With YouTube and short little videos, I think they’re great. And it’s great because now you can have videos on all sorts of topics that I might not find interesting but someone else will. Niches are king.

That said, one of my last ideas was to try to incorporate the technology we see online – user ratings, user reviews, popularity – to dictate what gets screened in a theater once projection goes digital and a movie can easily be swapped out.

And I do want to read “Here Comes Everybody.” I got it from the library once but didn’t get to look at it. And I’m sure you’ve probably read it, but if not check out “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson. It comes up a lot in these discussions.

This misses the point. We now live in a world without institutional barriers to production. The stick they had was that million dollars you needed. As you note, this created a “filter” much the same way that newspapers created a professional filter for news and print media. Previous generations grew accustomed to institutional filters but the technology has changed too rapidly to accommodate institutional filters. Too much content can be created and published for _any_ institution to provide meaningful filters, which means that individuals need to find their own filters and discovery workflows, which is happening.

You can’t account for bad taste, _my_ idea is always worth _my_ time, months or years of my time, even if it’s not worth 10 minutes of yours. You need to develop filters to keep out my bad product, not the other way around

For what it’s worth, you, and everyone for that matter, should really read “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky. Nobody in the world sums up the changes happening to our society and institutions better.