The Boston Globe is not the world’s best paper. For example, today it noticed that it’s hard to tell when someone’s on a cell phone or crazy. It’s only been a standup joke since the last century. Hey guys, it wasn’t very funny then and it’s still not funny now that it’s BlueTooth headsets instead of plug-in headsets.
Earlier, they discussed the 1% rule— which is that about one percent of your online consumers will create some content (actually it’s less: 0.065% in the case of YouTube). It’s pretty much obvious that way more people consume than create, and also misleading. A 0.065% contributor-to-consumer ratio is much higher than with old media where there are perhaps a dozen creators and five billion consumers. The fact that as many as one percent of your users might say something to you is incredible. One percent is a great achievement, not a lamentable failure.
And the fact that the one percent might be anyone, that there are few barriers to a voice coming from the wilderness and creating the best YouTube video or blog post ever, catapulting itself to global stardom? That’s the best part. That can’t really happen in film or news or television.
Secretly Ironic 