As I was saying…

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… about user-generated content. This article about YouTube continues the theme. Excerpt:

YouTube and other video-sharing Web sites signal a shift in the way entertainment will be made and consumed in the future. They’re creating a new form of television that’s at once personal, grass-roots and unfettered.

With the emergence of technology for easily sharing video over the Internet, viewers are gaining the autonomy to choose what, when and where they watch — be it on an iPod, laptop or desktop computer. And the masses are getting an opportunity to create and experiment with video while bypassing the central filter of a TV network.

No company epitomizes these rapid changes more than YouTube. In the past six months, YouTube, a 27-employee company housed above a pizzeria in San Mateo, has become a new global stage.

Visitors to the site view more than 50 million videos a day, mostly made by amateurs. Its audience has mushroomed to 12.5 million a month, making it the chief place people go online to watch video. It has become one of the 50 most visited Web sites overall….

Hmmm…. Wonder what their monthly bandwidth charges are like.

On the other hand…

Web sites such as YouTube, whose motto is “Broadcast Yourself,” have a long way to go before killing off the boob tube. In a recent survey for the Online Publishers Association, 24 percent of Internet users said they watched online video at least once a week and only 5 percent watched it daily. The average person watches 4 hours and 52 minutes of TV a day, according to Nielsen Media Research. On average, each YouTube visitor spends nearly 16 minutes on the site, according to Hitwise, an online measurement firm in New York.

For now, YouTube is a pastime mostly for the young. Thirty-one percent of its visitors are 18 to 24, according to Hitwise. And that is probably the age range of most of YouTube’s budding video makers.

But that only emphasises the point I was trying to make in my lecture. Nobody is saying that YouTube means the end of broadcast TV, any more than blogging means the end of journalism. It’s just that user-generated content brings new organisms into the media ecosystem, and changes the relationships between its components. The only things we can say for sure at the moment are that: (a) the old, near-total dominance of push-media and publication gatekeepers is eroding; and (b) the media ecosystem is rapidly becoming much more complex. For a fuller argument, see Yochai Benkler’s new book.

So who are the really creative people around here?

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I’ve been lecturing for years (e.g. here) about the coming transformation from the ‘push’ world of broadcast TV (in which small numbers of content creators push multimedia content at passive consumers — aka couch potatoes) to a world dominated by ‘pull’ media like the Web. The dominance of the broadcast model led people to assume that audiences were essentially passive and stupid — which is why, to broadcasters, the notion of “user-generated content” is an oxymoron.

I’ve also been putting forward the (to me, obvious) proposition that the current surge of user-generated content (e.g. in Blogging, Flickr, YouTube, Google Video, etc.) is a very good pointer to the way the world is going to be. Now comes some really interesting empirical evidence in support of that from the Pew Internet Survey whose latest report says, in part

Overall, 35% of all internet users have posted content to the internet. Specifically, we asked about four types of online content: having one’s own blog; having one’s own webpage; working on a blog or webpage for work or a group; or sharing self-created content such as a story, artwork, or video.

  • An even higher percentage of home broadband users – 42% or about 31 million people – have posted content to the internet. They account for 73% of home internet users who were the source of online content. A majority of them are home broadband users.
  • Having a fast, always-on internet connection at home is associated with users’ posting content to the internet and thereby shaping the environment of cyberspace.
  • Although home dial-up internet users get involved in putting content online, they do not do so at the same rate as broadband users.
  • Just 27% of dial-up users, or about 13 million adults, have placed some sort content online.
  • Sharing a variety of creations online is among the most popular kinds of user-generated content.
  • Overall, 36 million internet users have shared their own artwork, photos, stories, or videos on the internet. That comes to 26% of internet users. Home
    broadband users account for about two-thirds of this number.
  • Home is not the only place from which people upload content. Among the 11% of online Americans with access only at work or some place other than work or home (such as a library), 21% have posted some content to the internet. That comes to 5 million people.

