Some Links & News I haven’t had time to blog about in the last couple of days:
Tim O’Reilly was interviewed by German Spiegel Online (one of my main news sources). One of the questions: would Mr. O’Reilly show the current wewb 2.0 content (and here: mainly youtube videos) to aliens, in order to show how far we’ve gotten with our civilisation… He would show Google though he said.
Adverblog writes about Coke „invading“ YouTube with a brandchannel, where you can upload you own season greetings and send them to friends. Good idea in general… But why would you want to do that through a coke brand channel and not a standard YouTube account? They aren’t the only ones, either. Levi’s allegedly also opened a brand channel.
The new Second Life Newspaper „Avastar“ of German tabloid „Bild“ is selling for 150 Linden Dollars. This shows in some respect, that market prices in Second Life haven’t quite equilibrated yet. Just recently I bought a T-Shirt for a third of that price. The language will be english, apparently, which makes sense considering that the majority within Second Life won’t know German.
The new book title of Joseph Jaffe will be „Join the Conversation“. This makes absolut sense considering the contents of this podcasts and blogposts, this is the (his) current topic.
PayPerPost makes disclosure mandatory. Good. Now bloggers have to disclose if they are publishing a blogpost with brand or productreviews. This improves transparency and even though they might loose some advertisers and bloggers it should help them in the long run.
Time Magazin has once again named their person of the year. But this time, it’s following the hype of web 2.0 and all that buzz around it, so the person of the year is us. The people of the internet, the bloggers, chatters, homepage designers, forum contributors, the Myspacers and Youtubers, etc. etc. Because we „control the information age“:
The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution. . . .
And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you. . . .
But at the same time, as people sit down and spend their spare time creating things they probably expected main stream media to do, there is equally a lot of crap going on, that nobody ever wanted to see:
Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.
I like that choice. 2006 really was the year of the social web. Not only in the US. Even in Germany („Old Europe“) web 2.0 has started to become a household buzzword. At least most of the major German newspapers had feature stories on it…
So what’s next, who can be the person of the year in 2007, if everyone has been it already in 2006? An alien?
I must admit I hadn’t seen most of these. And I just wonder, how „The Viral Factory“ measured these figures?
Interesting is one reaction of TV companies:
Television companies, losing viewers to the net, are now launching channels to show “viral videos�.
And apparently they need to react, since:
A BBC Online survey has found that the online video craze is eating into the time that young people spend watching television, with 43 per cent of those who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week saying they now watch less normal television as a result.
In an article with the headline „DIGITAL UTOPIA A new breed of technologists envisions a democratic world improved by the Internet“ Dan Fost writes about the Hippie-esque dream of the social web:
Dubbed Digital Utopians by some, and Web 2.0 innovators by others, this latest wave of tech gurus champion community over commerce, sharing ideas over sharing profits. By using Web sites that stress group thinking and sharing, these Internet idealists want to topple the power silos of Hollywood, Washington, Wall Street and even Silicon Valley. And like countless populists throughout history, they hope to disperse power and control, an idea that delights many and horrifies others.
All very idealistic, and considering the following quote, Web2.0 seems to simply follow on an ageless debate:
The core of the Web 2.0 movement resurrects an age-old debate about governance and democracy, one that was argued by political philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville: Are the benefits of democracy — taking advantage of what Web 2.0 proponents call the wisdom of the crowds — worth risking the dark side of mob rule?
Tim O’Reilly, who coined the term, doesn’t quite see it that way:
Yet while people, perhaps reacting to the greed that fueled the IPOs of the dot-com years, saw in Web 2.0 a chance to create a new collectivism, O’Reilly said, „I don’t see it that way at all.“
Web 2.0, he says, is about business.
He says many tech movements start out with similar idealism, only to give way to capitalism. For instance, O’Reilly says, Napster introduced file sharing, but now iTunes has people comfortable with paying for music online.
PVR Wire has a good analysis of the YouTube acquisition by Google.
Google itself is already the 3rd busiest site on the internet, and now that it owns YouTube the company has control over a tremendous number of internet users, probably a higher percentage than anyone else!
Here is an Alexa comparison of Google Video and YouTube:
So Google has bought themselves a few eyeballs, since Google Video didn’t perform quite as well:
Putting criticisms aside you need only look a the amount of users and growth of YouTube to see why Google bought them. 20 million regular users, the Top 10 site on the net, and 100 million video views a day.
According to PVRWire there are three main things Google can do now with the new pool of content:
Video adverts in YouTube videos: selling adverts within or rather after the clips of users, preferrably context-sensitive.
Selling premium video, just like on google video.
Licensing content to TV stations like Blib.tv. Actually, a colleague of mine suggested to me today, that Google could start or at least support an extensive TV Network with channels broadcasting those thousands of clips clustered by topic, user votes, relevance, etc. per channel.
Regardless of these benefits, there are two winners these days, and they may look like your average around-the-corner geek, but take care, they’re multi-millionairs now, with only about a year or two worth of work:
The quality is a typical average user quality, with the little mishaps at the end – true user style, I like that. It has been viewed 560,859 times in the last two days, which makes it not top-video (yet), but I am confident they’ll make the top ten of their own site.
Wo ich sonst so bin...