I was reading an blog post by Mike Butcher, and found a reference to Joshua Porter’s “Del.icio.us Lesson.”

From now on I’m going to call this idea the “Del.icio.us Lesson”. This is the lesson that personal value precedes network value: that selfish use comes before shared use. We’re seeing it more and more everyday in services like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and is an interesting aspect of networked applications. Even though we’re definitely benefitting from the value of networked software, we’re still not doing so unless the software is valuable to us on a personal level first.

Porter nails what we think is a major key to the current round of Internet innovation: personal value precedes network value. That doesn’t mean shared use isn’t valuable, in fact what we do at Scouta is use the community to benefit each individual with highly relevant recommendations, but it’s those recommendations, or what each individual member gets out of it that’s most important.

It’s interesting what happens when you turn social software on its head.

Sometimes it’s hard to see the Internet for all the discussion of video these days . My head is so buried in Media 2.0 topics that I wonder if I’m getting a distorted view. So the following statement might seem a little biased/stupid/outdated/obvious.

2007 is the year of online video and audio. As Scoble says, “Videoblogging is about to really take off.”

Everyone tell me when they get sick of me saying stuff like this .

One such area that demonstrates the potential, as used by Scoble to make the point, is a deal signed by Ask A Ninja and Federated Media.

Heather Green spoke with the creators, and they stated it “guarantees them a contract for sales in the low seven figures this year.” It essentially sounds like FM will sell advertising on Ask A Ninja, and give the creators the majority of the revenue, with a guaranteed minimum.

If you haven’t watched any Ask A Ninja, have a look, it’s damn funny. I’ve been a fan for about a year.

Tom Reynolds, blogger extraordinaire and 3AW revhead, has already thought of a great use for Scouta. He’ll be adding his Scouta “bookmarks” to his 3AW site, as mentioned on his blog today.

As I have mentioned before, I spend part of my day listening to podcasts or videocasts in the background as I work. Today I spent a portion of my time doing the books, so it meant I could listen to a few good shows.

One fantastic show that is well worth listening to if you’re interested in online video, or Internet TV, is the latest show from Venture Voice: Fred Seibert of Frederator Studios and Next New Networks.

Seibert “is a television and movie producer, and an entertainment executive who has held leading positions with MTV Networks and Hanna-Barbera.” He now runs Frederator Studios and Next New Networks, both about delivering great video over the Internet. He’s done so much high quality stuff it’s best to check his entry at Wikipedia.

Although he’s been deeply involved in the animation business he talks a lot about entrepreneurship, blogging, the Internet, and the importance of online television. Not surprisingly the podcast clocks in at about 90 minutes, but it’s packed full of informative stuff.

Bruce Sterling’s blog has an awesome essay by Tom Sherman called Vernacular Video.

If you’re mildly interested in what the future of video ubiquity might bring, then it’s worth a read.

What Are the Current Characteristics of Vernacular Video?

Displayed recordings will continue to be shorter and shorter in duration, as television time, compressed by the demands of advertising, has socially engineered shorter and shorter attention spans. Video-phone transmissions, initially limited by bandwidth, will radically shorten video clips.

The use of canned music will prevail. Look at advertising. Short, efficient messages, post-conceptual campaigns, are sold on the back of hit music.

Recombinant work will be more and more common. Sampling and the repeat structures of pop music will be emulated in the repetitive deconstruction of popular culture. Collage, montage and the quick-and-dirty efficiency of recombinant forms are driven by the romantic, Robin Hood-like efforts of the copyleft movement.

Real-time, on-the-fly voiceovers will replace scripted narratives . Personal, on-site journalism and video diaries will proliferate.

On-screen text will be visually dynamic, but semantically crude. Language will be altered quickly through misuse and slippage. People will say things like I work in several mediums [sic]. Media is plural. Medium is singular. What’s next: I am a multi-mediums artist? Will someone introduce spell-check to video text generators?

Crude animation will be mixed with crude behaviour. Slick animation takes time and money. Crude is cool, as opposed to slick.

Slow motion and accelerated image streams will be overused, ironically breaking the real-time-and-space edge of straight, unaltered video.

Digital effects will be used to glue disconnected scenes together; paint programs and negative filters will be used to denote psychological terrain. Notions of the sub- or unconscious will be objectified and obscured as quick and dirty surrealism dominates the creative use of video.

Travelogues will prosper, as road films and video tourism proliferate. Have palm-corder and laptop, will travel.

Extreme sports, sex, self-mutilation and drug overdoses will mix with disaster culture; terrorist attacks, plane crashes, hurricanes and tornadoes will be translated into mediated horror through vernacular video.

It’s great stuff, but it makes me wonder if we really know what will happen with video in the next 10 years. After all, television may have bred short attention spans, but when the cost of producing and distributing video drops, perhaps we’ll see attention spans increase because of media lasting several hours.

Check out the essay at Sterling’s blog for more of the above.

The Oregonian has an article about video search, For Web video, search is the key.

“The key point to understand is that Internet video is going to go to the television,” said Phil Leigh, founder and principal analyst of Inside Digital Media, a digital media market research firm. “All of us are going to use the (Internet) search tool to find what we want to watch” on TV.

