I am speeding along on a train somewhere in New Jersey. In minutes I will be in Philadelphia for this week's Crowd Fusion codejam. Probably on TechMeme I came across a link to an article by Clay Shirky called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. Intrigued by the title, I loaded it and 20 other articles into Firefox tabs. Many of those loaded articles will never get read, but I am glad I read Clay's from start to finish.

It's clever.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

He goes on to compare the total amount of time spent editing the Wikipedia to date and how much time we spend watching television. In the U.S. alone every year we spend 2,000 Wikipedia projects watching television. Wild.

Then he explained how when even a fraction of passive television watching time -- our cognitive surplus -- gets used for collaborative creative efforts how amazing it will be. People like to create. They'd rather be doing something that doing nothing and collaborative Internet projects might be the next revolution's gin and sitcoms.

About the title: A lifetime ago in Internet years, Clay Shirky wrote a column in Jason's Silicon Alley Reporter magazine. Being the naming guy (and the platform guy, yes, yes, I know) I got to give all the columns names. Xeni Jardin's was called Jardin Party. Okay, not my cleverest name. Since it sounded like the movie Get Shorty, I named Clay's column Get Shirky.

I worked with Nick White for years at Business Week. I was working more from home in 1999 when this happened, but I remember the horrible story being relayed to me by some co-workers when I was at the McGraw-Hill Building that next week.

Working late on a Friday night he left for a smoke break around 11pm. On the way back up his elevator stopped working. Security guards never noticed his cries for help or the alarm buzzing -- neither did the maintenance crews working over the weekend.

He didn't have a watch or cell phone. He had no idea what day it was, how many hours had elapsed or if it was day or night. He relieved himself down the shaft after prying the elevator door open. When he slept, he had to cover his eyes with his wallet to shield them from the blaring lights.

All he had to eat were Rolaids. He survived 41 hours without a drop of water.

Yes, there was a court settlement. Yes, he still uses elevators. You can't live in NYC and not use them.

I knew his story, but I never even thought about the fact that there was a video of his ordeal. The New Yorker posted it on YouTube.

Niki and I both use Twitter, despite the fact that neither one of us is a teenage girl. When Niki went into labor 10 days ago, she kept her family and friends updated via Twitter. None of them follow her using the service itself. They just kept reloading her blog to see the new updates in her sidebar. To them, Niki was just updating her blog.

While Niki was sending her tweets, I was sending mine. Here's a recap of our birth-related tweets, including the ones about Liv going back into the hospital with severe jaundice. She's much better now.

Niki Going in tomorrow at 6am to be induced! 7:40PM Mar 30
Niki @sarahgilbert, but I am soooo ready for me to have this baby. This is the longest preg so far...39.5 weeks. i am excited too, also nervous. 10:58PM Mar 30
Niki I have a bad tummy ache. Can't figure out if it is the v spicy Mexican food I had for dinner or a case of nervous jitters. Probably both! 11:01PM Mar 30
Brian Waiting in the admission room while Niki gets her blood drawn. I can't wait to explain to our daughter that they use a red pen for that. ;-) 7:07AM Mar 31
Brian 6am at the hospital on two hours sleep -- surrounded by soda machines -- is making me reconsider that whole "I'm giving up Diet Coke" thing. 7:23AM Mar 31
Brian Wondering if I can live Twitter Niki giving birth to our girl today and make every tweet exactly one hundred and forty characters. Unlikely. 7:52AM Mar 31
Brian Niki's dictating a Twitter message for me to send from her Verizon Samsung phone. I am totally lost without my BlackBerry's qwerty keyboard. 8:45AM Mar 31
Niki Starting IV now. 8:57AM Mar 31
Niki Makes sense. You can't have 'Liv' without 'iv'. 9:02AM Mar 31
Niki Just broke my water. 9:21AM Mar 31
Brian After the second Nirvana song came on Niki's iPod (not my doing, I swear) Niki had me switch to all Jack Johnson. Now that's birthing music. 9:23AM Mar 31
Niki Nurse asked if I am organ donor. Very reassuring. 9:46AM Mar 31

The New York Times has a story today about bloggers working themselves to death:

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop.

