The power of mother nature, and the power of video 2.0

This afternoon around lunchtime there was a severe thunder and hailstorm in my neck of the woods, about a quarter mile from the junction of I-90 and I-95. Our family has a Flip video camera, so I grabbed it and took three quick clips, including this one:



Posting video on blogs is not a big deal nowadays, but as I went through the process, I was struck by how much things have changed in just a few short years. We really are entering the age of Video 2.0, and it's happening so fast.

Consider this. Back in 2004, when I started this blog, shooting and posting video was a very convoluted process. Most cameras did not record to disc, meaning that tape had to be played through cables to a PC and potentially converted to some Web-friendly format. Then you had to find server space, which basically limited homegrown video to techies who knew the ins and outs of FTP and had access to a server to host the file. At that point, you could send the link around or promote it via your blog, and maybe if you were lucky, someone bigger would also link to it or it would show up at the top of Google search results for people interested in the topic at hand.

A couple of developments have occurred since then which greatly change the way video is consumed and distributed online. First, there was a watershed event in world of news and user-generated video, the Indian Ocean Tsunami (an essay I wrote earlier describes this trend under "The New Gatekeepers" subheading). Second, the rise of free video-hosting sites such as YouTube not only took care of the hosting problem with easy-to-use interfaces, but also handled format conversion automatically and created search-enabled clearinghouses for millions of consumers. Third, cheap consumer gadgets such as the Flip (see my Flip review) and video-enabled phones made it easy for people to capture and send video to friends and hosting sites.

The hailstorm video above took 30 seconds to shoot, about a minute to get onto my computer (thanks to Flip's built-in USB connector) and about 10 minutes to upload to YouTube. Before I uploaded it, I used YouTube's interface to tag it, add a description, and even "geotag" it through the integrated Google Maps function. I then sent the link via IM to friends and even left it in a comment thread on a local newspaper blog. The editor at the blog then took the YouTube syndication code and published it under another blog entry, enabling more people to see the power of the storm ... and the power of Video 2.0.