One of the blogs I read daily is Micro Persuasion by Steve Rubel. He had an interesting post today about a little data mining he did with some web 2.0 terms like widgets, Second Life, podcasts, blogs, and RSS feeds. It was interesting to see that blogs are the clear front runner in popularity among these areas but the surge in Second Life interest was exciting as well.
What was noticeably absent from the list was any reference to online video. I did the same search as Steve did but dropped the RSS feeds and added YouTube. What I found was staggering. YouTube makes the other technologies look like nothing. I expected YouTube to be a contender with blogs but not trounce it the way it did. I was just telling someone today that there's been a rise in online video interest over the last year. This data suggests that it's not a mere rise, but rather a massive surge. So what's the moral of the story? If you're not thinking about online video right now you're getting behind very quickly.