Marc Andreessen makes fun of their sensational, over the top angle with a list of his own alternate headlines.

They document two recent bloggers who died and one that survived a heart attack: Russell Shaw, Marc Orchant and Om Malik. I am happy that they included Om. First, I saw him a few weeks ago and he looks better than ever. Second, Russell and Marc worked with us at Weblogs, Inc. and if Om hadn't been on the list the Times might have drawn the conclusion that working for me and Jason kills people -- and that's just not true.

They also mention that "those on the lower rungs of the business can earn as little as $10 a post" which is a trip. In the early days of Weblogs, Inc. we paid $3.50 per blog post. Bloggers could do four posts an hour, so that was effectively $14/hour or $28K/year as a 40 hour/week freelance writing job. Nearly two years into the business we set a per post minimum of $10 across all of our sites with some earning much more.

Doing the same math, $10/post at four an hour is $40/hour and $80K/year. Of course, no blogger is doing four posts an hour for eight hours a day five days a week. Like Mike Arrington says in the article, it's not sustainable. It's just funny to see someone call that the low end when I can remember it being much lower.

Anyway, congrats to the NY Times for their successful exercise in blogosphere link baiting.

What an interesting development. The Jerry Siegel estate won one of their legal battles with DC Comics over the rights to Action Comics #1. The material had been created before they got to Detective Comics, Inc. and has been found to be exempt from their work for hire agreement.

Mike Gold explains how this means there will likely be a settlement, but in the meantime DC and Siegel's estates are co-owners of the copyright of a small portion of the Superman mythos: his name, the cape, costume and "S" symbol, rocketing to Earth from the dying planet Krypton, super strength and invulnerability. Not included are many of the elements added long after that first issue, like flying, x-ray vision, heat vision, the Fortress of Solitude, his boss Perry White, Jimmy Olsen, Lex Luthor, The Legion of Superheroes, Bizarro, kryptonite and much much more.

It's fun to fantasize about what new Superman stories would be like if published today by an independent comic book publisher like ComicMix, but that's not likely to happen. As Mike explains, these are only the domestic rights and they would still be co-owned by DC. Smaller publishers don't have the muscle to do the licensing and distribution deal for a quarter of a million dollar movie.

Oh well.

Maybe we can focus our efforts on getting Batman or Spider-Man on ComicMix?

In the end, that's what this internet is about. Do we participate in a project of cynicism or a project of code? Project managers call on us to code. Investors call on us to code.

I'm not talking about blind optimism here -- the almost willful ignorance that thinks bugs will go away if we just don't talk about them, or the cross browser crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. No, I'm talking about something more substantial.

It's the code of developers sitting around a codejam singing Sublime songs; the code of sites serving APIs to distant shores; the code of a young junior programmer bravely patrolling subversion; the code of a lawyer's son who dares to defy the odds; the code of a skinny kid with a funny domain name who believes that the internet has a place for him, too.

Code in the face of difficulty. Code in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of code!

When I was in high school I drank Coca Cola like a fiend. When I was in college I was thrilled when three-liter bottles came out. After college I hit my largest weight ever, 225 pounds. Not good.

Around the time I met Niki, I was drinking up to two two-liter bottles a day. I knew all the caffeine and sugar were bad for me, but I was hooked. I knew I couldn't quit the caffeine, but I decided to ditch the sugar by switching to Diet Coke. The only trouble was that I didn't like the taste.

I was consulting at Business Week and they had Diet Cherry Coke in the soda machines, so I drank those and over time alternated in some Diet Cokes until I was used to the diet taste. Sipping a regular Coke was no longer an option. It was too sweet. My plan worked, sort of. Over two or three years I lost 63 pounds, down to 162. Just from switching to diet soda and hitting a rowing machine twice a week.

