Our good friend Russell Buckley over at MobHappy has a brilliant posting about the new trend of youth posting happy slapping videos now to video sharing sites like YouTube. The BBC's Panorama TV show apparently had a special on it - entitled Childen's Fight Club or something like that - the kids who have been beaten up (and videorecorded on cameraphones) get even more teased by this new phenomenon, its not enough they are beaten up once, they now get the added insults to the injury of the videos shared by other kids.

The worst aspect of it is specialist violence sites like Live Leak (and like Russell, we won't post a link, we don't want to drive traffic there or in any way endorse or support them).

I am torn by this. On the one hand I believe very passionately about free speech. But I deplore specialist websites who offer videos of ultraviolence, especially if it - the violence - is real and targeted at kids. I wish there was a way to control this, to limit it, to get rid of it. Obviously today as the web is mostly a wild west, there is no way to control this.

The one thing that can be done, is to bring the power of the purse into play. These sites make money through advertising. Perhaps soon there will emerge an ethical standard among advertisers, that certain sites are not worth advertising on (for any bad publicity to the brand). For that to happen, though, will probably take still considerable development in this digital community space we all engage in.

But as a note from my first day of my summer vacation, it is a sad flip-side to digital communities and user-generated content. But honestly, it is human nature and human behaviour, for any new innovation there will be upsides and downsides. Just like cameraphones introduced intrusions such as the Japanese man taking pictures under womens' dresses and Korean baths and swimming pools forbidding cameraphones etc, we do see abuses that come from human nature.

We'll, I won't dwell more on it. I'm going to go enjoy the sunshine    :-)

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Tomi T Ahonen is a bestselling author and independent consultant in the emerging areas of next generation wireless who lectures at Oxford University and is seen annually at about 20 telecoms/IT conferences on six continents. His expertise includes the business, applications, services, partnering and marketing of wireless technologies. Tomi provides advanced wireless service marketing plan workshops and business case audits for operators/carriers; new service creation workshops; and value chain analysis for content providers and assists global media, IT and telecoms companies on their transitions to a digitally converged world.

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