a billion here, a billion there

sooner or later, it all adds up.

Google measures things in billions. Billions of pages searched. Hundreds of millions of pageviews.

Literary fiction measures things in thousands. An important title might sell 4,000 or 8,000 books.

For the non-math whizzes among you, four billion is about a million times greater than 4,000.

All to say that everything has a range. It's a big deal if a movie sells 3,000,000 tickets in a weekend. That used to be nothing for a TV show, but now it's pretty respectable for cable.

Some business books have sold more than 100,000 copies. Less than a dozen have sold a million since the beginning of time.

And ChangeThis is just about to cross a hundred thousand downloads directly from our site. Figure in passalong and other sites posting and printouts and it's pretty easy to estimate 250,000 changethis manifestos downloaded since August.

It's always been an experiment, so forgive me if it sounds as though I'm horn tooting. I think it's interesting to track how these ideas are spreading and to consider how a medium like blogging or PDF manifestos can help you spread your idea...