It’s getting more social, but causing less face to face interaction.

Media was always a social experience
The channels media has historically been distributed through were inherently social (from plays in the park in Shakespeare’s era through to watching TV with your family)
The new channels (online) tend to take away that social element (watching YouTube on your own late at night with nothing but the glow of a computer screen for company)
How do we bring back the social element?

Tobias

It’s funny that for all of the ink spilled (virtual and otherwise) about “social media,” people sometimes forget that media was always social to begin with!

David

p.s. great to talk to you on Monday.

Last week, for example, we held a week-long “music festival” across the web called “RockMe.”– where fans and bands could turn up online, see each other, watch video together, chat to each other, and surf across the wider web together. It was a total riot – like an online moshpit! Bands like Dinosaur Jr, The Fiery Furnaces, Rose Hill Drive, The New Pornographers, Gosling, The Willowz, etc, all turned up and took their fans on a “virtual tour” around the web – to their MySpace pages, to YouTube videos, or to whatever ever they thought was cool. You can read more about it here: http://fowa.crowdvine.com/posts/show/141821

This week we’re continuing the theme with “The RockMe. Sessions” – a daily dose of musical mayhem. You can find out more at http://RockMe.dium.com

The joy with socializing around web content, of course, is that you can socialize around any web content. For example, we have a large number of politically savvy users in Me.dium who will gather online around the MySpace political debates this week. Think of it as like a virtual “Speakers Corner” (if you’re a Brit like me, that probably makes a lot of sense ;-). Rather than simply watching the stream/video online alone, you get the feeling of being actually at a rally, surrounded by loads of other people equally as passionate about the debate as you are. The extra “energy” that this brings to an online event is awesome.

Cheers. Tobias @ Me.dium

The only problem is that’s it’s disorganized and OVERWHELMING (so many options, thank god for miro). There are so many startups and online services that most producers just give up and video blog on YouTube because apparently YouTube is now the standard and THE video service to post on.

How will the startups overcome youtube and not intimidate viewers away with the attributes that I just described?

Then there’s the whole Joost as a widget platfrom thing that potentially could open a whole new world of social networking applications .

In general TV is a social experience and Joost needs to replicate that social experience especially if they are concentrating on bringing the TV experience to the computer at the moment .