BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) — YouTube, the privately-held video sharing website, now delivers an estimated 100 million videos a day to its users. The site has been online for barely a year.

It’s growth rate is phenomenal and without precedent, skyrocketing into the public consciousness and becoming commonplace nearly overnight. So what do the journalists, analysts and pundits all do when they witness this moment in history? Kvetch.
Nobody actually wants to understand exactly why this happened in the first place. Instead you hear the following (and typical) Silicon Valley commentary. “How are they going to monetize it?” “It’s the dotcom bust 2.0!” “There must be a video bubble.” “They’re burning through $1.5 million a month. How can they continue?”

It’s weird but almost nobody looks at this tremendous growth curve and asks themselves, “Holy cripes! How did that happen!?!” Instead you get headlines such as “Is YouTube the next Napster?”

Apparently YouTube has stumbled on to something and perhaps we should try and understand that in itself. If and when the company manages to “monetize” (don’t you love that term?) things may change.

And you must assume that with all the marketing brains out there one of them can find a way to make money. I’m more concerned about why this product exploded the way it did. I’ll critique the money-making scheme when it appears.
So let’s look at what caused the growth. And let’s note that this company is hardly the first on the block to let users share video. Google video, in fact, looks a lot like YouTube, but never achieved this growth despite getting a big head start.
Two things seem to be at work. The first is the incredible desire people have to share video clips with each other. That’s now apparent.

What’s not so apparent, unless you actually have tried to use the various video sharing sites, is that nobody — and I mean nobody — made it easy until YouTube.
By merely combining a pent-up demand with ease-of-use you get the YouTube phenomenon. It’s brain dead simple, but I’m telling you that is all there is to it.
The hardest part of the process is the user managing to get the video onto a computer where it can be uploaded to YouTube. Nowadays with digital camcorders and still cameras that shoot .MOV files it is not that hard and most cams come with software to make it easier.
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On the Internet, as in life, men and women have different motivations for doing what they do. According to a recent report from Pew Internet and American Life, women view the Internet as a place to extend, support, and nurture relationships and communities.

Do Different Genders Use The Web Differently
Men tend to see it as an office, a library, or a playground–screw the community, this is about function not family.

The report found that women are more enthusiastic communicators, using email in a more robust way. Not only sending and receiving more email than men, women are more likely to write to family and friends about a variety of topics, sharing news, joys and worries, planning events, and forwarding jokes and stories.

While both sexes equally appreciate the efficiency and convenience of email, women are more likely than men to value the medium for its positive effects on improving relationships, expanding networks, and encouraging teamwork at the office.

“Women also value email for a kind of positive, water-cooler effect, which lightens the atmosphere of office life,” reads the 54-page report.

The report found that women are more likely to use the Internet for emailing, getting maps and directions (after all, we men always know where we’re going), looking for health and medical information, seeking support for health and personal problems, and getting religious information.

Men tend to be more intense Internet users than women, being more likely to go online daily (61% of men and 57% of women) and more likely to go online several times a day (44% of men and 39% of women).
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I’m regularly asked why a lawyer client’s Technorati blog rank is dropping and what can be done to improve their blog’s Technorati ranking.

My typical response is don’t worry about. I just emailed a client tonight:

I would not worry about Technorati. I don’t watch my Technorati ranking at all and advise clients to do the same. It would be a vanity contest - assuming that Technorat’s servers and systems were even up to indexing all blog content and the incoming links to blogs. With the failures of their systems their rankings mean little, if anything.

What is a “Technorati Ranking?” (per Technorati site)

A Technorati Ranking relates to the number of sources that point to a particular weblog relative to other weblogs. The more sources referencing a weblog, the higher the Technorati ranking. The Technorati Ranking for a blog is displaying in URL Search results, Blog search results, and is displayed in the account profile.

To me that says nothing more than we’ve created a vanity contest that will cause vain people (many bloggers) to return to Technorati as they try in vain to increase their blog ranking. Maybe we can even get people to post their ranking with our Technorati logo as a badge on their blog. Sounds like Web 2.0.

Having an obligation to clients to find out if I’m right, I looked at what others were saying about Technorati rankings.
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