Follow the Web 2.0 money

His healthy skepticism for so-called Web 2.0 showing, Nick Carr reminds us that the infrastructure providers reap the rewards of Internet bubbles, new or old:

It's worth stopping for a second and thinking back to the old-school web - Web 1.0, as we call it now - and who made money off that big boom. Most of the money back then wasn't earned by the cool dot-coms. It was earned by the boring old farts who sold the cool dot-coms the computer and networking gear they needed to rapidly scale up their businesses to the point where they'd be certain to collapse in the most spectacular fashion possible.

So who's raking in Web 2.0 bucks? Carr follows the money from coolish new sites like YouTube straight to the people they pay to serve all that video -- in this case, industrial-strength streamer LimeLight Networks.

Discussion of YouTube leads me to admit I still struggle to understand most deployments of Web-based video.

Video has been "poised to explode" online for about as long as I can remember being online. Bandwidth was always the issue: first, we all said the Internet backbone itself couldn't support high-quality video; then, we all said consumers wouldn't pay the monthly fees to cover in-home broadband connections; now, we're back to saying the backbone won't handle it.

No matter. Compared to other forms of Internet communications, video is still a long way from cheap to produce, cheap to serve or cheap to consume. Apple seems to come closest to having user-friendly online distribution figured out, but the delivery is intended to be iPod-based, not Web-based. And most of what Apple sells via iTunes Video Store is repackaged commercial programming -- iPod meets TiVo.

And though video as files can be shared (still somewhat clumsily) in two-way or multiparty communications, video content itself is inherently one-way. Even the best Internet methods to find, view and share video still seem creaky compared to the best modern software UIs. None of this sounds terribly Web 2.0, does it?

Understand I'm not saying video has no place online. I'm just saying I'm not sure it's found its place. Carr's reminder of the monetary costs just reminded me of the consumer experience costs.

Update (4:12 p.m. 5/3): Lost Remote test-drives a possible exception to my video usability concerns -- ABC.com's new video streaming. LR's take: "extremely well done."

Update (10:54 p.m. 5/4): That new ABC.com video service apparently had a rough birth.