The People's Network

In one wild year, YouTube gave us macaca and lonelygirl15, turned millions into movie stars and made a billion bucks

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YouTube is ultimately more interesting as a community and a culture, however, than as a cash cow. It's the fulfillment of the promise that Web 1.0 made 15 years ago. The way blogs made regular folks into journalists, YouTube makes them into celebrities. The real challenge old media face isn't protecting their precious copyrighted material. It's figuring out what to do when the rest of us make something better. As Hurley puts it, "How do you stay relevant when people can entertain themselves?" He and his partners may have started YouTube, but the rest of us, in our basements and bedrooms, with our broadband and our webcams, invented it.

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