The Super Stars of New Social Media

sanspeak writes "The Wall Street Journal profiles the Moguls of New Media. It's not about the entrepreneurs who have created these new media islands like MySpace, YouTube and such, but people who participate in it and make it successful." From the article: "As videos, blogs and Web pages created by amateurs remake the entertainment landscape, unknown directors, writers and producers are being catapulted into positions of enormous influence. Each week, about a half-million people download a comedic video podcast featuring a former paralegal. A video by a 30-year-old comedian from Cleveland has now been watched by almost 30 million people, roughly the audience for an average "American Idol" episode. The most popular contributor to the photo site Flickr.com just got a contract to shoot a Toyota ad campaign."

Comments

Of course

[Threni]

when TV companies stop showing their stuff in one region and sell it on the net, they'll have a global marketplace which'll make 30,000,000 people look pretty small.

Oh, and while I'm posting, I was thinking about social sites and privacy. If people are worried about people posting too much info on the net, and they're also worried about big brother style data mining of their details, why don't the sites respond by turning the typed text into graphics, displaying it as bitmaps, so that it can't be cut and pasted etc. You could use a subtle form of CAPCHA (or whatever it's called) encryption perhaps - nothing too hard to read - but even without it it would thwart casual searchability.

Re:Of course

[SCPRedMage]

If people are worried about people posting too much info on the net, and they're also worried about big brother style data mining of their details, why don't the sites respond by turning the typed text into graphics, displaying it as bitmaps, so that it can't be cut and pasted etc.

Probably has something to do with image files taking up a lot more space than text.

Re:Of course

[utnapistim]

If people are worried about people posting too much info on the net, and they're also worried about big brother style data mining of their details, why don't the sites respond by turning the typed text into graphics, displaying it as bitmaps, so that it can't be cut and pasted etc. You could use a subtle form of CAPCHA (or whatever it's called) encryption perhaps - nothing too hard to read - but even without it it would thwart casual searchability.

Turning the typed text into graphics is not a solution. Once enough sites would do it, there would appear a need for specialized tools to process that data (just like there appeared a need for CAPCHA readers). The solution should not be in making the data more difficult to access, but making sure the data is not in the system, or considered out of bounds (by using strong encryption if you really MUST publish your data for example).

This is off in left field but...

[PixelPirate]

...if companies started publishing really creative material (and by this, I'm talking about +5 insightful, interesting, and funny all at the same time), does anyone think there might be a market for the ADS themselves (let alone the product). If ads were more often than not the quality that movies (used to be) are like, perhaps there would be another method for money-making, and not only that, but economic Darwinism could then spare us the really stupid ones. Anyone care to sare an opinion?

A long time coming...

[Gadgetfreak]

as more people are directly connected with one another, there's no need to go through the classic "get myself on TV" or "get myself a movie role" avenues to get popular attention.

In college, which is now between 3.5 and 8 years ago for me, my computer itself was far more popular than I was. I hosted all kinds of fun stuff (some legal, some illegal) but the popular things were videos I made with my laptop and webcam of amusing college exploits. I had microwave tricks with eggs blowing the door open, and stable plasmoids, as well as videos of driving an electric go-kart through the halls and up the elevator of the engineering building.

They were popular videos, and I had thousands of hits, but I was behind the camera.

Point is, when everyone has the ability to connect directly to one another through computers, the new "word of mouth" popularity is replaced and amplified by the email forward with a URL in it. The problem is that you can become famous in a matter of a week or 2, but you can be forgotten just as quickly if you don't keep it rolling.