Hi there, I’m Jeff DeChambeau and I just joined the Wikinomics team. You’re invited to comment on anything I post, or if you’d like to contact me directly, to send me an email.

Onwards to my first post:

A few months ago we saw the release of two movies that (for me at least) demonstrated mainstream Hollywood’s acceptance (or at least acknowledgment) of the significance of YouTube: Cloverfield and Be Kind Rewind.

In case you missed Cloverfield, it’s Godzilla with a twist. The movie was shot entirely from the point of view of one guy with a video camera. This footage told a first person account of the entire ‘incident’, from the start of the night at a party, to later on when the cameraman and his friends were chased through subway tunnels by vicious creatures and beyond.

Be Kind Rewind was much lighter. It followed the story of two friends who accidentally erase all of the videotapes at their local rental outlet. To solve the problem, the duo did their best to recreate and retell the stories of classic movies themselves, with very funny—if poorly produced—results. Be Kind Rewind, however,  went one step further, and encourages fans to make their own “sweded” (amateur recreations) versions of movies and post them on YouTube.

YouTube has been revolutionary because it allowed anyone to share their perspective on the world, be it through their first person video footage of events as they unfold (something that Cloverfield parrots masterfully), or by letting people remix just about anything in the public domain to generate new content (as was explored by Be Kind Rewind). When Hollywood released movies based on those concepts, it lead us to a situation where the big-screen was mirroring small-screen.

While these movies are far from being collaborative creations made exclusively by fans, it did seem that by following suit on what people were doing on their own, the movie studios were able to join the community of small-screen content creators.

But, this leaves me wondering if the movie producers are really entering the community, or are they just sitting in a place where they can pick and choose the best ideas and then sell them back to the people who created them.

What do you think?