I was on my way to the SFO airport after a conference and had to take a cab cos my heyuujje suitcase refused to go up to the BART. 'Whe'you from?,' asked the cab guy in a thick African accent 'India.' 'On business?' 'Yea. Where are you from?' 'Ethiopia. My family is there in Ethiopia - wife and kid,' he said turning back at me and smiling. 'Came to America to make money. I will return after I make good money. Where do you work?' 'Google.com. Heard of us? we have an office in Mountain View' 'Oh ok... I dont think so. It is an internet site?' 'yeah... a search engine' Two minutes of silence... 'You heard of youtube.com?' 'I have actually! You know the site?' 'Yeah! I love that.. Funny videos and music. I go to internet on Friday for my computer class and see YouTube too. Its really nice.' 'Huh! ok.. nice!'True Story! and exactly one year later... "YouTube's Crowned World's Second Most Popular Website" (According to Alexa.com) It's puzzling how the Ethiopian man (and the rest of the world) choose to visit YouTube, a video site, over Google - a search engine. Though this doesn't really a point of concern for any search engine, it only raises the question if users really prefer watching videos over reading text for their search queries? If this is true, it spells good news for video search marketing which has now come of age. Video search already compliments text search, if not beat it. This in turn means an amazing opportunity to original content creators who are interested in using the power of video to express or explain thoughts/ideas/concepts etc. Imagine you make a video about feeding your fish and a user who's youtubing for the same, finds your video and comments on the video to get more info or to thank you on making the video (thanks to web 2.0 communications). Or better still, you post a vlog about how you're having trouble fixing up your dvd player and someone posts a video response that walks you through the process of setting up a dvd player. More and more internet users are turning to visual data from textual. I'd much prefer seeing friend's vlog (video blog) rather than reading it. This not limited to video search, and also applies to Image Search. If I had to know how a cello looks, I will google-image-search the word, instead of reading a paragraph of cello. Not only is this faster, it also makes it easier for any lazy brain :) Of course internet penetration and broadband are two important factors that decide the fate of video on internet. But with sites like YouTube who cater to both high speed and low speed internet connections (with their high quality and low quality video options), users now have the freedom to choose to watch a video over reading about something. A Thought: what if someone made videos of everything on Wikipedia, you could look them all up on a video? Of course a challenge is: Is updating as easy? (Originally written on Sunday, March 09, 2008)
Is film the next big thing?
May 13, 2008
by mydh
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