Andy Warhol famously said, “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”.

In a YouTube/MySpace world that sees content growing at an exponential rate, I can see fast approaching a time when there is so much content on line that the real problem will be to sift through it all. Clearly Google provides the tools to sift through all the text in the world. But what about all the video?

Imagine that the posting of consumer created content will continue at its current rate.  Personally I think that it will continue to accellerate and we will look back at this time and think how pedestrian we all were. At its current rate, the big challenge for the on line repositories of content is to be able to afford the servers to hold that content and keep it near to the edge of the network in order to serve it to users.

The drain on cash for start ups playing in this space is going to be enormous. Additionally people are going to find it virtually impossible to find things that they really want to see, unless there is a personal recommendation. So the hit of the near future will be totally consumer created and it will be marketed (or become visible) through totally viral means.

Surely in a world of this kind the principal methodology for exposing the hit will be personal recommendations? Where there is such a plethora of content, content is no longer king.

Context is King.

And then the tools/services that provide that context become hugely valuable.

Is this what lies beyond Google?

Instead of searching for stuff, you have a bot that is constantly not just alerting you to what is new that you might like, but pre qualifying that content for you. Of course this is nothing more or less than what radio does in its own way. Programmers would pick the music most likely to appeal to the core demographic audience that they were aiming for. They still do that very thing.

The number of channels available is now equal to a factorial of the number of pieces of content available. And fame will continue to be an illusive challenge.

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Posted in Main Page by Chris Gilbey No Comments Yet