Clay talked about cognative surplus or the ability to volunteer free time to work on projects. He mentioned the wall cats as a project of this type becasue it is what someone does in their free time and makes public no matter how bad it is. Ushidi is also an example of this because some programers just gave their time to this cite to get the word out about what was happening. He separates these by labeling them communal and civic. The cats are communal because they are for the makers by the makers. But Ushidi is civic because it is by the makers for the world. The cats are fun to make but don't really make a difference for anyone except if you get a laugh out of them. Ushidi is different because it makes a difference and gives quality information to the world. This can be a reflection on the type of person who is using cognative surplus. The cat person might just want a laugh while the Ushidi person wants to make a differnce and change something.
This was deffinetly not my favorite talk becasue I didn't know what he was talking about until it was half done and the whole peice with the daycare didn't seem to relate to the cognative surplus topic to me. He didn't really have any good tie-ins besides Ushidi and the cats so it got old when he kept going back to the same examples over and over. If he had more developable examples or if he just had more this talk would have been better. This connects to me becasue I spend a lot of time watching T.V. and laying around. The only part of this talk that made me think was when he said the the world has a trillion free hours a year. I wonder what we could do if we all put some of that time to use.
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