753,00 CNN iReporters - and counting

Here comes everybody...

Here's an astonishing statistic:

There are currently 753,000 iReporters registered with CNN.

Let me say that one again, this time in bold because it deserves it:

There are currently 753,000 iReporters registered with CNN.

Buried deep in a recent report by The Nieman Foundation at Harvard,  (8th paragraph down), this is really the headline.

Three years ago, NYU's Clay Shirky published a seminal book entitled Here Comes Everybody.

In it, Shirky quite presciently predicted that more and more things done by 'professionals' would henceforth be done by crowd sourcing.

The absolutely astonishing iReport figures bear this out.

If each iReporter only produced one 2-minute video, that would result in 1.5 million minutes of content, or 250,000 hours of content or 31,000 8-hour broadcast days of content, or enough material to fill CNN until the year 2111.  From volunteers.

Clearly something is happening here.

And we are just at the very beginning of it.

Yesterday, I had a fairly surreal conversation with an executive from a major real estate company.

My idea was to 'empower' people to create videos to sell their own homes.

Think of this as iRealestate.

He agreed that this 'was going to happen'

He just didn't want to be part of it.

"It's going to destroy my business. My job is to hold this off as long as possible".

Anyone ever hear of King Canute?