Brittany Flick - musician, model, merchandiser, MySpace maestro

The web is still going through enormous change but 5-minute-fame has been one massive effect of Web 2.0 and the various social media sites.

Although reality tv started a lot of the throw-them-into-the-spotlight-and-see-what-happens nonsense, modern web technologies have allowed the very obsessed to continue the exposure/drama/fandom to almost unlimited degrees.

Whether ardent fans pushing their obsessions or ardent wannabes pushing themselves, the opportunities are almost endless: website, blog, FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter can all be used, alone or in any combination.

Brittany Flickinger (photo) has used a number of methods to keep her hopes and potential-career in the spotlight. After winning season one of Paris Hilton's Best Friend Forever tv show, Britt Flick (as she is often known) is still nibbling at the edges of modelling and/or musician and/or merchandiser.

It has been reported that Hilton didn't stay friends with Brittany because, "I loved her and I trusted her, but sometimes people get too caught up and they change."

Anyone who has watched the BFF shows will know that Paris is constantly changing her own mind. Nothing wrong with that as she has a multi-million dollar business to run. So although Britt is not in that league yet, she is a very good example of a modern Web 2.0 user in the better senses of the term.

2 years of astonishing growth - YouTube and FaceBook crush MySpace

At the start of 2007, MySpace, Google and YouTube were close to level-pegging for worldwide web traffic. FaceBook was barely on the radar.

One year later, YouTube was running at twice the traffic, while FaceBook had caught up with the other two.

At the start of 2009, FaceBook has caught YouTube, while MySpace is close to declining. The success of YouTube started with a lot of fairly juvenile and fun content, but now it exceeds MySpace for great music content, and good film resources, and, well, the whole of life - almost.

YouTube probably has the market locked tight for genre and niche content - all readily available, easy to find, and with good stepping stones to similar items. FaceBook, on the other hand, has captured both the tweenies market - great networking and mesmerising apps - and the family networking crown.

Prediction for the next 12 months: Blogs will catch up with MySpace, especially if FaceBook ever work out how to get a Blogroll to work properly.
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Context is not new - YouTube and FaceBook the future

Content is not king. Context is king. Unless you have a mechanism to classify or categorise in some way, content becomes a difficult mess.

Search engines helped find content on the web, but still rather inefficiently. Even now, with all the improvements to Google etc, it is still possible to receive thousands of results from a search query.

Microsoft was wrong. Internet Explorer was wrong. They were old concepts and have been totally overtaken by REAL context kings:

YouTube
easily find videos that work (rather than false or broken links in Google or Yahoo)

MySpace
easily stay in touch with friends and common interests (in contrast to clumsy and boring email software)

Facebook
easily find friends and share common interests (in contrast to clumsy and boring special interest groups)

Firefox
providing a browser with tools that work

So ignore the nay-saying of the big boys and go with what works for users. Every computer manufacturer (except Apple) and every hosting software (except Joomla) can be shown to have very fundamental usability failures.

Learn from history!

The Egyptians were smart enough to know that context was king, and used a version of XML-like descriptions for their scrolls to help describe the content. (Yes, the Roman Christians decided to destroy all that and set us back a few thousand years.)