I expand on my thoughts about the termination of googlebombing in a column in tomorrow’s Guardian.

Wikipedia has become the subject of a Harvard Business School case study written by Karim Lakhani and Andrew McAfee. The case chronicles last year’s debate over whether “Enterprise 2.0” warrants an entry in the online encyclopedia. (The term Enterprise 2.0 was coined by McAfee and refers to the introduction of Web 2.0 collaboration tools into companies.) The case study’s broader context is the battle between the Inclusionists and the Deletionists for Wikipedia’s destiny and, more broadly still, the emergence of the Wikipedian bureaucracy.

The BBC reports that YouTube founder Chad Hurley is confirming that the Google-owned company will begin sharing advertising revenues with the people who upload videos to its site: “The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, [Hurley] said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.” Hurley says the plan is intended to “reward creativity.” That’s true, I’m sure, but it’s not the real story. There are deeper strategic reasons for the move. Here are the four most salient ones, so far as I can see:

1. First, and most important, it provides a way to greatly expand the advertising on the site without instigating a community rebellion. To justify the huge amount of money Google paid for the site, YouTube needs to begin incorporating ads into videos on a large scale. By sharing a fraction of the resulting revenues with its members, it makes the expansion of advertising feel like a gregarious move, aimed at benefiting “the community” rather than exploiting it.

2. Second, it’s a defensive move that will help prevent the shift of popular videos, and their producers, to competing sites that offer revenue-sharing programs. As Liz Gannes points out, “Revenue sharing is something an increasing number of YouTube competitors, such as Revver, Metacafe, and Break.com, have used to differentiate themselves from the front-runner.” If it turns out that revenue-sharing is their only meaningful differentiation, they’re going to be in big trouble once YouTube initiates the practice. Their only recourse will be to offer contributors a bigger slice of the ad take, and a payment war against Google is a losing strategy. They’ll get killed.

3. Third, it spurs competition among contributors to create videos that get viewed a lot and hence generate more ad revenues and larger payments. Reward “creativity” (ie, the production of videos that attract a lot of viewers) with cash, and you get more of it. Social production’s fine, but when $1.65 billion is involved, crasser incentives are sometimes necessary.

4. Fourth, and most speculatively, it prepares the way for YouTube to exact greater commercial control over users’ videos. Here’s the current language in YouTube’s official terms of use: “You retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website …” The bold type, added by me, highlights the key points. Currently, you don’t receive any royalties from YouTube but you also don’t have to give the site exclusive rights to your video. You can post the same video on other sites. What will be interesting to see is whether, as a prerequisite for participating in revenue-sharing – for getting some royalties -YouTube will require that a member give it an exclusive license, precluding the posting of the video elsewhere. If we assume, as I think we can, that a relatively small number of videos and video producers will receive a disproportionate percentage of views and generate a disproportionate amount of ad revenues, then “locking up” that content and those producers will become increasingly important in the years ahead. Controlling the “stars” will be as critical to YouTube as it is to any media business. I would bet that, perhaps not immediately but at some point in the not-too-distant future, YouTube will demand an exclusive license in return for payment.

This is a smart strategic move on YouTube’s part. It’s an even smarter move on Google’s part. As for the users: Don’t quit your day jobs, guys. The money’s in aggregation.

Meanwhile, back at Davos, where this year’s buzzphrase is “enlarging the conversation,” all the interesting information, according to John Battelle, is being doled out behind closed doors and under gag orders. Writes Battelle on his blog:

Nearly every session I attended where I got that unmistakable “Shit I have to post on this” feeling was, unfortunately, off the record. Last night Larry and Sergey sat down with Charlie Rose for an intimate chat at a private event. Off the record. Before that I spoke to a room full of Media Governors – the folks who run just about every major media company in the world. Off the record. Before that, a gathering of influential editors and journalists from all over the globe. Again, off the record.

The overarching theme of this year’s gathering, by the way, is “The Shifting Power Equation.”

UPDATE: The Guardian reports on comments from Brin and Page, including an expression of regret over Google’s decision to censor search results in China: “Asked whether he regretted the decision, Mr Brin admitted yesterday: ‘On a business level, that decision to censor… was a net negative.'” The pair also bristled at comparisons between Google and Microsoft, reports the Guardian: “Since moving into China, Google has been compared to Microsoft because of its dominant position and power. ‘We are very sensitive to people talking about us in that way,’ said Mr Brin. Mr Page described the differences between the two technology companies by saying ‘we have very open partnerships, we are very clear about being fair with revenues.'”