    • Get the bad news early

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    From Technology Review…

    An ultrasensitive DNA and protein detector, expected to be widely available later this year, could save lives by detecting genetic and infectious diseases early, before they turn deadly or spread. Its relatively low cost and simplicity will make diagnostic tests that today can be done only in specialized labs available at local hospitals.

    Furthermore, because it’s extremely sensitive, it could detect signs of disease invisible to current tools.The device, which has been developed by Nanosphere, Northbrook, IL, based on research by Chad Mirkin, professor of chemistry at Northwestern University, is already being in used in several research labs and is awaiting Food and Drug Administration approval before it enters general use.

    In its first application, the gold nanoparticle-based detector will tell doctors whether patients have a genetic trait that makes them likely to develop blood clots during surgery, helping doctors prevent strokes. Soon after, pending the results of ongoing clinical trials, it could diagnose previously undetected heart disease and help researchers diagnose and develop treatments for Alzheimer’s disease by detecting levels of telltale proteins in the blood at concentrations “undetectable by any other technology,” says Bill Moffitt, CEO of Nanosphere.

    Each year 100,000 patients complaining of heart attack-like symptoms are sent home without treatment because current methods cannot diagnose some heart attacks, Moffitt says. Of these people, 20 percent die within a month, he says. And the rest have a much greater risk of dying from a heart attack in the coming year. Moffitt says that by detecting concentrations a thousand times lower that current methods of a protein released in the body during a heart attack, the Nanosphere technology may help doctors diagnose and treat these attacks.

    Pshaw! I developed a simple test for Alzheimer’s decades ago. You just ask someone to spell it. If they can’t, then the chances are they’ve got it!

    So what happens now?

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    This doesn’t affect me, because I’m boycotting the US until they elect a new president, but the European Court’s decision is going to cause some interesting problems. Here’s the NYT report…

    PARIS, May 30 — The European Union’s highest court ruled Tuesday that the Union had overstepped its authority by agreeing to give the United States personal details about airline passengers on flights to America in an effort to fight terrorism.

    The decision will force the two sides to renegotiate the deal at a time of heightened concerns about possible infringements of civil liberties by the Bush administration in its campaign against terrorism, and the extent to which European governments have cooperated. The ruling gave both sides four months to approve a new agreement, and American officials expressed optimism that one could be reached. But without an agreement, the United States could take punitive action, in theory even denying landing rights to airlines that withhold the information. That could cause major disruptions in trans-Atlantic air travel, which accounts for nearly half of all foreign air travel to the United States….

    NYT discovers World Cup Delusion Syndrome

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    It takes the Grey Lady time to catch up, but she gets there eventually.

    Soccer here is a three-ring circus, a zoo, a metaphor, a way of life. As a result, England’s indifferent record in the sport’s showcase event requires its supporters to perform an emotional high-wire act every four years, simultaneously holding two competing notions in their heads.

    One: This will be the year their team finally realizes its massive potential and wins.

    Two: Their team never wins. This year, England’s chronic angst is compounded by two facts. The first is that the tournament is being played in Germany, home of its bitterest rival and agent of some of its biggest defeats. In 1990, England lost a heartbreaking match to Germany in a penalty-kick shootout in the World Cup semifinals. In fact, after England’s greatest victory over Germany — its 4-2 extra-time victory in the 1966 final — 24 years passed before the English beat the Germans again in a major competition. The second problem is Rooney’s foot. Rooney, a prodigy who rose from the rough streets of Liverpool to become a star at Manchester United, is England’s most talented scorer and its greatest hope. But last month he broke a metatarsal bone in his right foot, and on Friday he was ruled out for the first round of matches. Every day there have been conflicting reports, anguished speculation, hope on the heels of despair…

    Quote of the day

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    The attractively simple thesis of The Change Function is that most technology ventures fail because technologists manage them. Technologists think their business is the creation of cool technologies loaded with wonderful new features. They think this because they are engineers who thrill to the idea of change. By contrast, Coburn says, “technology is widely hated by its users,” because ordinary folk loathe change. Therefore, any new artifact, no matter how much its various features might appeal to technologists, will always be rejected by its intended customers unless “the pain in moving to a new technology is lower than the pain of staying in the status quo.”

