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Michael Logan

When former Seinfeld comedian Michael Richards imploded on stage in a racist tirade, the moment was YouTubed.

When Virginia Senator George Allen tossed an apparently racist insult at a rival campaign staff member - a gaffe that likely cost him re-election and his Republican Party control of the US Senate - it was YouTubed.

When Roger Chan Yuet-tung (aka Bus Uncle and a candidate for the chief executive post in 1997, 2002 and last year) unleashed an obscenity-laden assault at a fellow passenger, it was YouTubed.

The revolution will not be televised, it will be YouTubed. And  podcast. And blogged. And immortalised as a Wikipedia entry.

The year 2006 continued the revolution - a democratisation of media - that began with podcasts the year before and blogs before that. Slowly and gradually, power is slipping away from traditional agenda setters and finding its way into the hands of users, who are reshaping news and entertainment.

User-generated content  helped make YouTube and Wikipedia household names. So much capital and intellectual investment have been poured into user-generated content that pundits are referring to the trend as 'Web 2.0', and Time magazine named 'You' its Person of the Year (more on that later).

What is happening is several trends have come together that promise to reshape the media landscape. First is the proliferation of broadband,  which makes distributing content cheap and easy.

The second is the tools of production have become more readily available. There is the laptop or desktop computer for the blogger, the consumer video camera for the budding movie director and the camera phone for the citizen journalist who just happens to be on the scene when news breaks.

Furthermore, there is inexpensive or open-source software and platforms such as photo-sharing site Flickr, YouTube and Blogger, which allow this work to be edited and distributed over the internet.

The venture capital community raised an estimated US$455 million for Web 2.0 and other investments in the first nine months of this year. But unlike the previous internet bubble, the goal was not to list on the Nasdaq at a lofty evaluation. Instead, the aim was to sell to an established player that had already done so, such as Yahoo or Google.

In 2005, News Corp acquired MySpace for US$580 million. Yahoo bought Flickr for an undisclosed sum, and this set off an amazing race for others to become the 'Flickr of video'. At the end of 2005, there were more than a dozen video-sharing start-ups, with companies like YouTube, Revver, Veoh, Video Egg, ClipShack, PhanFare, Vobbo, Blip.tv and Vimeo competing for audience.

A year later, YouTube was the clear winner, thanks to comedian Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live clips like 'Lazy Sunday'. In November, YouTube announced it was selling to Google for US$1.6 billion, enriching its founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley.

But the impact of user-generated media has been more than to make Mr Chen and Mr Hurley wealthy. It has created a more level playing field, giving anyone with an internet connection and the right hardware a chance to participate.

It has made stars out of ordinary people like Peter Oakley, a 79-year-old British pensioner who creates video  diaries of his life, and David Lehre, a 21-year-old filmmaker whose internet short MySpace: The Movie won him a Hollywood production deal.

In Hong Kong, it gave the Bus Uncle a far bigger audience than his three runs at the chief executive's seat ever could.

The year 2006 was the year of the little guy, and in recognition of this achievement, Time magazine named 'You' Person of the Year, 'for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game'.

But while this might be happening in mature economies such as the US and Europe, around the world there is more 'digital divide' than 'digital democracy'. The poor cannot afford cellphones, computers and internet connections, which makes Time's decision to name 'You' - and the other 5 billion people on this planet - a bit hollow.

Even in places where computers and internet connections are affordable there is not much digital democracy. Iran has banned YouTube. Earlier this year, mainland portal Tom Online was forced to delete 40 per cent of its user postings and 20 per cent of its user photographs because authorities deemed the material to be 'unhealthy'.

The operators of Mop.com employ a team of  editors to sift through the vast text, audio and video posts submitted to the portal, scouting for material that broach the sensitive 'three T's' - Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen Square.

Even US companies seem content to play by Beijing's  rules rather than let media democracy flourish. Google and Microsoft drew criticism from US lawmakers this year, Google because it launched a censored version of its search service, and Microsoft because it censors words such as 'freedom' from its MSN Spaces blogging service.

Yet Time does amplify a concept that has been at the heart of the internet's development ever since Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web. Radio, television and newspapers are about 'one-to-many' communication, about authority speaking to the masses. The internet is about 'many-to-many'   communication, about the masses speaking to the masses.

That concept looks set to become all the more powerful in the years to come.

Michael Logan is scmp.com's multimedia editor



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The year of the many speaking unto the many