The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
I've spent a lot of time the last few weeks traveling. I've been away from home for about 11 nights out of the last 20. Thankfully, more and more restaurants and coffee shops are getting high speed wireless Internet access. For a few bucks an hour, I can stay in touch with home, the latest news, and keep up with other things (like this column for instance). From the size of the smile on my face, people around me must have thought I was crazy last week sitting at Earls in Winnipeg when I checked my email, only to find a 30 second recording of my six year-old son telling jokes. It made my day. With the penetration rate of high speed Internet service growing faster then ever, and podcasting filling the net with audio files, the next step is video. Of course, putting videos online isn't new, but with more people having high speed service and with more easy to use tools available, it is bringing video onto more sites. When the site thirdrate.com posted footage showing that Kryptonite bicycle locks could be broken into using a pen, the site was deluged with hits, and Kryptonite will possibly end up paying millions in recalls. A lot of other vlogs (video weblogs) are operated by amateur filmmakers, distributing the content they have produced, hoping for a break to help their careers along. On the other side, a lot of people are blogging using video just because they are comfortable doing so. I've seen video blogs produced by kids as young as 13 years-old. Of course, companies aren't missing out on this chance to expand their business. Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy is currently working on his next project, a remake of King Kong. On kongisking.net, surfers can follow a day-by-day blog, both in text, and in exclusive behind the scenes video as the project progresses. An interesting way to stay in touch with fans and gain the interest of new ones. Tools like Bloglines and Technorati are changing the web from being millions of static pages we need to constantly check, into a constantly evolving information space, able to be fully searched roughly every seven minutes. Podcasting and video blogs are working to move the net from being a text-based place into a full motion medium. Now the ability to search through these files is also emerging. Singingfish.com, Google, and Yahoo video search are all now online and others are not far behind them. Specialized search engines are available for video and mp3 files as well as graphics and photos. As well, RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, has become much more prevalent in the past six months. This service allows net users to subscribe to websites, updated content being delivered to you instead of you having to go find it. Now Media RSS is emerging, a second generation service which allows you to subscribe to sites that contain video files and have them delivered to you. The web is undergoing a huge change. Written blogs, podcasts, and vlogs authored by regular people, fully searchable, and with the ability to be subscribed to are changing our information sources and our surfing habits. It's time to discover your inner Neal Stephenson, Steven Speilberg, or even Howard Stern. ([email protected])
