Screenr is a cool app that is married to Twitter but also lets you connect to other parts of the web. What it does is let you record your screen movements in a resizable window and then upload it as a video. It pretty much begs you to Tweet it through its tight integration with Twitter, but you can upload from the admin to YouTube, or you can embed it in your blog, as I do below.

I made this screenr for a presentation at SLOSTC — Hope I get a chance to use it! — so there’s no sound on it because I’ll talking over it (I won’t have good speakers at the event, but online it would work well with voice).

People like video online. The growth of broadband has changed the way we organize content — we’re not in text anymore, Dorothy!  But how does it affect your rankings?

Really nicely according to Nate Elliot over at Forrester.  His team ran a test on how sites ranked in the major search engines for 40 of the most popular keyword phrases. The basic finding was that where videos existed in the pool of possibilities for a query, video boosted rankings.  They did some back of the envelope math and came up with the result that each video in the pool has an 11,000 to 1 chance of ranking on the first page, compared with a 500,000 to 1 chance for a basic text page.  Big difference (even if the math is a little wobbly).

The underlying message is that optimized videos are becoming more important — you still need to connect text to your videos in order to get them to display in search results. Elliot offers some basic video optimization tips, which I will not duplicate here since you can read them in his brief post.

I think for most small to medium sized businesses the biggest challenge will be to make the video in the first place.  Yeah, I know that any 8th grader can shoot a video and upload it, but that’s not the same thing as having a video that both promotes your business AND is interesting enough to get some viral distribution.  Plus, you need to have a good way to display it on your site.  It takes a little work — but it sounds like it’s worth it.

Howard Dean made a splash with web-based fundraising four years ago, but this election was astounding for Obama’s use of the Internet for organizing at the grass(net)roots. I am sure the pundits are all correct that politics has changed permanently because of this — we’ll see more and more effort devoted to netizens in the future.  Here’s a couple interesting articles on the phenomenon. First, a review of search queries as political election predictors:  using Google’s Insight, Aaron Goldman matches up queries as predictions against the actual outcomes of the election.  Next, see Christine Beardsell’s nice article on the explosion in the use of video in the recent election, including some very influential user generated content (remember will.i.am’s ‘yes we can’ video?).  Christine argues that the Internet by its nature will demand more transparency and honesty from candidates:  do you agree?