Alex Kelleher's Blog » Video

Flash Goodness

admin — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:54:51 +0000

Every so often (i.e. not very often), the web springs a pleasant and unexpected surprise. Like when I clicked on the “enter site” link on Searcy’s guide to the 30 St Mary Axe, London (the “Gherkin”).

I won’t spoil it, give it a go!

13 hours every minute…

admin — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:53:38 +0000

… is how much video is uploaded to Google’s Youtube, according to their official blog post today. And that’s an “exponentially growing” statistic they believe. That’s 18720 hours a day, or 780 days every day. Still with me? It’s a lot.

Of course, there will be a long tail of this stuff which is never seen by more than the person who created it, and at the top end there will be a small percentage that are viewed a lot. Sure enough, a wildcard type search (searching for “*”, if that’s valid) turns up the top video with 101 million views (a music video, like a lot in the top results of that list)… Wikipedia’s got some notes on the “heavy tail” distribution, which I’m guessing is what this is.

The important take out is that very quickly (by which I mean already) there’s too much content on Youtube for one person to make sense of. And therefore ways of pre-selecting, filtering and locating stuff of interest – like in every area online now – are needed, beyond just search…

Delivering content via video

admin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:53:47 +0000

Earlier I said that 50 billion videos were viewed online in February 2008, and even that I think is just a U.S. figure. Now with seesmic et al, people are getting up every morning and saying “hello” to the handful of people who are also trying out the new service, and who knows where that will all develop to.

But one area that video is being used more and more is the delivery of information that before you would have got off a page of text. Business information. Views, tips, hints. And thinking about it, it really isn’t an efficient way of delivering information in many ways. A 5 minute video is probably equivalent to a page of text which would take 20 seconds to scan.

But what it IS very good at, of course, is getting across all that non-verbal detail that would go missing otherwise.

It’s like trying to make a joke, or be sarcastic, in an SMS text message. It doesn’t really work until you get to hear the intonation of someone’s voice, or see the daft grin on their face.

As an example, the “Niche Ninjas” drop some useful tips into their videos, which I fell upon today by chance, on affiliate and niche marketing. Sure there’s ninja-hand waving moments, but there’s some good stuff in there.

Is this just novelty value, or is this beginning to be the justification for video? Either way, I’m going to keep to writing for the moment, which is a relief for all.