Video blogs are the next online thing

FORGET boring text and tiny icons, streaming video is now the most fashionable way to express yourself on the internet.
Around the world hundreds of thousands of budding stars are uploading short videos containing anything as mundane as a spoken diary entry through to dogs riding skateboards and spiders eating grubs.
Two of the most popular sites for self-broadcasting include YouTube.com, and Google’s own Google Video.
What makes these sites appealing – and initially addictive – is their easy-to-access format.
Anyone with a broadband internet connection simply visits the site and clicks on a video and in seconds it begins streaming.
The popularity of such sites has gained the attention of advertisers and movie companies who are beginning to use the services to provide film trailers and to cross promote products.
One example is the film Borat starring Sasha Baron Cohen, of Ali G fame.
Distributed by 20 Century Fox, the film’s publicity machine has posted countless film previews, trailers, and even ‘deleted scenes’ from the film – which is yet to be released.
The film also has a site on the popular MySpace blogsite.
But among the promotional pieces is a plethora of unadulterated home videos, some that will provide hours of laughs.
You can even register with the sites and upload your own videos which are then viewed and given a score for entertainment value by a community of millions of viewers.
Visit the following sites to see for yourself at YouTube.com and video.google.com.