Energy is Abundant

Geo tagging

Energy is abundant - reCaptcha

One thing that has amazed me time and time again about people in general is the amount of effort and energy we spend on different tasks. It can be a by society deemed productive and useful task or as it is most of the time a seemingly useless one. We make meaning. In our work, our hobbies etc. We justify our existence that way, it is a survival tactic. People search for meaning. Nothing really odd about this. But endlessly fascinating. It inspires. Networking has allowed us to enhance our social networks and find more niched tasks to interact with as well as people to do them with. Imagine the combined energy, effort and creativity going into 8 million people playing WOW. It is 20 trips to the moon and back, each month probably. Can you compare efforts like that? Well maybe not. But the energy is constant. The time and attention spent is probably the same. What if you could focus that energy to specific tasks in the "real" world. What would happen? Well it happens all the time. A good example is the open source movement. The results are visible and effects our daily life. Another example I think is very telling to what you can do to focus this energy is reCaptcha. Have you ever signed up for a service our membership online? Do you remember if there was an image with some crocked text you were asked to decipher. Well If you saw 2 words instead of one you were probably taking part in an amazing effort to digitalise old books.

Quote from reCaptcha:

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

I would like to channel the collectives energy in different ways. Make plattforms for focus that's my mission. I will keep posting examples of this kind of work as I come across it.

Enough said

Thank you! I really appreciate it. I have always been a passionate user of several internet "tools". I have tried to share that passion with others, but to get over peoples innate thresholds about technology is a struggle each time. Explaining that this is really not complicated and you will most likely benefit from using it was exhausting. Sharing passion drains you. So thank you Commoncraft for making that process so much easier. Just copy-paste-send and wait for the "Ahaaaa now I get it".

Social bookmarking explained:

Wiki's explained:

RSS explained:

Social networking:

Google Docs:

The power of the fan

Today I was looking for some moodboard material and I thought about a game called Homeworld. It was released a few years ago på Sierra. It's a space strategy game. The plot in short is: your civilization has been destroyed you only have one mothership left and you need to find a new place to live. It was truly an amazing game, atmosphere, gameplay, music , everything was balanced really well. So then as the experienced researcher I am I tapped into the collective memory known as Youtube. With great success I found not only footage from Homeworld but also footage from a Battlestar Galactica mod for it. It looks amazing, fans of the series created this add-on to a great game and enhanced not only the original game but gave more value to the TV show, at least that's was what I thought. I spent the next few hours looking at outtakes from old BSG shows and reminiscing, that if anything has to be a proof of value. It's just a wonderful symbiotic relationship. I was blown away by the passion and the geekiness of it all. But also the power of it. Fans extending their fantasy with whatever tools they could find. I love it, and I love the way you can stumble upon such joy.

So I bring you Battlestar Galactica: Fleet Commander