    Or in Pip’s geeky formulation:

    The Change Function = f (perceived crisis vs. total perceived pain of adoption).

    [Former UBS analyst Pip Coburn, quoted in Technology Review.]

    Google stitches up the Dell desktop

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    I missed this.

    Under the terms of a roughly three-year pact announced yesterday, Google will pay Dell an unspecified sum to have its browser toolbar and desktop-search software pre-installed on the company’s PCs and their homepages set to a co-branded portal site. “The real reason we do this is for users,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at a Goldman Sachs conference in Las Vegas. People “turn the Dell machine on, and everything is integrated right there. (This deal) is a turnkey solution for search.”

    It’s a turnkey solution for Google as well, at least when it comes to wresting control of PC users’ default settings away from Microsoft. Dell shipped more than 37 million PCs and servers globally in 2005, according to research group IDC. That means Google could conceivably put its software in front of 100 million new PC owners over the life of the deal, and that’s the sort of footprint that can preserve its search dominance over Microsoft…

    This seems very significant to me. Wonder why there hasn’t been more coverage of it. Or did I just miss the commentary as well as the announcement?

    Securing Windows

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    From Bob Cringeley…

    Last week, a Microsoft data security guru suggested at a conference that corporate and government users would be wise to come up with automated processes to wipe clean hard drives and reinstall operating systems and applications periodically as a way to deal with malware infestations. What Microsoft is talking about is a utility from SysInternals, a company that makes simply awesome tools.

    The crying shame of this whole story is that Microsoft has given up on Windows security. They have no internal expertise to solve this problem among their 60,000-plus employees, and they apparently have no interest in looking outside for help. I know any number of experts who could give Microsoft some very good guidance on what is needed to fix and secure Windows. There are very good developers Microsoft could call upon to help them. But no, their answer is to rebuild your system every few days and start over. Will Vista be any better?

    I don’t think so.

    Hmmm… Is this really the advice corporate customers are being given about how to make sure their Windows installations are secure?

    Google peculiarities

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    Very interesting column by Bob Cringeley on how Google advertising works against the little guy. Also hints that ClickFraud is considerably higher than Google will publicly admit.

    The real cause of “systemic failure”

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    Terrific column by Jackie Ashley, putting her finger on the nub of the problem of “systemic failure”. Many of the problems that have come to light in the last few months are only incidentally about ministerial failure. They are about the inability of Britain’s civil service to manage complex organisations. Excerpt:

    John Reid is absolutely right. Traditionally, ministers have been nervous about criticising officials, and for obvious reasons. It’s like standing on the top of a wobbly ladder abusing the chap holding it at the bottom. Since the days of Richard Crossman and Harold Wilson, Labour ministers have privately complained about civil service competence. All too aware of the leaks and career-ending embarrassments angry officials could visit on them, they have put up with the responsibility for every failure, leaving their servants anonymously blameless.

    There desperately needs to be a change in the rules of the game. The days when the civil service was a badly paid, understaffed operation are long gone. The people in charge of major departments are well-paid managers with excellent pensions and job security. Why shouldn’t they bear responsibility when things go wrong? Everybody else does. If a journalist makes a mistake, she doesn’t expect the editor to be sacked. If a shop manager loses billing information, the chief executive doesn’t resign.

    The civil service knows how bad the situation really is. A survey of senior officials by SCS found that just 16% thought poor performance was effectively dealt with – a figure that dropped to a terrifying 6% at the Home Office. Meanwhile, a “Have Your Say” survey of all Home Office staff found only 19% thought the Home Office was well managed. Yet when the cabinet secretary, Gus O’Donnell, appeared before the public administration committee recently he enraged MPs who wanted to know who was carrying the can for the foreign criminals fiasco. It was “a complex issue” was his inadequate reply…