coz it’s wonderful.

“YouTube has 100 million clips viewed per day; 65,000 new videos are uploaded daily” – this certainly implies greater choice for the consumer being that the video clips are accessable from anywhere internet is available, uploadable by any internet user. But the sheer fact is that if the average video length is say 1 minute, then that equates to 65,000 minutes of new content created each day. That is 45 solid days of viewing uploaded every day. Even the most seasoned couch potato would struggle to watch more than 6 solid hours a day, so one day of new content on You Tube would probably really take the better part of a year.
The node of uncertainty I have on it impacting the media world at large doesn’t revolve around the obvious advantages quantity provides for the consumer but the issue of quality.
In some ways Google’s purchase and subsequent advertising payments to content loaders provides an incentive to upload quality video’s and thereby attract more viewings, there are going to be limitations as to how many people can view it. Of though the odds of having your clip being amongst the 100 million viewed each day are still statistically insignificant, a user rating allows people to determine the quality of the video and no doubt Google’s search algorithms help too, but what in the business world Web 2.0 has created would be described as perfect competition.
The key for broadcasters is to be different, that is what I would assume, a video that has its first viewer be not it’s specific target market by virtue of user generators of content not likely to be the user generators of sophisticated and effective marketing campaigns would be indicative of the fact that the big success stories of youtube, are less than 65,000 probably less than 1,000 thus far, being lonely girl, P-diddy’s famous King of Music and Fashion clip, the Thai inmates dancing to thriller… even then I am sketchy on how accurate my details are.
Probably the ‘node of uncertainty’ I have about the impact of Web 2.0 is the supply/demand factor drawn about by the sheer abundance of suppliers of media content, in that any given consumer or even many consumers has very little ability to actually pay attention to much of the content. The chances of a contributer being one of those whose video strikes it big (200,000 hits or more worldwide in a month) are probably conservatively less than 1/65,000.
What this means is that an abundance in supply of anything means a shortage in whatever it is that it consumes (not my words but I forget who said them) but the fact is that an abundance of user generated content (information/entertainment) means a shortage in attention.
Still an issue for community media broadcasters as You Tube is a ready substitute for Radio broadcasting, but it is necessary to remember it is a substitute. As internet access becomes more portable I agree this will be a force to be reckoned with should the content generated by broadcasters not have addapted to higher consumer expectations, but it remains that Web 2.0 is a shot gun approach to entertainment. Simply put, like the Idol franchise, a whole bunch of suppliers of the desired product come, and then the all important consumer actually picks the ones of any value.
The difference between Idol is that in the initial rounds, only three consumers count (4 for last season if you want to get technical) whereas User generated content is different in that individual consumers (100 million videos watched) are even more numerous than the content provides (although remember the content is cummulative) in which case neither entity has much power.
So who has the power? the providers of the forum of course, Youtube, if neither suppliers nor consumers have much power, from where Youtube sits profits are going to look pretty good.
Lastly on the Idol analogy, even when the voting is open to the public, the influence of the judging panel is not to be discounted so easily. There statements such as Mark Holden’s ‘touchdown’ can give someone’s polling a huge boost, or conversersly when judge’s in the past have made comments about a contestants weight, their opinion has had an inverse influence on the polls their criticism resulting in a huge publicity boost.
So who are the judges on you tube? well I would be surprised if the most popular clips aren’t drawn from network television, movies or DVDs, this has certainly been my experience. Even optimistically speaking a lot of user generated content is taking NBA television coverage, mixing it up and then using a rap artists copywright material over the top. A legal battle ensues currently over whether YouTube can build in a feature to detect copywright infringements and immediately remove them, something that this basketball fan will find less attractive in YouTube, although legally in the right.
So the advantage that can be exploited as I percieve it is in quality. I agree wholeheartedly that radio certainly cant rely on being ‘cheap and portable’ as a gaurunteed place in the consumer market. But community radio will have a future if it performs the function of pre selection, I don’t know how much time is wasted (or how many of the 100 million videos views provide no entertainment and thus do not fulfill consumer needs each day) searching for the specific product one does want on Youtube, I myself spent hours chasing dead ends looking for an infamous Stephon Marbury interview. Community media could save this time for consumers by performing the selection process for them, to some extent, consumers will still value choice. I think Web 2.0 means to broaden your reach, up your quality, and specialise your content in this regard. But certainly as Youtube itself demonstrates traditional media will be the lifeblood of user generated content for a while yet.

