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!

Sorry I have been so bad with consistent posts lately. I’m working on a couple of WordPress projects that are diverting my attention and which I’ll share with you once they’re up (in beta). Anyway, on one of the current projects I installed the WordPress plugin, AJAXed WordPress, and implemented a trick to compress my CSS stylesheets to decrease load time.
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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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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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So, if you’re looking for yet another way to increase web traffic to your blog, try going through your personal My Yahoo! and personalized Google pages to get your blogs indexed better on both Yahoo and Google search engines. How? Well, add your blog’s RSS feed to your personalized Google page and your My Yahoo! page. Below are step by step instructions on how to use your personalized Google and My Yahoo pages to potentially bring more web traffic to your blogs in a very simple way.

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The following are some cool websites with some cool website and blog tools for you to check out and make use of:

Nexodyne Email Image Generator: I love the web! Have I said that before? It’s good to have recognizable icons to lead your site visitors by the hand around your website or blog. This nifty tool by Nexodyne lets you create personalize email buttons that you can place on your website or blog.

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Found this cool new WordPress plugin I think many bloggers may find useful especially for those who have blogs posts that have geographical significance. PostMapper.com hopes to be the biggest, baddest blog post mashup. PostMapper is a geographically orientated blog post directory. It’s part API, and part Mashup, and they even have a Wordpress plugin that does all the work, save writing the post & entering an address. Allow bloggers to geocode their posts, and mash them up on a central post map. All travel blogs, photo blogs, and any blog with posts that concern locations can come together in one place. Check out the WordPress PostMapper plugin. If anyone uses this plugin, please let me know what you think.

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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