Knock your head off.
1. Users judge others' identity based on content.
- Videos that users associate with themselves are the videos that go viral.
2. Participation is necessary for community.
- A community with no contributors is a community with nothing to contribute.
3. Community is necessary for viral videos.
- In order for community to exist, users must have a form of identity.
4. Viral videos form communities.
- Elements from content unite/connectusers with similar characteristics(identities).
- Series of videos or YouTube channels can serve as community hubs.


Mission: convey the importance of community in spread of user-generated videos, and future role of community as it converges with traditional media.

• User communities are as necessary as they are natural
• Friends, favorites, channels, subscribers, comments and discussion catalyze popularity
• Sense of connection, obligations to friends, communitues
  
• Changes for traditional media
• Role of "scouts" in finding, discovering new content
• Creation of many niche communities, demograpgics
• Maven users (influential users naturally spread messages with greater ease)
• Users gain sense of participation, feedback
• advantages: greater investment into medium (YouTube, internet streaming), increased ease of video frequency, videos accessible through other online mediums/networks
• "response content" limitless, effective
• Transitions/exchanges between top-down & bottom-up content
• top-down content remixed, fed bottom-up
• bottom-up content picked up, fed top-down
• Popular users emerge as central nodes, develop surrounding communities
• examples for video: spricket24, nalts, etc.

Community elements - all of these are driven through actions of other users.

• Friends
• Subscriptions
• Subscribers
• Responses
• Rating
• Favoriting
• Comments
• Flagging
• Related videos
• Tags
• Description

Required structures - necessities for social circles to exist, share/promote/view videos

• Presence, interaction of other registered users

• through subscriptions/subscribers
• through friends

• Without links to other users (aka, videos uploaded anonymously), community does not exist

Additional structures - these elements give further depth to community (more advanced than simple community -- users interact w/ each other, not just associated)

• Responses
• Rating
• Favoriting
• Comments
• Flagging
• Related videos
• Tags
• Description

Popularity achieved through discussion, outside links, user ratings, number of subscribers and daily/monthly honors

• Users routinely give thanks for helping boost

• Likelihood to help with popularity a two-way street ("scratch my back, I scratch yours")
• Weight of comment emphasized, more powerful if user has more friends, subscribers

• Popularity drives from external communites
• embedded videos
• other mediascape sites linking (MySpace, Facebook, Digg, etc.)
  
• "Featured" videos chosen by YouTube elite, not users

Community formation

• Popular videos make for popular users
• Factors for "good" vlogs/videos:
• editing
• clear presentation of ideas, messages
• personality, humor, voice
• Circle of users
• Friend cliques form from outside of YouTube
• circles extend to bring in new users, previously unconnected
• Stand-out users in overlapping circles
• More active through comments
• More active in video creation, uploading, favoriting responding
• The more instances a users name appears, the more opportunities for new user exposure
  
• Connected through common interests
• Tags
• user-defined
  
• Responses
• user-controlled
  
• Related videos
• determined by YouTube mediation

Community maintenance

• Users more likely to friend, subscribe to other influential users
• Will subscribe to commercial content if user has invested interest
• Commercial channels still allow for sense of community, via:
• comments
• list of subscribers
• list of favorited videos
• Stagnant users (lacking video updates, mutual comment exchanges) likely to be "unsubscribed," "defriended"
• Question: How often must users interact with others on daily basis? Monthly?
• Users with popular videos need not directly interact (i.e. commenting) to others to maintain friends, subscribers

Community influence

• Other sites, mediums employing YouTube community (among others) as model
• Hulu.com
• Elements YouTube does not have: Hulu users may pinpoint, highlight certain clips in videos to send to others, emphasize
  
• Major networks (nbc.com, cbs.com, abc.com) allowing for community interactivity stemming from television show interest
• User-defined wikis