There's always, and I mean always, an ongoing parade of acronyms and hypothetical measures applied to the notions of productivity and growth; a search for measures of some sort that can harness and describe the human activities that make up what we call work and business.

In recent years there has been significant attention focused on concepts such as  Human Capital, Customer Capital and Social Capital, amongst others.

A recent conversation I had with a couple of colleagues about the valuations of Web 2.0 companies stimulated some semi-random thoughts on my part.  We were talking about how to value a company, and they focused on the standard measures of "X times revenue" and "numbers of users".  I added a bit into the conversation about the emerging trend of putting one's customers to work, as in "user-generated this" or user-created that", noting that while YouTube was acquired for an enormous sum, there were also reports of YouTube working quietly behind the scenes to limit its exposure to copyright infringement litigation.

My guess, along with some other people, is that Google acquired YouTube as a means of supplementing and adding to the capabilities of Google Video.  Yes, they "acquired" a user base in a sense, but these "users" are the kind that can flit from one site or service or blog to the next without so much as a "Thank you, ma'am".  What I think Google was thinking about was the ease-of-use of YouTube and the ways that using YouTube will increase the flow of information in the form of sharing and circulating video clips, which will allow them to further penetrate and surround users with other Google services, all of which serve to lead more human interaction ... more mashups, more creations of "small pieces, loosely joined", and eventually some sort of persistent positioning within the Long Tail of all content ... they are or will be seeking some Return on Human Interaction (ROHI) in markets made up of "small targets, loosely joined".

I expect that there will come to be metrics and ratios that seek to define and clarify what kinds of interaction(s) lead to what kinds of decisions ... early signals that presage this idea can be found with RootMarkets (mining and monetizing attention as derived from click streams), Radar Networks (Nova Spivack), IBM's WebFountain initiative, BuzzLogic (mapping influence derived from content and connections), and others.

An additional perspective can be found in this NY Times article titled "Entrepreneurs See A Web Guided By Common Sense".

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