I don't know if you're following the online community news but over the past holiday break, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation blocked all YouTube, an online video aggregator, references on last year's media purchase, MySpace, a social-networking site. What were they thinking? Couldn't the old/big guy just leave the new/little guy alone? How come MySpace can't or won't recognize that it's those whacky videos and other odd online contributions that make community spaces...interesting?!
Too bad MySpace could not forsee the power of citizen journalists and the online community -- it's pretty ginormous and powerful and can gather troops in well, faster than a mouse-click. YouTube's supporters/fans/users banded together, fought the silly censorship and "won". Just before Christmas, MySpace granted YouTube the right to live with them online once more. Woot!
A few weeks past. So now what does MySpace do? They go and bully Revver, the awesome video-sharing plus money making site I wrote about for DailyCandy. You'd think that News Corporation would have learned their lesson! Traditional media has already lost this battle.
So hey, Rupert, why don't you go and like, worry about your newspaper sales and let the online community be a community. What's the point of buying into Web 2.0 if you want to make it Paper 1.0? And how about assimilating and advancing instead of back peddling through all the bad press? How about having a Revver-lation and I don't know, censoring all the creepy naked people on MySpace instead (for the record, I'm actually not an advocate for censoring creepy naked people).
