YouTube, Google and the traffic-crazed echo chamber
So you have anyways perhaps read the rumour, re-read and read it again across multiple blogs. This supposed scoop by Mike Arrington at TecCrunch could perhaps take the record for the most related posts at TechMeme
While various people have various points of view on how real this rumour could be and what the probabilities are (quoting from TechCruch “Based on experience with these sort of rumors, I’d put this at 40% likely to be at least partially true”, that is a pathetic statement to make. What does he mean by 40 % likely to be at least partially true. sic !), the fundamental issue as I see it is not whether YouTube is worth a buy or not or whether it is indeed worth 1.6 bn $ or not or whether Google should be buying ir or not
The core issue is that bloggers in today’s world are so traffic-crazed and even fully / partially unsubstantiated news like this can gather so much steam (because everyone wants to link to TechCrunch, don’t they), that for a lay observer, this all probably seems true. Who knows, as a result of all the buzz that this generates, maybe the folks at Google would make themselves believe that this is indeed a great idea and go ahead and execute the buyout
The Web 2.0 space today is getting to be too much of an echo chamber. Lots of rumours, too much being written by Google & MySpace and every joe on the street wanting to startup something using AJAX, Tagging, Networking and no revenue model
Wake up guys … Bubble 2.0 is just around the corner. The last time around, the investment bankers and the journalists / media folks in some measure were perhaps part of the reason why the Bubble got inflated to the extent it did, this time around maybe it is these Bloggers would be the prime bubble inflaters
To give credit where it is due, I have drawn inspiration to this post from this one by Kevin Maney in USA Today
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Never really heard of it as “An Echo Chamber”, but it is an interesting way to describe the phenomenon.