I've come to realize something recently. All this news around Joost and TV-on-the-Internet is interesting and disruptive and cool, but it doesn't match with my interests as much as I thought. I don't really care so much about a new way to watch TV.
What interests me is user generated video, or video for the web (as opposed to video for the TV). I realized something interesting while making videos on our trip last year. When shooting video, I never even considered gathering my family and friends around the TV to watch an hour or two of video from our trip. That seemed so boring. I was shooting video for a single purpose: editing an experience down to less than three minutes and putting the video on the Internet. I didn't realize it for a while, but this was a different sort of video - video for the web and not for the TV. I'm betting that we're at the very beginning of a trend where many more people are going to make this same transition from video for the TV to video for the web.
You may be asking - what does this have to do with Social Design? My answer is that video for the web is a new format of community participation. Video has unique properties that can make for completely new ways for people to work and learn together. So, after learning more about Joost, I can see that it's not what I thought it would be. To borrow a couple of phrases from John Battelle, Joost is Packaged Good Media and I'm interested in what he calls Conversational Media. I'm interested in how we can use video for the web to push the concept of community in new directions.
(Thanks Jay)