Like text messaging on a cell phone, video on the Internet should not replace common traditional modes of communication. Why? Because again, like text messaging, video serves a purpose but doesn’t and cannot tell the whole story. Especially on the web with bite sized bobs of information preceded or followed by ads.

Though a picture may say a thousand words, and video yet still ten thousand, sometimes you just want to read the bloody story and not have to update QuickTime or Flash plugin, or deal with video loading issues and/or errors. Like my hometown of NYC, the interweb should be thoughtfully convenient, not just “easy”.

I say, instead of reading an interesting headline on a news site like Yahoo News, MSN, NY Times or CNN, and clicking the title link to read a bit more about the story, but finding a video unstead, why not give us a choice.

More often than my patience allows, headlines, like movie previews these days, are misleading. So, I say at the very least, these news sites should just throw a summary of the video below or above the video. Or, if for advertising reasons these sites need the site visitors to watch the video – with prerolls and postrolls – they can put the entire story below with the usual inline ads.

Frankly, this last option, to me anyway, is more inline with what I would call “best practices” of social media/marketing. It gives site visitors options rather than assuming we want none. Were not all video junkies. And some of us who like watching videos on the Internet, don’t necessarily want to watch, but to read our news instead.

Though video killed the radio star, I believe there’s enough room for video and good old fashion plain text on this world wide interweb!

I’ve been quite a busy bee these past few weeks and been so inconsistent with posting at The WordPress PAD. Other than learning how to use Drupal and Joomla content management systems, and the new WordPress 2.5, I’m also starting a blogging network for bloggers in the City of Oakland where I live, work and play…mostly. In doing the research for the design and development of the blog network, I’ve come a cross some great information, plugins and trends in blogging that all relate in a sense to a term I’ve just recently learned about yet apparently I have always been wanting to express in the perfect (in my mind) web presence. It’s called Lifestreaming. Lifestreaming is basically pulling all your web activities from multiple sources online on to one space, your web site.
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This month’s briefing at Trend Watching, is all about “FREE LOVE”, companies giving away free valuable products and services to consumers online and offline as the latest trend in marketing. I thought this is a relevant article especially as regards to the C2C (consumer to consumer) marketplace and of which we bloggers benefit from every day. We get free plugins from each other, free tools, free links, free traffic, all of which are valuable in our blogging successes. I touched on the value of “Free” things on the Web in an earlier article suggesting that good content on the Internet specifically may be worth paying for, and still, free content is only as valuable as its use to you. It’s interesting how Trend Watching breaks down how FREE LOVE came to be:
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I have a wonderful SEO person whose taught me and continues to teach me all sorts of wonderful things about search engine optimization for my blogs and me websites. Last week while we were discussing a client’s website redesign project (on which we’re collaborating), she told me about “The Way Back Machine“. Have you heard of this? Here’s a summary from the about page of Archive.org:

“The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections.”

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It’s always a good thing to give your blog readers as many options as possible to subscribe to your blog. RSS feed and email are the most common. But how about letting them subscribe using their mobile devices like a PDA.

You’ve got a couple of options. For one, there are a couple of WordPress plugins that can make your posts viewable on a mobile device:

WordPress PDA Plugin: WordPress PDA plugin enables the wordpress blog viewable for PDA browsers. It is really simple plugin which detects the browser agent and loads a simple theme on fly. The plugin comes with a theme folder which acts like normal theme with all the functionality of wordpress theme.

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When I first started building websites and blogs I toured a few content management systems that were all but ridiculous to figure out. Though, at the time there were a few out there that were simplified for the non-designer or non-developer, me being me, I needed something more robust and endlessly flexible. Joomla and Drupal were a couple I explored but both, especially Drupal, were just so incomprehensible. Of course, the modules, extensions, etc. gibberish make sense to me now, but back then, I was just as lost as the average person trying to learn either a new language or a new system. In fact, looking back on those maddening weeks of hyper-research, I realized now, with Web 3.0 looming and Web 2.0 in full throttle, that it’s often language that is a barrier in learning, using and adapting any new way of doing something or any new system, especially on the Internet which is still very new to many people. At least, the way many of us use it now. In this article I’ll attempt to break down common gibberish (lingo) used to explain simple concepts in this new age of the Internet and put them in context. [Read more →]

Wikipedia.org defines Web 2.0 as “a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration and sharing between users.” Gibberish? Yes. Forget the jargon. Web 2.0 is is simply a new wave of using the Internet for users to get what they want and need in a more dynamic way that promotes interacting with other people on the Web. More important, this new age of the Internet is about developing mutually beneficial relationships between users and website owners, users and users, website owners and website owners, etc. Remember the days of static, non dynamic one-way interactions with websites where you searched, found, read and moved on with your web surfing? Well, they’re gone, even if you are still using Internet Explorer. Now, you have a hell of a lot more options and have a hell of a lot more control over how much or how little you can receive, share and contribute to websites, and blogs. You even, on some level, have more choices with how much advertisement you get exposed to. That alone is reason enough to embrace this new Internet age. The most appealing aspect of Web 2.0, the current generation of all things web is the perpetual interactivity and interconnectedness of users to the site creators and the content created. It’s like the wild west, digitized and Digged. [Read more →]

Another installment of cool sites to visit:

Tubetorial: Tubetorial is a great new website that shows video tutorials on web development tips and ticks of all kinds and how to do this and that on WordPress. It’s a great site for us visual learners. It’s quite easy to navigate and find videos. Tubetorial is also a new site so they’re building their inventory. You can also sign up for an rss feed or get the latest tips and tricks via email. Damn I love the web!

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