Why All the Media Has it All Wrong about Google/YouTube

You know that old saying - if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail?

Well, it's true.

And if you're big media - than all stories about media are about 'bigness' or about wanting
to achieve bigness, or about consolidation to achieve bigness.

The only problem is - no one is asking the customers if the relative size of the media participate
in makes it more engaging.

Just take a look at the statistics. While the media likes to report the size of MySpace as a single number, that doesn't really make any sense. MySpace is a zillion tiny little networks (some really wonderful, others really creepy). There is statistic floating around that says 65% of all the videos teens watch on the web is created by someone they know. How cool is that.

If bigness is no longer the driver - than what is? Well, it is in fact smallness. The narrow-nitchafication of media.

Channels as communities. Social Networks as media networks. And perhaps most frighteningly
of all - the emergence of a class of media makers who express themselves as an act of pleasure, or expression, or engagement.

Yochai Benkler - who is by day a law professor at Yale - has taken the position in various papers and books that the future of media is going to look very much like the open source software community today. That people will make and share content (like code) in a peer environment. Why will they do it? Because human beings like telling stories, connecting, and being part of tribes.

Not surprisingly - you haven't heard of Benkler. Why? Because the future that he envisions will dramatically reshape the media universe, and none of the current keepers of the keys to the kingdom are enthusiastic about promoting a future in which unpaid peers are making and experience each others home-made media.

Evidence, YouTube is rarely covered for its content, instead it makes headlines for its Bigness. As if its size somehow ratifies the idea that all media is big, and all successful media companies are looking to be bought, rolled-up, consolidated, and homogenized.

The shift from commercial media makers to peer production isn't likely to explore (or implode) any time soon. Instead, there is subtle shift that draws more and more value from community members - and pushes up the stack the media making that requires professional full time attention.

So reporting GooTube is about 'biggness' - gets it all wrong.

Television is exploding. And all the little bits that are being created will blossom into micro networks of friends, creators, remixers, and storytellers. It's a five year launch-pad of what will be in the end a new way to learn, teach, explore and express ourselves.

How cool is that?