It's The Community

Charlene Li, of Forrester Research, is quoted in the NY Times regarding the $1.6 Billion price tag that google is said to have put on potential acquisition target YouTube.com

"YouTube figured out what Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and all the others in the marketplace didn't," she said. "It's not about the video. It's about creating a community around the video."

I think she nailed it. I'm giving a talk next week at the Web 2.0 Kongress in Frankfurt, specifically about Blog Events and Communities, and I'm thinking very much about these types of things these days.

The basic problem is we've spent a lot of time gathering and indexing and recommending and reviewing stuff, and now we're seeing the expressed need to build and sustain relationships through which we can make sense of all that stuff.

Without the relationships, it's all so much noise and hype.