My new problem was that I was drinking up to two two-liter bottles of Diet Coke a day.

I met an old friend of mine at an event he was attending and another old friend walked up and introduced me to the guy he was talking to, Jack Myers. I don't know if I gave Jack my business card or if he just has the mutant ability to sense peoples' email addresses, but I suddenly ended up on his newsletter mailing list. Not a weekly newsletter -- we're talking three or four of these a day.

The annoying thing is that they're about industries I follow and they're often useful. So I haven't unsubscribed. And I keep reading them. Damn.

Today's morning edition had an article by Shelly Palmer covering Antigua's recent copyright threats:

This week the government of Antigua threatened to unleash hell on the information economy. Well, kind of … they're threatening to repeal intellectual property treaties with the United States and to allow massive copyright infringement on the island if the U.S. doesn't hasten its response to pending trade disputes. In short, they are threatening to copy "virtually anything that can duplicated."

I haven't blogged in more than six weeks, mainly because there wasn't a lot of news I wanted to share publicly. Plus, it's just easier to give a half dozen updates over Twitter every day. Twitter has ruined blogging.

We have a baby daughter arriving any day now. Niki's mom died a week ago on a cruise ship halfway around the world. Niki can't travel to Florida for her mom's funeral this week, so that is a mess.

I had a great trip to the west coast a few weeks back, meeting with investors who wanted to hear about Crowd Fusion. That was exciting and reaffirming. We have a solid model and a great, growing team and I just want it all to get built and launched yesterday. My four favorite questions from the trip were:

• How is this different from Typepad or WordPress?
• How is this different from Glam or Sugar?
• How is this different from Mahalo?
• Can I get you some sparkling water?

I skipped SxSW because I wouldn't have been able to get back for our daughter's birth if Niki had gone into labor. She didn't arrive, but thanks to her I was able to miss the SxSW flu everyone else caught, a.k.a., SxSARS.

So this week I'm trying to tie up loose ends, get freelancers loaded up with work and squeeze in some meetings like the really productive ones I had in NYC yesterday. As an unexpected bonus I went to a True Ventures party for Automattic (WordPress), Sphere and Giga Omni Media -- plus some lesser known media brands like Hearst and The New York Times.

I didn't get to see Matt Mullenweg on my SF trip or at SxSW, but we did get to catch up last night. That's always good. I spent some time with Jason Calacanis, Om Malik, Alan Patricof, John Brockman, Toni Schneider, Scott Kurnit, MC Hammer, paidContent's Staci Kramer, TechCrunch's Heather Harde, Rcrd Lbl's Peter Rojas and Inhabitat's Jill Fehrenbacher. Like I said, it was an unexpected bonus.

So, am I done being quiet? I hope so.

Back in November, I saw that Rick Marshall had been fired from Wizard Universe, the website run by one of the biggest trade publications in the comic book space. They offered him a choice when they let him go: get two weeks severance for "future cooperation" and not making disparaging remarks or get no severance at all. They weren't interested in negotiating the number of weeks so he took the option where he didn't have to remain silent and did a great interview with Tom Spurgeon at Comics Reporter.

On his own blog, Rick collected many of the encouraging quotes he received including anonymous excerpts from some of his Wizard co-workers.

ComicMix recently hired Rick as our online managing editor. In the Publisher's Weekly comments about Rick's hiring, someone actually offered to have Rick's baby. As long as it doesn't distract him from cranking out comic news and helping us with some pretty ambitious editorial plans, I'm okay with it.

Over on Fleen's webcomics blog, Rick's hiring was described in more colorful language:

Rick Marshall - who along with Brian Warmoth successfully de-suckified Wizard's website and was dejobbed for his trouble - has landed at ComicMix, where he is contributing up a storm and taking on the position of Online Managing Editor.

Rick is tearing it up over on ComicMix. Recent email from our comic book journalism peers says ComicMix is becoming a very interesting read. Coincidence?