UPDATE: Forbes has more details on what Brin and Page said. Apparently, the expression of regret about giving in to Chinese censors was fairly tepid and related mostly to Brin’s nervousness about the effects on Google’s image (do I sense a pattern emerging?):

Brin said the damage to Google’s image made the deal a “net negative.” But Page wouldn’t say it was a bad move. “I would hate for us as a company to make what we think is the wrong decision for people in China based on our reputation.”

After years of taking a fairly laissez-faire attitude toward googlebombing, Google has now taken action to stop the practice. It has incorporated into its search engine a googlebomb-sniffing algorithm that somehow identifies and neutralizes any concerted effort to skew search results for a given phrase (such as, most famously, tying “miserable failure” to the White House site). That’s fine with me. It’s like scrubbing graffiti off the side of a subway car.

But that’s not the whole story. What’s particularly revealing here is Google’s explanation for why it has finally decided to tweak its search engine to defuse googlebombs. Did the company act out of a desire to present better search results? Nope. To counter the willful distortion of results? Nope. To serve the public interest? Nope. The driving reason is that the company had come to fear that googlebombing was tarnishing its image. As Google’s Matt Cutts explains:

People have asked about how we feel about Googlebombs, and we have talked about them in the past. Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us. But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.

So the company is allowing its concerns about its public image to influence its search results. The upshot in this case may be salubrious, but what kind of precedent is being set here? And, perhaps more important, what does it tell us about what’s inside the Google black box that determines how most of us find information on the Web most of the time?

Three years ago, when Google was first asked about googlebombing, it gave, as Danny Sullivan notes, the corporate equivalent of a shrug. A spokesman said, “We just reflect the opinion on the Web, for better or worse.” Google’s search engine was, in other words, just a passive feedback machine that reported the people’s wisdom – or stupidity – back to the people. It was resolutely democratic, with all the strengths and flaws of democracy. Google itself had little control over the machine it had built.

That perception of Google’s search engine – that sense that “we the people” control its workings – continues to hold sway among the public. But while it may have been true once – and while it may in fact have been the company’s founding ideal – it’s not true anymore. Google’s engine is a meticulously hand-crafted, continually optimized machine that does precisely what Google instructs it to do – even if that means filtering results to protect the company’s reputation. Google may have good in its heart. It may, for the time being anyway, be fighting on our behalf against the forces of distortion that it has unleashed. But let’s not forget that Google’s machine is not our machine. It’s Google’s, for better or worse.

I forgot to mention, in that last post, that amid all the hoopla over user-generated content at Davos this year, there was one guy who decided to toss a turd into the Web 2.0 punchbowl. Who was this malefactor? Believe it or not, it was none other than the blogmeister himself, Technorati’s David Sifry. According to the FT, Sifry cautioned the attendees that “some Web 2.0 tools could backfire on the next generation of Davos delegates, warning that the Supreme Court justices and presidential candidates of 20-30 years time could be embarrassed by their juvenile MySpace pages and drunken photos on Facebook.” Thanks for the tip, dad.

The mucketymucks have invaded Second Life. Or at least a little roped-off corner of it.

The big thing at this year’s elite World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is to don a cartoon persona and slum around the virtual world as if you “get it.” An avatar, reports the Financial Times, “has become the must-have accessory for [WEF] delegates.” A big attraction on yesterday’s program was a session called “The Age of the Avatar,” and another session featured an interview with a couple of ‘tars about “identity in the modern world.” The WEF’s impresario, Klaus Schwab, says that the embrace of Second Life is all about “enlarging the Davos conversation” to include the commoners.

That sounds fine, but I’m suspicious. In order to “participate” in the Second Life sessions, residents had to send their questions in advance to Reuters’ avatarian reporter, Adam Reuters, who got to choose which ones to ask. Residents and other “Internet users” were then invited to “watch the interviews online.” Some conversation.

When I see the avatars of the power elite surrounded by griefers, then I’ll know they get Second Life. Until then, it’s just virtual window dressing.