The YouTube Effect: Creating the Means

One of the cool things about making website is that once you actually create a super awesome mechanism, the creators of that website loose the ability to make major change.

Website creators need to create websites that almost anyone can find useful. And as much as the creators would want to influence the tastes of the users, chances are that they won't. I mean who listens to the Amazon.com editor recommendations anyway?

The YouTube Effect refers to the idea that anyone in the world can create a video about a politician/political issue and get a potential audience thanks to the power of the web. Now chances are that you or I will never have anything funny enough nor important enough to make it past the 500 page view mark but YouTube is there waiting.

P.S. the article that speaks of the "Next Cultural Revolution". Wasn't original Cultural Revolution the one where children under the direction of Mao beat and tortured their teachers. Sickening. I hope the Internet doesn't do something similar...

Word of Mouth Marketing Limitations

A company doesn't need to have a large advertising firm to "sell" a product to a specialized demographic of people. Software is used by people who use computers a lot. And people who use the computer a lot frequent areas of the internet that are essential for mass mouth marketing campaigns.

Webmasters or regulars in area were primarily responsible for the extravagant growth of programs used in the book. Firefox, ICQ and Skype , if you read into the history, were all valuable tools for webmasters thus motivating them to promote the product through their websites.

The book Naked Conversations talks about passion and motivation as a determining factor when promoting a word of mouth software. Webmasters who ran smaller enthusiast sites on the web were frustrated with the Microsoft browser because it hindered them from building their own sites without purchasing expensive Microsoft Software.

Because of this frustration, webmasters built their sites around the new browser firefox and promoted the software on their sites. Like this one.



Web regulars visited their favorite community sites and upgraded their browsers accordingly. But because Firefox only initially appealed to the webmaster demographic, the browser was adopted by a closed community of people.

Several years later, most students at this University did not hear of Firefox until their IT department encouraged them to make the upgrade. Cross community fertilization is this case, is the limiting factor to mass adoption of a product.