Business: Sun Microsystems tells employees to make YouTube videos — what?!

News:  Sun Microsystems (which encourages its employees to blog) has set up a contest for its employees, asking them to make the best YouTube video to advertise Sun products.  Below is Executive VP of servers John Fowler discussing the contest.  (More from ZDNet)

Analysis:  This sounds like fun.  I imagine Sun has lots of techie people who can come with creative ads or at least videos.  Whether the contest will work in promoting Sun products, it’s hard to say, though.  Some YouTubers might see this as a corporate infiltration of their site and peer production.

YouTube is now a verb and an adjective

News:  Wall Street Journal writer Lee Gomes has an excellent article discussing how “YouTube is now a verb and an adjective“–great title!

For those still questioning the YouTube-Google deal, this is a must read.  One key point:  “Instead, Google is getting an awesome brand name, and the eyeballs that come with it. It’s one of the ironies of the current Internet that success is often uncorrelated with a company’s R&D budget or the number of programmers on its staff. As proven with social networking sites such as MySpace, what makes for success is often being in the right place at exactly the time that a particular fad breaks your way.”

Analysis: The grammatical discussion of “YouTube” as a verb and an adjective provides nice symbolism of how pervasive YouTube has seeped into everyday culture.  Gomes is exactly right that a bunch of other sites do exactly what YouTube does, but without YouTube’s success in attracting users.  Being the First Mover in a space is always an advantage, particularly if you do it well. 

Gomes also makes a good point in questioning why major copyright holders are failing to capitalize on the video craze right now.  In my last post, I discussed how South Korean shows freely disseminate clips of their programs on the Internet.  Why aren’t NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox exploring that marketing strategy more aggressively?