Internet editorial

Citation

O'Beirne, R. (2007), "Internet editorial", Reference Reviews, Vol. 21 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/rr.2007.09921bag.001

Internet editorial

In the recent past this column has frequently focused on the rise and rise of social networking and how it changes the way people use the web. From the perspective of the librarian there is the challenge of being able to locate, manipulate and exploit the sometimes rich, and often unique, information that lies within social networks. The whole area of social networking is growing at an astonishing rate and it already has become the “next big thing”. As so often happens at the cutting edge, there tends to be a group who contest the validity and resist the obvious progress, often this is passive and manifests itself as a simple denial.

There are two forms of proof that support the growing ascendancy of social networking across the worldwide web. The first is recent hard-nosed quantitative research put together by investment research company Morgan Stanley (www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs/Webtwopto2006.pdf). Key findings and forecasts include a significant shift in content type towards video particularly on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.

The figures are stark, looking at the four main P2P networks the bandwidth usage percentages are: video 62 per cent, audio 11 per cent and other 27 per cent. Of course, quiet rightly the research does point out that video does tend to hog bandwidth. The point which is of crucial importance to library and information managers should be that, with products such LimeWire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire) now reaching maturity and being adopted globally, there exists the ability to create, publish, classify, tag, search, find and share video content. What does this mean?

If I walk into any library and ask at the reference desk for video footage of an event in history I should in theory be able to view it over the library’s computer network via the web. Let’s take, for example, an event from the recent conflict in the North of Ireland, the early 1970s “Battle of the Bogside”.

Using one popular video content web site it is possible to view footage of this political unrest and violence. There are 11 different videos to choose from. Some have no authoritative narrative to accompany the video, in many the context is not apparent, the bias is inherent and clips have been viewed from 500 to 10,000 times (www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Battle+of+Bogside&search=Searc3).

This takes us to our second form of proof and the evidence that social networking is upon us. Quite simply, it is the fact that Google has bought YouTube. When Google makes such a purchase at considerable expense then it has significant meaning.

So what is YouTube all about? Well in declaring YouTube to be Time magazine’s invention of the year 2006 – Lev Grossman explains the phenomenon:

The minute people saw YouTube they did its creators a huge favor: they hijacked it. Instead of posting their home movies, they posted their stand-up routines and drunken ramblings and painful-looking snowboarding wipeouts. They uploaded their backyard science projects, their delivery-room footage and their interminable guitar solos. They sent in eyewitness footage from the aftermath in New Orleans and the war in Baghdad–from both sides. They promulgated conspiracy theories. They sat alone in their basements and poured their most intimate, embarrassing secrets into their webcams. YouTube had tapped into something that appears on no business plan: the lonely, pressurized, pent-up video subconscious of America. Having started with a single video of a trip to the zoo in April of last year, YouTube now airs 100 million videos–and its users add 70,000 more–every day (Grossman, 2006).

It is a story familiar to the web. There is a lot for the librarian to think about, not least the copyright implications for all this. Indeed discussions, deliberations and business realignments have all taken place in order to take account of the intellectual property rights issues.

With the Google takeover of YouTube certain major copyright holders are willing to allow copyright breaches in return for the potential of reaching new audiences using “viral” informal online distribution and recognition. This dealing in copyright is of course not new, but it can create a confusing picture for those not fully versed in international copyright law.

Returning to the Morgan Stanley research it is interesting to note that Wikipedia, YouTube and MySpace, all user generated content sites, now rank among the top 15 total global unique visitors on the web.

Rónán O’BeirneInternet Column Editor, Reference Reviews, and Principal Libraries Officer, Bradford Libraries, Archives and Information Service, Bradford, UK