A Million Voices, A Million Cameras, A Million Creators of Content

One of the most lasting impressions from my trip to Vegas for CES last week was the prevalence not just of cool cameras and phones on display but those already in the hands of an attendee base heavily invested in the creation of content.

It was truly stunning how many people had their cameras and camcorders and audio recorders all out and recording, capturing different aspects of the days' events.

Presumably, many of them were trained on creating content for a blog or tech news site. So they're not just creating content, they're doing so with the intent of distributing that content over the Internet.

And perhaps none were more impressive from a tech-geek perspective then the two men behind one of my favorite blogs: Technology Evangelist. Ed Kohler and Benjamin Higginbotham often bring a full HD camera crew along with them to events, but this time around all they had was an unbelievably fancy looking phone through which they not only recorded high quality video but also uploaded directly to their blog.

Needless to say, my "only makes phone calls with the occasional text message" cell phone was feeling rather inadequate while discussing these matters over a beer at the Venetian.

But back to my main point, which is that we live in an era where anyone and everyone can be and increasingly are trying to contribute their own perspective to the public, and in doing so we're all creating incredible demand for bandwidth in order to support the transfer of all this data.

The problem, though, is that with so many new voices it can be nigh impossible to keep track of everything that's being said.

Case in point, during a recent presidential debate one online forum registered enough comments that it'd take you more than 10 hours to read them all, despite the event itself only being a couple of hours long.

As another example, after the New Hampshire primary I jumped onto Google News and saw more than 4000 stories related to that news, and those were just the more reputable news sites. I'm sure when you add in all the personal opinions on blogs and message boards the number jumps at least into the tens of thousands.

And if the trends shown at CES continue, of more and more ways to capture audio, video, and pictures getting integrated into more and more devices, there's little reason to think this trend will slow any time soon.

We truly are entering a world where everyone's a content producer, where everyone can try their hand at the process of creating news, but in doing so we're also going to have to figure out a way to sort through all this noise in order to find the truth.