Search is incredibly important to content these days. There is so much that we rely on it to find everything–I do anyway. However, it’s not the only way to find great content. In fact recommendations make a much more compelling way to find content, especially audio and video. Whether a friend mentions a great new show, or a group you below to suggests some great listening, recommendations are usually more reliable that stumbling around search results: especially with so much content online.

That’s why we’ve built a few ways to be given recommendations for online audio and video. Imagine turning on your television and having a bunch of relevant shows queued up waiting for you to watch, ones that you didn’t know about, but when you watch them you realise they match your tastes or interests. That’s what Scouta is aiming for.

Peter Gabriel’s Witness group is one of the reasons that I am passionate about online video and audio. It’s now not only up to major news organizations to spread the word, but is at a point where it rests with all of us to make a difference by being involved (I’m partially stealing from Cameron Reilly’s thought that he often expresses on G’day World). Ten years ago we couldn’t spread a message as far and wide as we now can, and with audio and video the message we send can be so much more compelling.

From the article Peter Gabriel enlists videos for human rights:

Gabriel has been trying to get the businesses gathered at Davos to come up with cash or technology for Witness, a group he founded and which seeks to use video from cameras or phones to bring human rights abuse to light.

“With the telephone and Internet, anyone, anyplace can tell their story,” he told Reuters in an interview.

One of Witness’ main goals at the moment is to build a video hub where evidence of human rights abuse can be uploaded.

“You have seen the trend to citizen journalism,” Gabriel said, referring to the ability of people to record and distribute news and events rapidly with phones and cameras.

The big news in online video over the last few days is Chad’s admission at Davos that they’re in the process of moving toward revenue sharing from advertisements. Fred Wilson mentions it today.

But of course, there needs to be revenue to share with the content owners and the content creators (the people creating stuff on YouTube). And that’s where the monetization system comes in. To date, YouTube has relied on banners to provide revenue.

Chad wasn’t forthcoming on when this new system will be rolled out, but most of the weblog community seems to have taken the remark as a formal announcement. However, I think if done right it’s going to have a similar effect to Adsense, but for video.

By that, I mean that the story will be much more compelling if YouTube also share revenue for referral. If someone embeds a video on their site and it gets viewed, will they share the revenue with the publisher. I’d be interesting to see an economy build around that, and what effect it could have on the videos themselves. Would some of them become more viral because more people stand a chance of making a buck?

Imagine Scouta, Digg, Boing Boing and other sites generating income from links to video. What about if we then shared that with the community somehow. Consumers making money from the video, movies, or television shows they love.

The conversations over at Davos at the moment are just fantastic. I just wish I was there to be involved. Maybe next year . In the mean time I’ve been catching a few discussions at Davos Conversations.

In my past life, at Sun Microsystems, I didn’t often agree with Bill Gate. It’s not that I think he says anything revolutionary anymore–though his charity is mind blowing–but his latest comments at Davos confirm a lot of the vision we have for Scouta.

In the years ahead, more and more viewers will hanker after the flexibility offered by online video and abandon conventional broadcast television, with its fixed program slots and advertisements that interrupt shows, Gates said.

Chad Hurley even chimes in with another interesting comment in the article.

YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley said the impact on advertising would be profound, with the future promising far more targeted ads tailored to each viewer’s profile.

We’ve taken an approach that’s a little different to that. We figure that your keen to see the content, not really the commercial. So Scouta tailors the content to you, not the advertisement.

The next 5 years will be amazing, I think I keep saying that. There is a new race for convergence in the lounge room, and it’s all driven by the amount of content that is online.

Anyway, Chad’s a smart guy, for a number of different reasons. So it’s worth checking this video out.

Alan Graham, ZDNet journalist and online marketeer, blogs about his realization that he can save $300 a year by canceling his cable television and relying on iTunes and Netflix for his television and movie needs.

Last week I came to the realization that with Netflix and iTunes, I would be able to cut out the $50 portion of my cable TV bill and ditch the 80 or so channels I never watch, including 3 shopping channels, 3 sports channels, 6 family channels, numerous foreign language channels, and one Lifetime Channel for Women that my fiance tortures me with. Farewell Melissa Gilbert, Rachael Ray, and Paula Deen! You are thus banished from my home!

I’m currently interested in about 6 shows, all of which it turns out I can get on iTunes. Plus, Netflix handles all of my movie needs. If I’m generous with my iTunes figures, it adds up to about $300 in purchases each year, versus the $600 I pay for all of the “variety” that Comcast provides me. The old model of just piping junk into my home simply doesn’t make sense to me anymore.

There is already so much choice online that it is simple to ditch broadcast television. It’s also accelerating rapidly with most major television networks working out ways to get their content online. This is also excluding all the illegal ways to grab television and movies.

Even more interesting is Graham’s statement, “All of us have uttered at one point or another, ‘why can’t I just pay for what I want?’” Online video is causing this disruption, the ability to access only the stuff you care about.

The next year or two are going to be really exciting as far as online video goes. It not only makes me excited because of what Scouta can offer, but also because I’m an avid consumer of video.