“Wikipedia, a not for profit organisation, had approximately 8.2 million articles in 253 languages as of September 2007. All of these articles were submitted, edited and managed by individuals and built by a community of users. There are roughly fifteen times as many English articles as the largest edition of Encyclopedia Britannica.” – aside from having the same issues of attention as before (these aren’t new even revelations even for the Encyclopedia Brittanica I would assume it would probably take people most of the time between a years edition to read the entire content of the current edition) my nexus of uncertainty that Wikipedia specifically highlights is this: ‘wasn’t the internet supposed to be the information superhighway?’ before wikipedia there was Geocities, where users created pages dedicated to their own personal interests and hobbies. Quality was highly variable, but essentially it was even MORE user generated content than Wikipedia in the true spirit of the word. If all the information was out there, the key issue was the how to find it, hence I assume the boom in stock prices of Altavista, Yahoo! and Google – now the internets largest company.
So what did wikipedia bring to the table? each article is in effect a website, the same thing existing in a different form has really been in existance since the dawn of the information superhighway.
What wikipedia brings is quality control and standardisation, it is a brand name or seal, each article recieves the seal of approval. You know the content is going to be in the upper left hand corner, the key statistics and usually a picture in the right hand column. A brief summary up top, a prompt for disambiguation above that in small print, and the timeline in a lot of cases down the bottom.
And every article on wikipedia follows that format, consumers can rely on their expectations as a result to be met by Wikipedia in their standardised layout.
Quality is the other issue, before the advent of wikipedia, you didn’t know if a website on the marx brothers was done by a university professor of aero-space engineering or a 5 year old child (though you could probably hazard a guess) on wikipedia, anyone with better knowledge and better sources can improve the content, furthermor you can track the changes made on dedicated discussion pages. So the value delivered by Wikipedia is similar to that the Encyclopedia Britannica produced before, standardization and quality. It just happens much much faster.
The Encyclopedia has one fallback though, by limiting its pool of contributers it has a verifyable quality, hence you can use it as a reference for Wikipedia, you cannot however use the reverse.

So that’s two examples, so I’ll try and put my node of uncertainty as a generic problem.
“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves beautifully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
Eric Hoffer

what is learning? with regards to constantly evolving technology in the field of media, ‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins gives some insight. Technology is a performance excellerator, it is neither means nor end in itself. A company that is performing poorly can rely on technology to drive it into the ground, a company that knows precisely what one unique bit of value it delivers can use technology to accellerate its delivery.
The best thing to do, is to know what value your company/organisation/industry delivers. Then dedicate yourself to doing it well, if technology can help that so be it, but don’t bring it on board until you know it can help, I imagine for some broadcasters the cost of capital to bring in new technology could be ruinous if the costs and benefits haven’t properly been analysed before hand. If the percieved legitimacy of an older medium (such as TV, which still produces the most easily recognisable stars and when drawing new talent from user generated media usually is recognised as their having ‘made it’).
A fool would turn a blind eye to the technological developments in any given industry, it is as you say a part of learning which never stops, but the determinates of success will remain what they always have been, good management, knowing your value prospect, managing your talent and communicating your value to the market.
I can conceive of no certain way Web 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…10000.0 would change these issues unless they somehow change the fundamentals of organisational behaviour.
Email has not replaced the business trip, because as yet it can’t deliver the same value as face-to-interaction. Television did not prevent Dan Brown from hitting it rich with the Da Vinci code, the advent of the airoplane did not bankrupt Ford Motor company.
You gotta compare apples with apples, oranges with oranges, even when all the newspapers are talking about is tangello and nashi pears.