YouTube just launched a $5 million grant program. They want to fund amateur video creators and help them drive visitors to their YouTube pages. Hmmm. I get that they want to fund people who will give them more eyeballs – that’s like paying someone for business development services. But there is more and I’ve heard it before.

The article states that many of these amateurs have been able to “generate substantial revenues and command an audience that rivals those of the broadcast networks”. The grants will help these amateurs get more professional. Because these underdogs have leaped higher with less the conclusion is that “the game has changed” and people are “throwing the rules out the window”.

You’ve probably heard it before too. Social media has broken so many rules that content, organized information, will never be the same. George Strompolos at YouTube tells the New York Times that “these people [are] the next content creators”.

Is it just me or does this appear to be silly rhetoric? If YouTube and others like it provide the capital for these upstarts to get professional, then have they simply shaped them in the same mold as the broadcast networks? The business model changes from broadcast to on-demand, but we’re even using the same television set. Well, I am. Plug the cord into my laptop and TV and presto! I’ve got a big screen.

And so it is that prospect researchers have gotten caught up in some silliness. At first it was panic about prospects’ self-reported information on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Could we trust that it was correct? Were we invading our prospects’ privacy by looking at the information they post so freely?

LinkedIn is not Who’s Who. After all it isn’t exclusive, edited, printed and you don’t have to pay for it. But they are both self-reported with the awareness that anyone can read the information. And the information is a veritable GOLD MINE of biographical data we could not get elsewhere.

But even for all the silliness that happens when something new gets digested, I do think George got it right about the new “content creators”. I don’t believe that we’ve thrown the rules out the window, but the Cool Data Blog by Kevin MacDonell, a researcher at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is a fabulous example of how the road to content creation has been re-directed. If he had tried to write a book and get it published the old fashioned way we might not benefit, if at all, until long after his techniques were showing some age. Technology is changing everything rapidly right down to the data we collect about our donors.

Instead we get the benefit of Kevin’s expertise for free and as he works through it. This makes it more fun and he’s good at including visuals. After a year he might think about turning his blog into a book. He could do this himself and sell it on Amazon or maybe even get a publisher to jump in. More than a blog he could develop an email format, video demonstrations and more.

Whatever he does, he could probably use some cash to do it better. So I hope to discover that the WordPress Foundation wins the donor lottery, jumps on the bandwagon and announces this kind of “professionalizing the amateurs” grant funding soon!