Have you already seen it? What has changed the most about the Internet in the last five years? If you haven't already noticed, more and more websites are adding audio and video.
How often have you recently gone to a website and a sound track started right away? Before about a year ago, you had to spend a lot of money on a studio set-up to stream audio over the web. There are now free open source programmes that let you record straight to your hard drive. The quality is good enough that it can be used online without any changes. The software used to make the streaming audio file is cheap enough that anyone can buy it. In fact, it is one of the resources that members of my site can use.
Video is now taking over the Internet like a storm. Informational commercials like the ones you see on late-night cable channels will soon start to show up on the Internet. Videos can now be streamed right on a web page thanks to new compression technology. This means that almost anyone who can get on the internet can watch them. On the other side of web video, there are already "mobloggs" with videos uploaded straight from cell phones.
Recently, the growth of a new type of surfer has been linked to the rise of "Screen Capture" videos, which show how to use programmes on your computer. Who Doesn't Read.
In general, people under 30 don't read books. Recent UK statistics show that more than 60% of 20-year-olds haven't read a book in the last year. 27 percent say they have never even looked at a newspaper. The American numbers are probably not the same. Still, most of these people are used to using computers and often use them to play games. People like these wouldn't read a web page. The people who grew up watching TV. But these are the people who use their phones to surf the web a lot.
The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is something you should know about if you haven't already. The market is being driven by their strength. Through their work, no one platform has gotten ahead, so change is happening faster and faster without being slowed down by different standards.
Check out FoneBlog, the world's first and leading mobile blogging solution designed and built for the mobile operator with the goal of driving MMS revenue and building mobile communities. It lets people send and post text, photos, audio, and video from a camera phone right away to a personal website that can be set to be private or shared with the whole world.
Imagine a generation that sets up and runs personal websites from their cell phones as a matter of course. They can share these diaries with anyone or with everyone.
If you don't see how important it is for the growth of your web business to use audio and video, you'll be like Ken Olsen, the president, chairman, and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., who famously said in 1977, "If you can't see that using audio and video is important, you'll be like me."
"There's no good reason for anyone to want a computer at home."
