Sadly for Yahoo (and much better for YouTube) it's YouTube that seems to be winning the battle for eyeballs at the moment. While a great number of people know and love Flickr, even more will confess to taking a quick trawl through YouTube. This is reflected in many things, not least the enthusiasm amongst operators for YouTube content. Partly this is because it's moving pictures, but mostly it's because YouTube is a brand that attracts people. It's a guilty pleasure in most cases.

Perhaps we missed the trick at the round table; Flickr and YouTube aren't telling us anything new. Some people like doing arty things with cameras, prefer a smaller choice of a higher quality. The vast majority want to be entertained with something crazy, funny or sexy. That's got us to the point, perhaps, where social media is aping old media - or perhaps to a point where old media hacks like I are seeing parallels.

There's also a dark side to it all - something Chinwag is going to base an event on soon. Yesterday I found that personal information I'd posted on my Facebook profile had been inadvertently scraped into Jaiku, and thence into a Google Alert. People have been bullied, victimised and stalked. So no different from old media, then. However, there is a difference, and that is in terms of accountability.

There are a lot of positive sides to social media. It dis-intermediates. It brings small, local stories into the fore. It may yet show up the imperfections of older, more entrenched forms of media. It's certainly going to be fun for the search companies. Perhaps it already has. Google's original algorithm depended on links to sites, not the considered weight of an organisation behind a site. Whatever is likely to happen, it'll be a fun ride.