Web 2.0s Versus Wilinets

Online collaborative platforms (i.e Youtube) and community media projects (i.e Public Access TV) relate in that it is a community that directly contributes to and absorbs the production of the whole. Beyond that, these two mediums differ greatly in how they influence and act on the community at large.
Cable Access TV and other community media projects are aimed at people in their surrounding community. Wilinet, for example, is programed for the people in the small Williamstown area. Media projects, like the “People's Video Theater” were made to have an even smaller specific audience.
Online collaborative projects, on the other hand, have a larger specific audience. This audience is based not on geographic closeness to the media production, but on interests. I doubt that “Crying While Eating” would have gotten nearly as large an amount of entries if it were a show on Wilinet. Online social networking sites make it easier for people with obscure creative interests to get together and make something more accessible for the world.
Cable access is, furthermore, limited in that it is not as simple for the audience member to choose what they are watching. The only way to choose is to make your own programming. However, with web 2.0 sites, users can choose what they are absorbing and when they are going to absorb it. As David Weinberger writes in “Everything is Miscellaneous”, “users are now in charge of the organization of the information they browse.”
The extreme example of this can be found in the new Ever Note program which allows users to gather as much information they like from the Internet, in the similar “tagging” manner that most Web 2.0 applications allow for.