2007 is starting to look like the year of the vlogs. An explosion in Internet video is taking place, and in large part it's an explosion based on video blogs. A massive online industry is gearing up around video sharing sites like YouTube and Internet video platforms like Brightcove.com. Television is moving online, and Internet TV may soon replace your favorite TV programs.



Viral video is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful marketing tools for boosting traffic to your web site. When you upload your video to YouTube, for instance, you simply need to copy the code that YouTube gives you and paste it into a new post on your blog. To distribute your video as a podcast, you only need to attach an RSS feed to it. As soon as you do that, your video product is ready to reach a potential audience of millions on the Worldwide Web.

The quality and simplicity of Rocketboom illustrates how fast the revolution in Internet technology is transforming delivery systems. Licensing and distribution costs used to require an investment of millions of dollars to get a broadcast TV channel on the air. Rocketboom is created with a consumer-level video camera, a notebook computer, and a simple set. It looks and feels like a commercial TV broadcast, but it has no budget for advertising. The videos are produced on simple sets, but the content is as smooth and as professional as anything broadcast on television. The cost of storage and bandwidth space on the Internet is so cheap today that a video channel like Rocketboom can be launched with virtually no investment at all.

Like most popular video sites on the Internet, Rocketboom is distributed through a technology called Real Simple Syndication, or "RSS." This technology lets viewers subscribe to your channel and receive alerts every time you make a new video product available on your site. And like so many other new technologies that are connecting people on the Internet, RSS is a free service.

The ease with which a video product can be uploaded to video sharing sites like YouTube and Google Video is bringing about an explosion in Internet video. YouTube started as a site where individuals could share home videos with friends and family members. And although the bulk of the video content on YouTube continues to be home videos produced by amateurs, the site is beginning to attract professional content producers and large media companies. YouTube recently entered into a partnership with the BBC, for example, which illustrates how professional video content is beginning to move online.

How to distribute your video product on the Internet? Once you have created, captured, and uploaded your video to an Internet site, it's easy to distribute your video content over the Internet. (Technically, a video product does not become a "podcast" until it has an RSS feed attached to it.) Almost all blogging software has built-in RSS capability, which is the easiest way to distribute a video product over the Internet.

Once you post your content online, simply copy the "embed" code given by YouTube, Google Video, or any of the other popular video sharing sites, and paste that into a new post on your blog. You can then submit your RSS feed to any of the video broadcast sites, and your video is on the Internet.

By using a free service like FeedBurner, you make it easier for people to find you and to remember you. Whenever you post a new video on your blog, FeedBurner updates your RSS feed and alerts all the video distribution channels, as well as your blog's subscribers.