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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."

It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

At least they're doing something. Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

One per cent of that  is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you? Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn't this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It's fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn't as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn't the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

Part of that success for mobile ads could relate to the novelty of the format, Strother suggested. As people grow more accustomed to seeing ads on mobile Web pages, clickthroughs will decline, the argument goes.

Nevertheless, Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone has shown that with a decent screen size and intuitive navigation, U.S. consumers will use their phones for activities other than talk and text messaging. Google is hoping that efforts such as its own Android initiative will lead to a new generation of handheld devices that help the mobile Web live up to its promise.

While "some of the bigger brands have made some serious commitments to mobile," Strather said that the tendency among advertisers is to make mobile a microcosm of an aggregate digital budget, or to treat mobile advertising as an experimental expense. "Very few companies on the advertising side have made mobile a standalone item on a line-item budget," Strother told InternetNews.com.

The company is trying to keep file sizes small, so that the ads do not unduly slow the load times of mobile Web pages, Agarwal said. Slow speeds have been a common complaint about the experience of browsing the Web on a mobile device.

Google also said it will only show one display ad per page.