Lee Gomes in the Wall Street Journal has a great look under the hood at YouTube.

But i wonder if all his data warrents his conclusions.

The data itself is pretty remarkable.

The piece begins with the fact that Lee has 'scraped' YouTube to get data. Wow, a reporter doing real reporting in the tech space, how cool is that! He says his data shows that in one month's time the site went from 5.1 to 6.1 million videos posted. These number show 33,000 video posts a day (less than YouTube's public # of 70,000 a day - but still pretty darn impressive).

What Lee derives from this data (and the fact that key words Dance, Love, Music, and Girls) is that we've wasted - collectively -9,305 years watching YouTube.

He doesn't use the word 'wasted'. But that's his implication.

And i get his point. A quick glance at Google Video's top five reveals:

1. Sex in kitchen
2. Shakira - Hips Dont Lie spoof
3. World's Clumsiest Pole Dancer
4. GIRL CAUGHT CHEAT ON WEBCAM
5. Topless Car Wash

Hmmm... harldy high art.

But the fact is that Google video's top 5 isn't any more high brow than YouTube...

And what all these stat's don't reflect is that there are also millions of videos about Gardening, Race Cars, Home Repair, Mountain Climbing, Parenting, and tons of other really valuable data. The long tail doesn't suggest that the top of the curve is going to be anything other than mass market glop. But what happens out on the end of the tail is that nitch, smarter, more important stuff starts to get made - watched -and shared.

That's the really cool data.