Internet use is changing. Consumers are no longer content to sit at the trough, absorbing news, buying books, streaming movies or even posting on blogs. They want to produce and upload their own content. “Upstream is the new downstream,” says Travis Leo, director of Qwest high-speed Internet product management and development.

Thanks to services like Facebook, Skype video chat and even online storage services like Carbonite or Mozy, the consumer is now a content creator — or at least a content uploader. Over at NewTeeVee, Liz reports that Facebook receives some 415,000 video uploads per day, while people upload 20 hours of video to YouTube per minute. And it’s not just the consumer. Last week, on Cisco’s second quarter earnings call, CEO John Chambers noted that an enterprise customer has purchased $1 million worth of Flip cameras. That’s between 5,000 and 10,000 of those point-and-shoot video cameras. Don’t think for a second that the content created by those is going to stay nestled on someone’s desktop at the corporate headquarters. It will find its way to the world on the employees’ office (and home) Internet connections.

The average employee generates up to 5 MB of information each day, all of which gets backed up nightly at large companies. Depending on the number of employees a comapny has and the business’ upstream connection those backups can take a few minutes or many hours. To deal with extremely large data uploads Amazon Web Services now offers folks the option to send in huge amounts of data via the postal service, rather than waiting for the snail-like pace of today’s upstream bandwidth offerings.