The Revolution Will Be Monetized

Something significant happened last week. In fact, I don't think it would be hyperbole to say that it might have been a watershed moment in the history of the internet. Years down the line, when we're all old and retired, people will still be speaking about this event--some with fondness, other with great distaste.

What I'm referring to, of course, is the May Day revolution on digg.com. Responding to an attempted censorship effort by the site's owners, who deleted all posts containing reference to a series of numbers and letters that could be used to circumvent the copy protection on next-gen movie discs, Digg users, in a fit of beautiful coordination, posted thousands of stories containing the contentious protection key and then voted those stories up to the main page. All of a sudden, it was confrontation at the barricades, as the digital masses stormed the virtual Bastille. To calm the bloodlust of the e-mob, Digg co-founder Kevin Rose relented and posted a blog promising that the original posts would be reinstated.

Instantly, everyone realized that this was far more than an issue of intellectual property. Rather, it was a veritable Prague Spring for web users, and it represented the most scintillating and compelling piece of evidence that the user driven content movement had forever shattered the paternalistic paradigm of traditional content distribution.

History has shown that ruling elites frequently attempt, and often succeed, to reimpose their authority after periods of revolt and unrest. But this was before the era of Web 2.0. Now that control has been turned over to the users, now that they are empowered to be engines of a site's growth and dynamism, now that they have become the exclusive creative wellspring of content on vast and decentralized social networks, there will be no turning back.

A wise company is one who learns the lesson of May 1st, 2007. A foolish one will soon find out--to put a new spin on an old phrase--that the revolution will now be monetized.