There are many compelling reasons. These are only the latest. From emarketer.com:

Broadband users spend almost half their spare time in a typical weekday online, according to Media-Screen’s “Netpop|Play” report.

Google goes universal.

Google is striving to make all of the internet as valuable as  text, and in a realtime format. This will level the playing field of content search in a revolutionary way. Video, audio, doc files, all of their value increases as their hit values rise. An illustrated guide.

As new media guru, consultant and professor Jeff Jarvis says:

This promotes other media to the exalted rank of text … This is the mark of true agnosticism coming to media: You should be using whatever media best communicates information in the form the user wants.

[...]

(O)ne can use different media strung together to tell a story: text, then an embedded video, then an original video, with links all about. It’s not having text here and video over there and audio up there. It’s about using all the tools appropriately at all times.

Using the talents of these departments of UAB to tell the University’s compelling stories, we’ll be ahead of the curve in reaching out to all of our audiences.

The obvious question is how does this communicate with the department’s key audiences?

1. Prospective students/current students/alumni
2. The community
3. The media

How do we make this part of a reporter’s routine?

Does your voice get tired when you sing? Are you tired of singing in bumper to bumper traffic? Two UAB graduate students could solve some of those problems one day. Because of their research they can lay claim to the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship award, given annually to outstanding graduate students contributing to research, teaching and innovations in science and engineering.

Hear them on our podcast:

This is a very small sample of what we can do with podcasts and blogs together. This isn’t on iTunes, obviously, but we could easily be creating programs for people to download to their iPods, to have their RSS reader retrieve them and to take with them on the go. That’s one of the strengths of the 2.0 world, where everything can be accessible on demand. It is here for journalists when they’re under deadline and it is here for the student about to hike across campus. What’s more, it is always available, on the web for as long as we choose to keep it there, a shining endorsement of the quality of education and research that are available at UAB.

Podcasts can be slickly produced or they can be very informal and casual. Meanwhile, we could use the same setup to distribute actualities to radio stations if there’s still an audience for that. New quotes from these students or pulled quotes from the podcasts, either way it makes us more helpful to the reporter and we become a daily must-visit on his or her newsbeat.

Let us assume that we chose to shoot a quick video with Mr. Jackson and Ms. Waid. A soundbite from each, perhaps something from their advisors and just a quick piece of b-roll of the award-winning students doing something relating to their research. Highways and pianos, if you will.

This could serve two purposes: one to give a little glimpse into their efforts for the casual viewer — a prospective student, student, alum and the community — and, of course, to inspire broadcasters.

Two UAB graduate students have received the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship award, which is given to outstanding graduate students who demonstrate the potential to contribute significantly to research, teaching and innovations in science and engineering.

Birmingham is known for its musical heritage and stars on American Idol, but Christophe Jackson is doing research that could help singers belt out even better tunes. His award winning research focuses on vocal endurance and he has tips for you, no matter your level of expertise.

Also be sure to note that Jackson is a concert pianist. The Montgomery native is studying biology and music and plans to enroll in UAB’s Master’s/Ph.D. program in Voice Science.

Johnnie Waid spends a lot of time thinking about how we travel. She’s a doctoral student in civil engineering with an emphasis in transportation. The Pinson native earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering at UAB. She plans to pursue a career in higher education.

Reporters: Video and audio will be on the site momentarily. For more on this story, please contact Media Relations at XXX-XXXX.

Flickr hosts your photographs, but data storage is the smallest of the site’s selling points. Flickr provides a myriad number of sub-communities through their tagging system and can connect you with other people shooting the same subjects through comments, pool projects or any of their many fun gadgets

There are several Alabama, Birmingham and other locally relevant communities on Flickr and a great potential for a thriving UAB community. Just a short look at the site shows there are many talented shutterbugs around town, and with their help and careful cultivation many ancillary communities could grow.

From the perspective of the University’s desire to improve upon the collegial atmosphere at UAB the online world is an excellent place to to concentrate because that audience — the students — are already there. Flickr is an easy starting point because of the ubiquity of digital cameras and camera phones. Perhaps some of the student social organizations could create contests as incentives to help insure that photos on flickr get the all-important UAB tag.

How powerful is YouTube? TV networks and advertisers fear emerging competition. As well they should, a recent Harris Interactive poll showed that out of 2,309 U.S. adults, some 363 of them were avid YouTube watchers. 32 percent said it took away from their TV time.

YouTube is the market leader, but on that site and on their competitors UAB can expand their outreach without the constraints of news holes in the paper or the timed segments of television. From serious high-end productions to casual crowd shots off of a student’s cameraphone and everything in between, there’s an opportunity to help spread UAB’s identity as a vibrant part of the community, the place where trailblazing research is conducted, students get a quality education and have fun as well.

We can embed youtube files in a blog by the way.

From serious to silly …

People are sitting on their home machines and producing videos, either of their own footage, or clips they’ve pulled from other sources …

Here’s another application of that technology: TeacherTube. The name pretty much says it all.

FYI: for videocasts in general, Apple is looking for upgrades to 640×480 or 640×360 for their transition to iTunes and Apple TV

Facebook reportedly has about 1.5 billion page views a day, up from about 1 billion daily views last month.
Emarketer.com cites Facebook as the overwhelming number one website for both males and females ages 17-25.

Jobster, and Facebook are joining forces to create a career site featuring video resumes. At least three other sites have already started that process and powerhouse YouTube isn’t far behind. If you search for resume on youtube today you’ll earn more than 5,000 returns. From an employers perspective, a hiring manager can view the clips immediately online, saving time and money by eliminating the first round of in-person interviews.

There are university side applications here as well. This is likely a few years off, but it isn’t difficult to envision a day when the 2.0 generation makes it from the high school through the lecture halls and into the workforce with this becoming a more common practice.

Social media is a term used when discussing any number of online technologies or practices used by people to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. It takes many forms: text, images, audio, and video. Popular mediums include include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs, or video logs.

Just a few prominent examples are Wikipedia, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and more.

Hitwise says 2.0 sites — more appropriately known as social media sites — make up 12% of Web traffic, up from 2% two years ago.

The top social sites:

digg
12,156,271 Unique Monthly Visitors (United States) – Rank: 61 – Compete
4,800,000 Unique Monthly Visitors (United States) – Rank: 180 – Quantcast
netscape
5,832,349 Unique Monthly Visitors (United States) – Rank: 179 – Compete
5,300,000 Unique Monthly Visitors (United States) – Rank: 159 – Quantcast
del.icio.us
909,091 Unique Monthly Visitors (United States) – Rank: 1,965 – Compete
923,442 Unique Monthly Visitors (United States) – Rank: 1,671 – Quantcast
stumbleupon
390,523 Unique Monthly Visitors (United States) – Rank: 4,793 – Compete
386,470 Unique Monthly Visitors (United States) – Rank: 4,647 – Quantcast
reddit
433,070 Unique Monthly Visitors (United States) – Rank: 4,311 – Compete
100,398 Unique Monthly Visitors (United States) – Rank: 19,070 – Quantcast

Emerging technologies continue to make the process more accessible to users, enhancing the conversation across the world’s most powerful communication tool.

And remember, the internet is an adolescent.

College recruiters now use bloggers, from Ball State, to Dickinson College to MIT to Colgate and Texas, in an effort to reach prospective students with the voice of their peers.

Some of the student bloggers are even paid nominal fees for their efforts. Some schools hold some editorial control, but others have given the students a free run, believing that the voice must be authentic.

Meanwhile, Technorati numbers show around 15.5 million active blogs.