Image uploaded to Flickr by Kance

2006 has been another great year in the development of the Web 2.0 and digital technologies.
John Battelle but I thought I would write a series of posts on the major themes that I expect will define the online world in 2007:

1. The return of old media

There are some undeniable virtues to user-generated content, to the extent that even traditional media has picked up on the trend and even TIME magazine named YOU as Person of the Year.

Still, when it comes to entertainment that sustains attention for mass-audiences over longer periods of time I strongly contend that content has to be more carefully written, shot, edited and packaged than amateur shot videos. I therefore expect the popularity of user-generated content to slow down from its current explosive growth… the same way “America’s funniest videos”is still running in its 17th season but its popularity has faded from the peak.

2007 will be the year when the pendulum moves away from the likes of Youtube and MySpace and time spent watching videos online starts to shift towards more mainstream media groups like NBC or VIACOM, which after some initial failed experimentations are starting to figure out what works in online distribution (microchunking, easy sharing, multiplatform, alternative revenue models).

In the meantime, some other user-generated functions will continue to evolve and play major roles in 2007:
- User-generated collaboration: think Wikipedia and the implications of its success
- User-generated filtering/ranking: the Digg and Reddit experiments have shown how quickly these systems become popularity contests and how easily they can be gamed. Still, opportunities in filtering/ranking by observed usage rather than expressed voting abound: think Last.fm or del.icio.us (and read Fred Wilson’s discussion with Josh Kopelman for more on this)
- User-generated piracy: always a crowd-pleaser, and a key driver of online technologies, from the days of Napster, to the success of Bittorrent, to the rise of YouTube thanks to copyrighted clips that users wanted to see but couldn’t get anywhere else (see Mark Cuban)
- User-generated journalism: With newsroom budgets falling dramatically and the wide-spread availability of mobile phone cameras it is no wonder user-submitted news items are becoming part of the news if not the news itself (see how Saddam’s hanging was covered)

As always, I strongly suggest to take anyone’s predictions with a pinch of salt (particularly mine )
“I have been saying for many years that we are using the word ‘guru’ only because ‘charlatan’ is too long to fit into a headline. “ - Peter Drucker