Monday, December 18, 2006

Well done to everyone...

Quick on this, given I'm preoccupied with a post about Xmas that needs thinking out before I write it down, but noteworthy all the same. Two news stories jumped out at me today that affirmed my previous post about the pervasiveness and mass acceptance of You Tube and the like as a means of expression and communication.

First up - Social networks top Google search
Nice piece of reporting from the BBC looking at the popularity of community sites across the web, and their predominance of the annual round up of Google's searches of 2006. Compare this with their 2005 Google Zeitgest (how do you pronounce that? stevie t, any ideas?) and you can see the dramatic shift away from P2P, online music and World of Warcraft towards a who's who of "social computing" including wikipedia, bebo, video and MySpace.

Second up - We've all won the Time "Person of the year 2006"!
I knew I was under consideration, but I never expected us all to win. Anyways, hop along to the Time website here to get the full rundown, and at the same time go out, buy the magazine, and frame it (or send copies to relatives, although no doubt they'll be doing the same). Still, their point is noteworthy as it signifies the importance of user contributed content to the media mix. The role of user footage in breaking news stories is now absolutely crucial to news networks in getting under the skin of events as they happen, and the emergence of personal video blogs (search for serving US troops in Iraq) can offer far more insight than a 15 second bulletin on the nightly news.

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