The Ala Carting of Video on the Net - Will it lead to disaster? - Blog Maverick:

So where does this leave independent video content on the Internet? Right in the hands of Google and Youtube and black and white hat SEOs.

The ala carting of video on the net will benefit those who enable the search for content and can monetize that search. The economics of supporting content will force independently produced Internet content to be dumbed down to levels that create a perfect match for Youtube. There will be SEOs that come up with arbitrage solutions that will drive traffic to parked videos. Content creators will partner with SEOs and create budgets that reflect the CPMs they can earn in and around the video hosted on Youtube against the costs of the SEO driving traffic to the video. SEO support will be the only even marginally effective way to create baseline traffic to a video/show.

Who could have guessed that creating financially successful video on the net would require the same marketing skills as driving traffic to parked domains?

That's pretty much what's happened with my former employer, and why design and UX don't matter to them. Robots don't care what the page looks like. And that's the problem when you value statistical growth over actual human growth. But since advertisers value the former, and video production requires significant capital output, I have no solutions for when revenues are required very early in a very young market. All I know is no-one expected to make money with free open-source browsers or search either. I see a near-future convergence in the media industry that includes some market attractors that redefine the game and leave a few people very wealthy. But they will be the people who set themselves up early, putting a lot on the line to be there when it happens...with actual human audiences.

And once I am able to wrestle said blog's data out of its RDF store (for *&#$ sake) and put it into a normal database I will be able to show you.

But in the meantime I wrote this in an email just now and thought it preservation-worthy:

My relationship with the Semantic Web (big S big W) parallel paths my relationship with Religion (big R)...I still have faith, but when it comes to the religious doctrines of the various denominations, I am totally cynical and just want to see some actual works. While I aspire to and enjoy perfection in design, be it aesthetic or informational or whatever, someone walking up with a tool or product whose entire innovation is that the guts work better according to a particular school of thought, I get uninterested really fast.

Jenny woke up with something new (to her) on the brain. She swung her legs gingerly out from under the duvet and spread her toes on the hardwoods. With a brief detour to press the coffeemaker's "on" button, she settled at the computer. The Idea Copyright Database website was in her bookmarks, her search query submitted within seconds and with nary a touch of the mouse. The annoying "please wait" graphic a throwback to 2007, when the (then called) Apple computer popularized the hypnotic spinner. Government websites were always a solid decade behind the times. "This thing gets slower every damn day," she mumbled under her breath, and stood to retrieve a cup of tasty caffeine.

1004 results matched your request... "Shit," Jenny thought, "not specific enough yet," and sipped her coffee faster in an attempt to facilitate the process. She only had 15 minutes before she had to start getting ready for work. She managed two more keywords and searched within the results. This brought the list to a manageable two pages' worth. She scanned the abstracts and clicked through to a couple. Finally, towards the bottom of the second page she found what she was secretly hoping not to (having long ago stopped worrying about the ironic causality of the process). She mumbled some obscenities and clicked through to the Execution Permits. Already a three-year with two more years left on it, and three more in the queue.

"These," more obscenities, "people," Jenny said loud enough to elicit a groan and some rustling from her lover, still in the bed. "They need this shit like so many trophies on their shelf. What would they talk about at parties? How would they know how to feel about themselves, how to rate their self esteem against all the other similarly-but-not-too-similarly-now dressed people in their precious little peer groups? Oh, I'm sorry: communities. What ever would the world do without their precious little ideas, codified by Big Brother for all to see."

"Oh, for the days when a freakin' domain registration was as far as these nascent mental masturbations need freakin' go, when there were actually TLDs to be had."