Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager
Friday, July 21st, 2006
It’s Friday, time for another viral video.
But you know, I’ve been thinking lately — Chinese Backstreet Boys, Evolution of Dance, these are all funny, but what are we learning? Where’s the deeper moral message?
So I spent the past week scouring YouTube for a viral video I felt really said something, something with a message that spoke from the heart. And I think I found one. Its message? It can be very hard living in the shadow of a famous sibling.
That was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while. If that was a new network sitcom it would be better than 90% of the crap out there.
Agree — and YouTube seems to be the new network for a lot of us.
John sent me this article–
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1823959,00.html
–which discusses a notion called the 1% rule: “It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it. It’s a meme that emerges strongly in statistics from YouTube, which in just 18 months has gone from zero to 60% of all online video viewing.”
The article, from the UK’s Guardian, goes on to say:
“That puts the ‘creator to consumer’ ratio at just 0.5%, but it’s early days
yet; not everyone has discovered YouTube (and it does make downloading much
easier than uploading, because any web page can host a YouTube link).
Consider, too, some statistics from that other community content generation
project, Wikipedia: 50% of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of
users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of
all users, according to the Church of the Customer blog
(http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/).”