|
2006 was the first year since 1999 that file-sharing jumped into the media spotlight in a big way. But gone are those days of Shawn Fanning’s Napster and its Metallica-induced malaise. If you paid attention to CNN, Time and the recording industry in 1999 you would think that after seven years of file-sharing record stores would be a thing of the past and all of the Internet’s bandwidth would be wasted downloading Britney Spears songs—scary stuff, indeed.
Flash forward to 2006 and you have youtube. You have Myspace. You have iTunes. You have podcasting. You have Flickr. You have del.cio.us. You have RSS feeds. You have user-generated content that gives people exactly what they want, right when they want it.
How can we expect TV to compete with that?
Something different happened this time. It wasn’t music, it was video. It was blogs. It was pictures. It was profiles. It wasn’t about you downloading a Rolling Stones song. It was your co-workers videotaping you singing “Sympathy for the devil” at the office party you wish you could forget.
User-generated content gave us some incredible images over the past year. But more importantly, it has changed the dynamics of media so that CNN now counts on an army of unpaid people with cellphone cameras for the latest breaking news. When something eventful happens, bet money that faster than you can say “Macaca” the video is online.
Andrew Rideout
Posted January 4, 2007
Categories:
Social Networking
Comments
Add Your Comment
|