It's no coincidence that on same day we launch a simple one-page website for my new company Crowd Fusion Microsoft panics and plans to join forces with Yahoo.

In their official news release, Microsoft mentions how "the market is increasingly dominated by one player" as a significant motivating force. I think we all know that they're talking about Crowd Fusion and I must say that it's flattering.

TechCrunch zeroes in on that one line as well, but they don't mention us by name.

On Yahoo's own news site, the AP story explains that Steve Ballmer will not be taking no for an answer. Seriously, how did Microsoft even find out about my new company?

Giant Internet companies are not normally known for being so quick to react.

Kudos, Ballmer.

The game is on.

Since we have about four times as many freelance developers as we do designers and we need a whole lot of both, I decided to give Krop a try. A few different people had recommended them and I had seen them on a couple of sites, so I posted our designer job description.

Three of my first four applicants looked decent on paper. Overall the nearly forty results I got were good. I'd say the 37signals applicants were better overall, mainly because 37signals candidates had more pure web experience. Krop applicants usually have print and video backgrounds and ad agency experience.

Now we just need to load them all up with trial design projects. We have plenty to do, so that won't be difficult. It's easier to hand off a self-contained design project than it is to hand off development work.

This weekend's ComicMix podcast includes a brief but exclusive Heath Ledger interview. Our team got a chance to ask him about his role in The Dark Knight when he was doing press for I'm Not There in December.

In the interview, Heath talks about having to follow Jack Nicholson's Joker and how he wouldn't have taken the role if Tim Burton was directing the movie.

This week we also added an iTunes feed for our podcasts and a podcast-only RSS feed for feed readers.

And we updated our page titles. They used to have the name of the article followed by "at ComicMix" which was fine for some stories. Cloverfield Easter Eggs? was titled Cloverfield Easter Eggs? at ComicMix which wasn't too confusing. But we knew we had to change the titles when people started asking about these:

• Heath Ledger Found Dead at ComicMix
• Heath Ledger's Funeral to be Picketed at ComicMix

• Heath Ledger Found Dead - ComicMix news
• Heath Ledger's Funeral to be Picketed - ComicMix news

I love web comics. I have a comic book publishing company that's giving away comics online for free and I follow several strips both on their sites and in my feed reader. Some creators post their whole comic in their feeds and some just send out links letting you know a new strip is online. One of the ones that puts each daily comic in a feed is Savage Chickens, by Doug Savage. Hmm...chickens and feeds...a perfect combination!

Unlike the geek humor of xkcd which makes hilarious SQL jokes and Internet in-jokes, Savage Chickens is more accessible. It's like The Far Side, but starring chickens and drawn on yellow sticky notes. Today's chicken strip (oh, stop me, this is too easy) appealed to me since I haven't seen any of the recent movies with surprise endings.

Brilliant.

Crowd Fusion is making great progress and one day might even have its own website.

My recent quests for developers and designers have been really fruitful. I never heard back about the email spamming problem so I didn't post my job descriptions to 37signals again. I guess I figured that everything in Ruby on Rails takes only a few seconds and updates would be instantaneous, but that's silly of me. And snarky.

I did hunt for skilled candidates in Emurse again. I uncovered around 40 people whose skill tag clouds I liked and I contacted them. More than half accepted my connection requests and I added hour-long developer and designer calls to my already jammed days. Out of those interviews came:

• more than a dozen smart freelancers who can start working with us immediately;
• two rockstar developers who are tied up through the end of the month, but interested after that; and
• me sounding hoarse like a presidential candidate's husband.

I was already excited about Crowd Fusion before these interviews, but in the last few (blogging-free) weeks we've added some killer talent and managed to get a few more customers and investors interested in what we're doing without reaching out to them.

Now I just need to find a catch-phrase like "Excelsior!" or "To infinity and beyond!" that I can use at the end of these upbeat cheerleading posts.

Any suggestions?