My friend Joe Case is the current Chief Forecaster at Nashville’s Fox affiliate. He’s going to be leaving his weather related duties in a few weeks to serve full time as the pastor at UpRising Church. I really think he needs to leave with a memorable final forecast and I humbly submit the video below as a point of consideration for his last weather report.

Here’s the link for the feed readers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_DypI85o3Y

I’ve been working on something with a friend for the last couple months called MySliceofPi.com. MySlice is going to be an interesting experiment in online property. Think of it as a little online billboard an owner maintains with a message and link of their choosing. We expect some people will see a monetary and/or promotional value in this to promote a product, blog, website, service, organization, etc. Others may use it as a messaging system to make a simple public statement…maybe something that makes sense to everyone or perhaps something that is really only for their friends to understand. We’ve come up with a bunch of ideas (“Pideas” actually) for ways people may use this.

We’ve already had some questions about why a digit is purchased rather than given away. The answer is twofold. First, we’d like to make some money off this. I’m personally planning to give 100% of my share to my church for at least the first 2000 digits that sell. The second reason is that if this thing takes off then the people who got in early will have something of a higher value than the people who got in later and the money is a barrier to people erroneously claiming a bunch of digits and turning this into a massive spam page. We have, however, made some digits free for the taking. All the zeros are free so check the site regularly to see when the next zero is available.

We know people have lots of ways to communicate online. We’ve got MySpace profiles, blogs, instant messages, YouTube, Facebook, email, photo sharing, etc. Sure, you don’t need another way, but we think there will be some people who’ll gravitate to the unique nature of this and get on board. If you’re one of those we encourage you to grab your slice of Pi.

I recently pulled stats for some work we’re doing at White Post that cover the growth in blogs, online video, and MySpace. These are all really interesting and I’m going to let the numbers speak for themselves…for now anyway.

Worldwide Blog Growth (source: Technorati)
January 2004 – less than 2 million blogs
July 2004 – 3.5 million
January 2005 – 6 million
July 2005 – 12 million
January 2006 – 24 million
July 2006 – 50 million
October 2006 – 57 million

Worldwide Online Video Growth (source: ComScore via Reel Pop)
October 2005 – less than 25 million online video views per day
January 2006 – 125 million online video views per day
July 2006 – 700 million online video views per day

United States Online Video Viewers (sources: eMarketer; US Census Bureau via Business 2.0)
2003 – 52 million (32% of U.S. Internet users; 19% of population)
2004 – 69 million (41% of U.S. Internet users; 25% of population)
2005 – 89 million (51% of U.S. Internet users; 32% of population)
2006 – 107 million (60% of U.S. Internet users; 38% of population)
2007 projection – 123 million (67% of U.S. Internet users; 43% of population)
2008 projection – 137 million (73% of U.S. Internet users; 47% of population)

MySpace.com registered users (sources: MySpace, Blog Herald, Business Week via Joe Suh)
May 2004 – 2 million
April 2005 – 12 million
October 2005 – 33 million
January 2006 – 48 million
July 2006 – 90 million
November 2006 – 131 million
February 2007 – 160 million

As new media is expanding rapidly and pushing for bigger and better content there’s an interesting thing happening…a few new services are focused on micro messages.

Twitter, for instance, is a text only log in which you have 140 characters available per “post” and you can submit them through the Twitter interface, your instant message service, or text message. You can check out my Twitter page to see what I mean.

At the same time, a new mini blog tool has emerged called Tumblr. Tumblr is essentially stripped down blog service. There’s no comments available and the tone lends itself to stream of consciousness more than anything else. It does allow images, embedded video, and a long post (if you would want to do that here) unlike Twitter. See mine here.

After playing around with both of these for a while tonight I think there’s something really compelling here. My first thought was that these services will be niche successes…meaning they’re not the kinds of things a non blogger or those uninitiated into the world of social networking will likely dive into. Then I realized this “niche” grew by at least 35 million blogs and well over 100 million social network registrants last year…so if I’m Twitter or Tumblr, that’s a nice fat niche to tap into. Whatever the case both of these are a perfect outlet for someone who feels like they’re somewhere beyond the white belt at the web 2.0 dojo. They play together nicely too. Tumblr will pull in your Twitter RSS feed for the perfect melding of the two.

I’m personally excited about this because I’ve felt like I needed an outlet for things that don’t really fit the general topic of this blog. Also, the very nature of both of these means I can’t really spend much time on it so it forces me to say what I want and move on with the day. I’m looking forward to twitting and tumbling.

The first video below is from a newscast from sometime in the 90s talking about this thing called “Internet”. We’ve come a long way since then. The second video is a great overview of web 2.0. It’s interesting to see these videos together to fully appreciate the rapid change over the last decade.

Web 1.0

Web 2.0

Links for the feed readers:
Web 1.0: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n4fDgmrF3o
Web 2.0: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

With so many tools emerging on a weekly basis it’s hard for me to determine which ones are actually going to make my life easier. Every once in a while I’ll see one that really makes sense and this week I had one of those discoveries. I found Clipmarks, a Firefox add-on, that lets you very quickly highlight entire articles, paragraphs, sentences, images and video to blog or send as an email. I used this a few days ago to send part of an article to some coworkers and it worked out really well. I’m a big Del.icio.us user and am always saving links there but Clipmarks seems like a better way to pass along something I see or read rather than sending people a link to a page where the content on that page may not apply entirely. For instance, I can just clip an important paragraph or two without and email it to a friend rather than sending a link to an entire article with a confusing explanation like “hey, this article is decent but you’ve really got to check out the 6th and 8th paragraphs…those are really interesting.” Whereas Del.icio.us is really for my own reference, Clipmarks is going to be what I’ll use to send articles, blog posts, pictures, etc. to other people when a simple link won’t be sufficient.