Web Video: A Thousand Britney Spears Lip-Synchers Can't Be Wrong

I think the proliferation of video on the web is one of the greatest things to happen online in at least the last five years.  Video has an immediacy that the printed word can't capture.  If a picture is worth 1,000 words (it's probably down to 835 due to the global economic slowdown) a video is worth far, far more.

Yes a lot of the content is specific to a particular audience, often times an audience of one.  Maybe 70 to 80 percent of the video content on the web is useless to all but the few people it was designed to reach.  But the point is that even those limited conversations can happen instantaneously, and meaningfully, for those people.  And the leavings of these closed circle communications comprise and gigantic amount of information and entertainment intended for mass consumption.  Of course you have the big media outlets creating content.  Content normally broadcast through TV or cable outlets has made the jump online, whether legitimately or through pirate activities, creating a whole new way to watch television and film content.

But the really exciting segment of online video is the content created by small organizations, or single individuals.  Small or no budget productions.  Projects that, prior to the web video revolution, would have had no way of reaching a mass audience.  Web video has democratized video content creation and distribution, and allowed any segment of the population the ability to communicate visually with the rest of the world.

Yeah, you're going to get 760 videos of people standing in front of their video camera lip-synching to Britney Spears tunes.  Nobody would want to watch one of them, likely, let alone the whole lot.  But isn't it cool that we have a medium for transmitting even inane video content like that around the globe?!  At no other point in history would that have been possible.  We have the ability to document, transmit and share every useless, pointless, uninteresting thing that happens in our lives with everyone else on the planet.  That's great, because somewhere, in that din, there is really important stuff waiting to be found.  The more content you can create, the more likely it is that interesting and new uses for that content can be found.  It's a beautiful mash-up cycle.

For all those interested, after I finish this I'll be posting a real-time video of myself typing this blog entry.*  Why, because I can.

* I won't actually be posting that video, but only because I don't have a webcam.