I’ll be the first to admit that, while I was at work, watched cats scamper across a treadmill on YouTube today. And I have started to be more active in the number of webinars, video conferences, and news reals I watch. I would say my usage has at least doubled in the last 6 months where I’m watching something at least every three days or so.

I think our infatuation and willingness to watch something online is probably two fold. One, we are simply in front of the computer for so long these days (I spent 73 hours this week) that we just want a quick break now and then to relieve stress or gain some quick information without reading. The second reason is somewhat related in that we are so involved with online content and detached that social networking creates, as it is intended to do, a common bond between online people, thus pulling us deeper and deeper into accepting more and more content.

While I’m sure I haven’t touched on every aspect of what is driving us to become more accepting of online content, Gartner has a current press release in which they state “The popularity of video among consumers will fuel a similar interest in video within enterprises, leading to the severe disruption of existing content strategies“. A couple important take-aways form this press release would be:

• Software for managing images and video is the fastest growing segment of the content management market
• Video use is growing with about 73% of Internet users watching a video at least once a month

While the take-aways are very positive and, in my opinion, show some exciting times ahead. I’m personally thinking, and making a note, to see how fesible it might be to have some bite-size videos now and then instead of simply writing out a blog post. I wonder if we will get to that point where our blogsphere will begin recording instead of typing. Will our chat truely chat instead of limiting ourselves to bursts of keystrokes?

One can hopefully see the benefit here as communities evolve into constant video conferences. Imagine having multiple video feeds going at the same time and maintaining multiple conversations. Sounds a bit confusing and almost impossible to maintain. But don’t you think that our inginuity can solve that problem. I never thought I could maintain multiple chat sessions going, be typing a blog, and listening to a conferance call all at the same time before. But now I do it with much ease.

My mind is overwhelmed with possibilities here–thinking that there will also have to be some grand infrastructure to keep this new revolution of video going. Imagine the networking issues, the storage issues, the application interfaces, and the list goes on. While the Internet has been around for a while, oh how it has grown, we are, in my opinion, only on the begining edge of realizing how to facilitate and handle informaiton flow.