One of the blogs I read daily is Micro Persuasion by Steve Rubel. He had an interesting post today about a little data mining he did with some web 2.0 terms like widgets, Second Life, podcasts, blogs, and RSS feeds. It was interesting to see that blogs are the clear front runner in popularity among these areas but the surge in Second Life interest was exciting as well.

What was noticeably absent from the list was any reference to online video. I did the same search as Steve did but dropped the RSS feeds and added YouTube. What I found was staggering. YouTube makes the other technologies look like nothing. I expected YouTube to be a contender with blogs but not trounce it the way it did. I was just telling someone today that there’s been a rise in online video interest over the last year. This data suggests that it’s not a mere rise, but rather a massive surge. So what’s the moral of the story? If you’re not thinking about online video right now you’re getting behind very quickly.

Looks like the answer to that question is yes. I’ve seen several stories from the last two days about online video companies beginning to find ways to pay the people using their services.
Google Video’s doing it.
So is Metacafe.
Brightcove has joined the fray.
Revver’s been doing it for a while.
So here’s the big question. Where’s YouTube in all of this?

One strategy seems to be paying the top talents on a site (Google’s approach). The other is an ad revenue sharing system of some form or fashion (Metacafe and Revver). One thing is clear to me with all of this…2006 will be seen as the year online video really got cranked up. What’s your organization doing with it?

By now you’ve seen and heard numerous stories about the Google acquisition of You Tube this week. You know technology news is big when it’s the leading story on all the major news outlets. It’s so big, in fact, that I’m hearing people talk about You Tube who I suspect didn’t know what You Tube was this time last week. The fact of the matter is if someone hadn’t heard of You Tube before this week, they know who they are now…even if they don’t understand what it is.

Does this matter to your organization?
Yes, and here’s why: This acquisition is a major step toward the adoption and mainstream knowledge of online video. This story is bigger than Google or You Tube. What it really signifies is that online video is moving out from the fringes and into the mainstream.

All the hype around this acquisition has just put online video on the radar screens of an entirely new segment of the population that knew little or nothing about it just a few days ago. It’s raised awareness to a new level. After awareness comes adoption and in time those who don’t adopt will find themselves on the outside looking in.

So now what?
Any organization that was already using online video now has the opportunity to establish itself as a leader and trendsetter. Any organization that was considering using online video may very well pursue it more actively with this new level of attention, and for the people who had never thought of using online video for their organization…well, they will be jumping on board soon enough.

I believe conversations will move from “do you use online video?” to “how do you use online video?” The difference between these questions is dramatic. The first one is solely about using the technology and whether you’re “in” on it or not (awareness). The second question assumes you’re already doing it and takes the conversation to a deeper level of use, quality, messages, technology, influences, strategies, etc. (adoption).

Where’s Your Investment?
So what are you doing about online video? Where’s your investment in online video? Don’t have a billion dollars handy…ok, try investing in some time learning more about how online video can work for you. Maybe you know enough to get started and just need to make an investment in some equipment. Maybe your organization needs to invest in some personnel (even on a contractual basis) to get online video up and running for your site. Google saw enough long term potential to invest a load of money in this technology (and they even had their own competing service too!) so where are you investing in online video? Google just took care of the big investment…now take care of yours.

We know there are a ton of video sites now. You can find a sizable list of them at Catagoriz (scroll down and look for the “video” section). With all this free video hosting available what is to be made of the infamous “15 minutes of fame?” Does a reference on a video blog count? What if you just upload some video to YouTube or Vimeo? Does that count?

The original 15 minutes of fame came about when the opportunities to be seen far and wide via video were controlled by the television stations. But somewhere between Candid Camera and America’s Funniest Home Videos this started to deteriorate. Now it’s all but dead. Today we don’t need TV for this…just ask the dance guy or the urban ninja.

If, in fact, the 15 minutes of fame are now dead does that mean we’ve entered the era of 15 megs of fame? For 15 megs you can get a video on any number of video hosting websites. If it’s compelling enough, funny enough, weird enough, or some kind of “enough” we don’t even know about yet…it will make the rounds of emails and conversations and could in time reach well into the millions of views.

For any organization that can harness the power of the 15 megs of fame, they’ll have something truly valuable. The problem with the 15 minutes of fame was that it only lasted about that long. With the 15 megs of fame, however, it can continue to grow and gain online momentum over time. Whereas time was the enemy with the 15 minutes, time is your friend with the 15 megs. If it’s true that everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame you can have mine. I’ll take the 15 megs.

By the way, the winner from yesterday’s free Starbucks offer was…..Chris from Voxacious. Congrats Chris! Just let me know when and where.

A friend asked me today to recommend a video hosting website to him to use for a family blog he keeps. The first one I suggested was Vimeo.com because I’ve heard some good things about it. He reported that it was easy to load the video onto Vimeo but wasn’t sure how to get the video onto his Blogger blog. Vimeo provided him with a video embed link and he sent it to me to get onto his blog. At first I wasn’t sure how difficult this was going to be because I had a terrible time getting a You Tube video to work for me a few months ago. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the link Vimeo provided just had to be plugged into Blogger’s new post field and it published to the blog without a hitch or glitch. I spent at least 30 minutes the day I tried to get You Tube video on this blog so the 30 seconds it took to get the Vimeo video on my friend’s site today was a breeze. I know where I’ll go when I have a choice for video from now on. Also, if I ever start a video blog, Vimeo will be my first option to host the video…it was just that easy!

I had a tough conversation recently. It was tough because I had to let a client make the wrong decision. In fact, I told them it was the wrong decision, and I was tactful, but they got the message. After my gentle protest and suggestion for taking another approach I was met with a resounding gong of silence (insert cricket sounds here) and it was then that I knew they were going to do it anyway. What is it? IT was banner ads.

The goal this client came to us with was to drive more traffic to their website but they already had decided they wanted to try to accomplish this with banner ads on a particular website they selected. After a few minutes of listening to them I just had to tell them that it isn’t generally a good idea and that there are better (and much cheaper) ways to go about it. As I mentioned above they wanted to do it anyway…and so they are…but here’s where we’re really going to test this…

In addition to the banner ads we’re going to put some video for this company’s same product on YouTube. We’ll be able to track the number of views and links from both areas and see what happens. I don’t quite know what they’re going to pay for a month of banner ads…but I know what they’re going to pay for the YouTube video…$0.00. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

I’ll admit, I’ve got an issue with banner ads. I rank them right up there with the people who sell email lists that are usually just spam. Banner ads are the very reason I was interested in switching from Hotmail to Gmail a year or so ago (Gmail only has text ads). Banner ads just don’t work most of the time. They’re not a wise expense. An effective banner ad would have to be highly targeted on a very specific kind of site to even have a chance. For instance if Apple had a banner ad for an iPod accessory they’re going to have a good chance of getting some attention for the ad, but even then most people still ignore them. By and large banner ads are ignored and with all the effective (and free) web 2.0 options today like blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, video blogs, Wikipedia, etc. there are much better ways to go. Needless to say I’m excited to see how this little experiment turns out! In the end I expect the score to be: Banner ads - 0, Web - 2.0.

I saw on Voxacious today that the band, The Shins, just did a novel thing over the weekend for the creation of an upcoming music video. Basically the idea is that people who were at the show could film it and then upload the video according to some instructions posted on MySpace and the band was going to use the fan-generated film to create music videos for their upcoming album.

This is a great example of user-generated content in an offline kind of way. Kudos to the band or whoever thought this up. Not only will they get the raw footage for their own videos but this same film will soon find its way on YouTube, MySpace, and numerous other social media and social networking sites to spread it even further.