Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Bubble 2.0?

Well it seems like it according to John Dvorak.

The event itself was characterized by sessions that did nothing more
than discuss "exit strategies." Hey boys and girls, how about making a good
product before getting into exit strategies? Is that asking too much?


I don't recall seeing something about customer satisfaction, but
plenty about customer acquisition.


It sure sounds like Web 2.0 could become Bubble 2.0 in a hurry. I remember the days when stock would trade at triple digit P/Es because capturing eyeballs was more important then getting those eyeballs to party with their money. It seems everyone is chasing the YouTube megabucks with this talk of "exit strategies" just like people were chasing "buying groceries online" with crap like Peapod.com.

One gripe I have about YouTube is that it is vastly inferior to regular TV. I have played around with YouTube off and on but a video of some fake college girl talking about her life or a dog on a surfboard cannot match stuff like the Sopranos or Rome. I would rather watch Spiderman 3 100x before I watch some crap like Ask a Ninja.

However I think user created content can take off if it is better than professionally created content. For instance the edited version of Phantom Menace (aka the Phantom Edit) is a far better movie then the crap that Lucas put out.

Also user created content shines when it fulfills a need that professional content cannot. You see this in the blog community because the Main Stream Media is always slanted one way but pretends they are not. The Blogosphere lets you read the news slanted exactly how you like it. If you are a leftist you can read DailyKos if you are to the right you can read InstaPundit. They don't make any pretensions to being fair arbiters of news content.

So until someone can churn out the Hobbit on a Mac that could rival anything that Peter Jackson (or now Sam Raimi?) can film then I will be convinced that the YouTube era has actually arrived. Until then I'll take a pass on the Mentos Guys, LonleyGirl15, or the Boy from Brooklyn.

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