer was different too: ‘I’ll bring you a snack next week. What would you like then, fruit or chocolate?’ Three-quarters of subjects chose fruit."

This is just one of many examples when our short-term, dopamine-fired preferences conflict with what we might choose given an opportunity to reflect in tranquility. Seamus then asks what that story implies for online news:

Apply for a moment this understanding of decision-making to newspapers and we arrive at a not-very-comforting conclusion. A newspaper is a package of information, the celebrity gossip and TV listings bundled in with the op-ed and the current affairs. Choose the bundle of news in a newspaper and you satisfy both parts of your decision-making brain. The dopamine system gets the immediate gratification of reading about the fabricated erotic misadventures of some soap actress or the Spurs result; the cognitive system gets the glow of knowing there’s real, hard, investigative news in there somewhere too (don’t worry, you don’t ever have to actually read it to get the effect).
Online, the news package is unbundled (we already know this) and hard news outside the bundle is hard to monetise (we already know this too). But the effect on reading habits of unbundling hard news from the newspaper package seems likely, from this understanding of how decisions are made, to have a disastrous impact on the propensity to read that news (this might be new). Online, news consumption is all about immediate gratification: you choose the story you want to read now every single time.

I think Seamus is saying that you shouldn’t be getting cheap thrills from this blog but should read something worthier instead… His whole post, with lots of tempting short-termist links, is well worth a read.

Berkeley Electronic Press is a wonderful institution and was ahead of its time when established in 1999, but BEPress editor Aaron Edlin doesn’t want to be ahead of his time any more. He wants Windows XP:

We now buy Dells with the old operating system (though we have heard that won’t last forever) and scrounge around for “new” versions of the old MS Office 2003 elsewhere, which we install ourselves. The added time and expense is worth it…

Now people complaining about Vista is nothing new, but Edlin has a good layman’s expectation of why Vista can catch on even though I’ve never met a person who likes it:

Microsoft controls many things. Obviously, it owns its old software and can decide at what price to sell it and whether to sell it at all. And Microsoft owns its new software. More subtly, Microsoft can control expectations. And expectations turn out to be everything when network economies are substantial, as they are in software markets.
If everyone tomorrow woke up expecting that the world would shift to Apple within six months or a year, then sales of Windows would plummet. Why buy a Windows machine when all your colleagues will own Macintoshes and can help you on them, but not on Windows? Why buy a Windows machine when all the independent software developers will program for the Mac’s new Leopard system, and not Windows? The expectations are self-fulfilling.

Edlin’s proposal?

I hope the antitrust authorities give serious consideration to a remedy that Ian Ayres, Hal Varian, and I have developed. Suppose Microsoft had to allow licensing of old versions of Microsoft software at a reasonable price (perhaps the price of the new version) whenever Microsoft brings out new versions. This would give Microsoft an incentive to make sure that new versions were compatible and significantly better than old versions—otherwise, the new versions wouldn’t sell, or at least wouldn’t sell easily. Wouldn’t it be great if Microsoft’s new software had to compete successfully at least against its old software? Then we would know the world was improving.

In the meantime, he’s trying to change our expectations by urging everyone to stick with XP…

Who could resist reading on when an article starts like this?

Would you like your penis enlarged? It is a question I get asked a lot.

Really?

Not by women, thankfully, but in the e-mails I receive every morning. For just $70, I could open up "new exciting horizons of sensual pleasure" and put an end to "being shy of [my] manhood in the showers".

It’s a great piece about a BBC investigation into spam. The eventual conclusion should be obvious but sadly isn’t widely-known enough: that when you click on a spam email you are not only opening yourself up to being scammed, but you’re also encouraging more spam to be inflicted on the rest of us. Don’t do it, bozo. (A sad case of a negative externality.)
Relatedly, Steven Landsburg calls for those who create computer viruses to be executed.

He reports:

I’ve just got back from ten days abroad (from Amsterdam to Israel to several cities in China) and while I was in China AT&T cut off my phone service. Why? Because I’d apparently run up a $2,100 bill.
And how did that happen, when I hardly used the phone at all? Because the iPhone’s email app keeps automatically fetching email every ten minutes even when it’s roaming abroad. I know I am the last person on the planet to discover this…

I doubt it, Chris: you’re the editor-in-chief of Wired, for crying out loud! Read the whole story here.

Cory Doctorow thinks so, in a piece subtly titled "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook":

Sure, networks generally follow Metcalfe’s Law: "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system." This law is best understood through the analogy of the fax machine: a world with one fax machine has no use for faxes, but every time you add a fax, you square the number of possible send/receive combinations (Alice can fax Bob or Carol or Don; Bob can fax Alice, Carol and Don; Carol can fax Alice, Bob and Don, etc).
But Metcalfe’s law presumes that creating more communications pathways increases the value of the system, and that’s not always true (see Brook’s Law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later").
Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I’m inclined to think that these systems are subject to a Brook’s-law parallel: "Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance." Perhaps we can call this "boyd’s Law" for danah boyd, the social scientist who has studied many of these networks from the inside as a keen-eyed net-anthropologist and who has described the many ways in which social software does violence to sociability in a series of sharp papers.

Cory has many more complaints  - and a separate one about privacy here.
Meanwhile Seamus McCauley thinks Facebook advertising is dead on arrival because people will get plug-ins to block Facebook ads the same way we all use Firefox to block the advertising on the rest of the web.

At the heart of Cory’s complaint is the idea that Facebook tries to trap us into eyeballing the site by, for example, sending highly uninformative messages - "Bob has send you a message on Facebook, click here to read it". He believes that we’ll all give up soon enough because it’s all too annoying.
I tend to agree. My research on rational addiction suggests that even heroin addicts will quit if the circumstances that led them into the habit change. If they can kick an unwelcome habit, so can Facebook users.