Garrett French on YouTube and Social Networking

Garrett French of Search Engine Lowdown just commented on my Paul Hemp post, which led me to explore French's work further. Today he discusses why YouTube is beating everyone else in video discovery and recommendation:

...YouTube's contribution is, for my purposes, far superior. My purposes being to watch smart, funny, creative videos.

The reason being that in YouTube now I can find other like minded folks and:

a) subscribe to the videos they create themselves
b) subscribe to the videos they find excellent and add to their "channels"
c) find random videos I like, see who uploaded them and see what else this person has created or subscribed to

It's far simpler for me to find videos that I like in the collections of people who have made or aggregated other videos I like.

I'm not sure how *mainstream search* could *ever* deliver that experience.

In this video-discovery-through-social-navigation format I find a similarity in POWER to Amazon's book or video recommendations (which in my recent MMOG book buying spree had me pull out the credit card 5 times instead of 2...)

The importance of the relationship between attention data and social networking is becoming clearer all the time, and this strikes me as a perfect example. YouTube allows us to document and share our attention data (albeit somewhat crudely, in the form of explicit gestures such as channels and subscriptions, rather than via implicit gestures such as actual video viewings), which allows users to direct their attention to media that's more likely to be relevant and interesting to them. The attention data is the medium of exchange, the social network is the marketplace within which it circulates.

On a separate but related subject, it's worth noting (to me, at least) that French's exploration of YouTube's social networking features was an effort at blowing off steam, necessitated by his disappointment with a series of readings on the attention economy, particularly with works by Michael Goldhaber and Seth Goldstein. I know both of those guys--Seth co-founded AttentionTrust and is, in effect, my boss as a member of our Board of Directors (so take this with a grain of salt)--and I can fully understand why anyone would initially find their writing disappointing, but I'd argue that it's worth the effort to dig a little deeper. They're both big thinkers but they're not clear communicators. In fact, I first met Seth because I came across his "Media Futures" series and found them compelling but needed to synopsize them and cut down on the literary allusions to render them fully comprehensible--the magic of trackback (RIP) brought my translations to his attention.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+economy garrett+french youtube searchenginelowdown seo