untangling_the_web

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What blogs are to traditional news, online videos are to television and, to a lesser
extent, movies. The spread of broadband connections, cheap data storage, free or
inexpensive video technology have all contributed to this boom. In a perverse way,
al Qaeda in Iraq was an early adapter of Internet video, making effective if
horrendous use of videos to spread its terror message, recruit new members,
communicate across its terror network, and even offer training and support.
And, of course, online video has given rise to its own neologisms: vlogs (weblogs
containing video), vloggers, vlogcasts, vlogcasting, and vlogcasters, as well as
vodcasts/vidcasts. I suppose there are even vlogmasters, though that word conjures
up images of a character in a Wagnerian opera.
Given the relative ease with which Internet videos can be produced and spread by
anyone anywhere, we must take this technology very seriously and learn how to find
videos of interest quickly and efficiently. Here are the some of the major players in
online video and video search, excluding companies that are offering solely
entertainment-related video uploads and downloads. Also, most news sites do not
make video clips available for very long, usually no more than a week, before they
are archived. Once archived, the clips may require registration and/or payment to
view them.
The two basic types of video on line today are downloadable and streaming video.
Some of the video sites I discuss below offer downloadable video, which may be
saved and played later; this type of video may have a format that requires a specific
type of video player. Virtually all the video sites below offer some form of streaming
video, that is, one-way video transmissions over the Internet to a compatible media
player. These do not require the user to download the video, nor can the video be
saved for later viewing. You've seen this "buffering" message before, I'm sure, when
requesting video be streamed to your computer:
I he ~tl""nnn'3.l_on.:(>pt
Extra packets are buffered in memory In order to compensate for th e
un predictable delivery over the Internet.
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th e v ideo . 117
117 "Streaming video ," Answers .com, Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, Computer Language
Company lnc., 2005. (15 November 2006).
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