Jonathan and I have finally booked our vacation for this fall, and have decided that Turkey is the place. Because I was so handsomely rewarded for having read a bit of the history of the place when we went to Scotland, I decided to do the same with Turkey.

But so much has happened in Turkey! The Crusades, Alexander the Great, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottomans, Constantinople and, oh yeah, this little thing called the Trojan War! How am I supposed to learn everything I want to know in the months remaining?

There’s only one thing for a producer can do; come up with a plan and follow it through.

 

I’ve been wondering if it’s geeky of me to be reading The New Penguin History of the World.

Then yesterday I got a total thrill hearing that the mummy of Hatshepsut’s been found.

And I didn’t have to wonder anymore.

I’ve been mildly interested in the book Wikinomics recently, because it’s one of the sexy recent non-fictions to appear on my radar, and I’m obsessed with Wikipedia (well, who isn’t). But mildly interested means I haven’t really yet bothered to find out what it’s about.

But this morning I saw an interview with the author, and he basically explained that the book is about how the web will not only promote information exchange, but also collaboration (yawn). What really caught my attention, however, was a very compelling real-life example he used (details very approximate):

His neighbor owned a gold mining company, that didn’t really have a good way of finding the gold on its territories, and he was about to fold it. He decided as a last-ditch effort to share all the geological information he had about his lands on the net, and hold a contest to see if geologists around the world could use the data to find where the gold was. The prize for finding the gold was 500,000$. The contest entrants, using all sorts of methods he was unaware of, found 34 billion dollars worth of gold on his lands. Not a bad return on investment.

The bottom line is, outsourcing to the masses out there may be a very good way of creating value (Wikipedia and Linux are obvious examples). And there’s nothing yawnworthy about that.

I went to work happily thinking about the possibilities of harnessing this and how I could participate in it. Then, a few hours later, a complete stranger wrote to tell me she was writing a story about how San Francisco was banning grocery bags, and could she use one of my photos in her story. Guess she thought of a way for me.