What happened? YouTube's creators had stumbled onto the intersection of three revolutions.
- First, the revolution in video production made possible by cheap camcorders and easy-to-use video software.
- Second, the social revolution that pundits and analysts have dubbed Web 2.0. It's exemplified by sites like MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr and Digg—hybrids that are useful Web tools but also thriving communities where people create and share information together. The more people use them, the better they work, and more people use them all the time—a kind of self-stoking mass collaboration that wouldn't have been possible without the Internet.
- The third revolution is a cultural one. Consumers are impatient with the mainstream media. The idea of a top-down culture, in which talking heads spoon-feed passive spectators ideas about what's happening in the world, is over. People want unfiltered video from Iraq, Lebanon and Darfur—not from journalists who visit there but from soldiers who fight there and people who live and die there.
Its not hard to figure out the common thread for what works on the net. What works on the net is where simple solutions create both community and collaboration. And YouTube has these elements in spades.
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