TheWayoftheWeb

If you’re looking for a more interesting way to send your Christmas greetings electronically than a standard E-Card (and you’ve just about missed the last day for postage in the UK, so you don’t have much choice for last minute greetings!), you might want to check out the Christmas video greetings from Skype.

It’s available either as a Facebook application, or as a standalone service. And if you use the standalone version you can embed your video message in your blog, as a Christmas greeting - so be very glad I don’t have a webcam with me at work!

It made me wonder how Christmas card sales will perform this year - those of those who are connecting to people online have many more contacts who we might want to send a Christmas greeting to, around the globe, and in an economical way.

Or is this an area where doing something personal by sending a physical object makes a big difference?

Definitely interesting times for a variety of companies and industries that had successful products just a few years ago. I’ve just seen the news that Polaroid has gone bankrupt - as Tomi says, instant pictures haven’t gone out of fashion, they’ve just moved to mobile phones. Personally, the last time I had a reason to think about the Polaroid brand was when I found a couple of their old cameras in the loft…

It’s not often I would say a video is essential, but not only is this keynote by USC Annenberg Professor Jeffrey Cole full of brilliant comments and quotes, but after eight years of research in 20 countries, he’s got the stats to back them all up.

Found via the also brilliant Gerd Leonhard.

A while ago, my former colleague Angus recommended I subscribe to a really funny and innovative Youtube producer’s channel. And in amongst the comedy moments, I spotted one which seemed appropriate for a blog covering advertising and marketing:

And if you want to see more, then click for the dananddanfilms channel on Youtube.

Meanwhile, Video Expert Angus Farquhar has started his new role at Which?, so I’m going to end up slightly jealous of his chance to play with gadgets before I do…and here’s one of his videos:

If you’re reading this elsewhere, it’s from www.thewayoftheweb.net by Dan Thornton…

Had a really good day in London, and met some cool new people, both from within Bauer Media and externally. Hopefully I’ll have plenty of reasons to write about them all shortly!

I spotted a number of sites mentioning Backtype as I was catching up on my RSS feeds on the train home. It’s a fairly elegant way of keeping track of the comments you leave on other websites and blogs - something I tried doing via Delicious, but always failed to keep track of!

If you’re interested, you can keep tabs on me at Backtype.com/DanThornton. The way it tracks comments is by tracking the url you leave - which covers most blogs and similar sites. I doubt there are any Dan Thornton/BadgerGravling impersonators out there, but they’ll appear if they’re dropping my urls! I’ve looked at alternatives like Disqus, and coComment, but never quite saw enough value to invest the time and effort needed. Backtype is far quicker and simpler, and may well encourage me to re-investigate some of the alternatives, depending on what happens - although Friendfeed etc also give a home to comments and conversation about blog spots.

Now the predicition. I’ve been prompted to pick some of the things I think will emerge next on the web (and I’m always happy to also spout my ideas unprompted!). I’ve often made the obvious observations around mobile and smartphones, and the fact that Twitter and microblogging are being adopted by brands, enterprise, celebrities and the mainstream. But the third prediction is one that surprised me a little, the first time it launched out of my mouth!

Twitter has a fair way to go to become really mainstream, but the next site/application to follow it, in my opinion, will be Seesmic. Most people in the tech bubble will have heard of it and web celeb founder Loic le Meur. But, like many emerging sites and applications, it’s taken a little time for the value of the service to become apparent.

For the unitiated, it’s a tool for video conversations by individuals, enabling responses to be threaded into coherence. Which means it overcomes the downside of streaming your life via webcam 24/7 - the dull bits. It’s already popular with some people withing social media - like top journalism lecturer/social media/multimedia person Paul Bradshaw - but now it’s also being used by mainstream media. The BBC has now joined the Washington Post in using the service, as written about by Loic today, and not only have they outlined how it will be used in their first video, but they’re already gaining responses to their first conversation about the financial crisis.

Now listen up, journalist people. Not only can you get a response from the more engaged members of society without having to do ‘voxpops‘ in the local town centre in the pouring rain - but now they’ll even video themselves! See the benefit now?