IP Democracy: Google Home Page Now Features Video Link

Antone Gonsalves at Information Week drew my attention to something that I should have discovered on my own:  Google now has a  video link on its home page.  According to Loren Baker at Search Engine News, the impact of this simple on Google Video’s traffic has been “amazing.”

After the link first appeared, on August 8th, Google Video instantly became the 5th most visited Google site, a surge in traffic that never occurred with the home page link for Froogle, which got kicked off to make way for Google Video.  That just goes to show that video on the Internet is hot.

It helps, too, that Google has revamped Google Video to be more like YouTube.  Baker writes

The buildup to the mass organic marketing of Google Video via this homepage link has been quite spectacular over the past few weeks. Google has obviously borrowed the key components of their main competitor in the video upload & sharing space; YouTube. Like YouTube, Google Video has Flickrized their index, with tagging, commenting and other blogging influenced attributes to the system. Google Video has become Google’s testing ground for social search, a direction Google’s main competition at Yahoo has committed the entire future of the company too.

Unrelated Note:  I just wrote this entry and published it using Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer.  What a beautiful tool for blog writers…no laborious saving drafts and then previewing and then tinkering and then previewing some more.  Live Writer let’s you preview instantly your blog entry as if you had already published it.  Formatting is a breeze — no more HTML code, preview to check to see if the images are aligned, tinker, change HTML code, tinker some more.  Very fast and easy.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on August 13, 2006 11:07 PM to IP Democracy