TechMedia

With the massive increase in online video, I wasn’t surprised to see a story on mediapost.com saying it is the fastest growing medium in the world.

The story cited a new report from social media research consultancy Trendstream and research firm Lightspeed, giving stats such as:

• In one week in January, 97 million Americans viewed a streaming clip online – as many as are tuning into any major broadcast network
• With 72 per cent of U.S. web users watching clips online, web video outstrips both blogging and social networking, and is now the leading “social-media platform”
• With 49 million active Web users – 32 per cent – uploading content in January 2009, users of all ages now generate far more content than traditional broadcasters and collectively contribute the majority of video content to the web

Meanwhile the world’s most popular video-sharing site, YouTube had a 1,700 per cent jump in mobile video uploads over the past six months.

YouTube has shown phenomenal growth over the past few years. In mid-2007, six hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. Now, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. In fact, as I write this blog “uploaded youtube” is a trending topic on Twitter.

In my hometown of Yellowknife I have seen the growth of online video. Here are a few businesses that prominently feature online video. Let me know what I am missing:

• CBC North – runs its full Northbeat news show as well as numerous shorter news videos
• Kellett Communications – offers full gamut of filmmaking and effects, strives to make communication interactive, weave it in and out of all media, especially online content
• Up Here – this magazine about the north posts photos animated Ken Burn’s style with music/voice over track such as this recent soundslide, which is hosted on Up Here’s Vimeo channel

You can check out the Yellowknife tab on my Netvibes page to see other Yellowknife videos on YouTube.

I had to check out Netvibes after reading a story about Kris Krug on Techvibes. Netvibes is a “multi-lingual Ajax-based personalized start page or personal web portal.”

Once I discovered the fun feeds on Kris’s page I figured I needed a page of my own. Since I use several social media channels, why not pull them all together. So I added my blog RSS, Flickr photo stream, YouTube videos and Twitter stream. As well, I created another page to capture similar feeds but using keyword “Yellowknife.”

http://www.netvibes.com/liz-hargreaves

This tool is a great asset to aggregate social media and other feeds. The Twitter widget was (and still is!) hanging, so I clicked “Add a feed” instead and pasted in the feed URLs, that works fine.

I also created a tab to stream some of Yellowknife’s social media scene, which is interesting. I like the hourly weather tweets, you get to see the trends better than just static temperature check.

I love Netvibes because it makes it so easy to pull in multiple feeds and present them in attractive ways. Which feeds should I add next?

Grooveshark brings music to your blog/Facebook/Twitter.

Been checking out Internet music streaming service Grooveshark, which I found through stories on Mashable (via Twitter/Facebook links).

The service unveiled new products for social media sites, such as Facebook and WordPress, so I had to check out the widget for WordPress.

I love the idea, though I am not sure I will search for a soundtrack for all of my posts.

Here I only embedded a single track, but you can create playlists as well.

I always thought the beginning of One of These Days sounded like driving along a snowy highway – or iceroad – with flakes swirling around. I guess that’s not in the spring theme, but Yellowknife is having a chilly one so humour me