There are al ot of things about Google that are not so remarkable. People tend to value the integrity, skill-level or overall worth of a company or product based upon their net worth. If they are rich, they have to be good. That is not necessarily true in real life ... The misses Spears and Hilton being a couple prime illustrative examples.

Years ago when I did a lot of IT systems specifying and implementation work I worked for a guy who was very quick to see the difference between a solution that solved a customer's problem and a solution that was on the market in search of a problem to solve.

When I brought him a new, latest and greatest "thing" to suggest we invest in it for our operation, if he did not see the problem it was solving immediately he would counsel me wisely ... "Dave, this thing looks like a self-licking ice cream cone to me."

I would imagine that would be his take on Google's tangential and relatively worthless foray into all things video.

I think video is a great way to showcase the value of your product, assuming it lends itself to video.

If the content is boring, or not something to keep a viewer's interest it can certainly have the opposite effect of what you're looking for. I think Google's video is "one" way to get your ideas seen, but YouTube seems to be really get the lion's share of views.

Google's video ads is an interesting concept, but again if they ad isn't professional in quality, it can have an undesired effect.

We've been able to effectively use video to help convey our message on our site, since we create computer based training videos. By offering free full-length IT Certification Training videos as examples of our training, it gives people a great indicator of the quality of the product before they purchase. Uploading sample videos to YouTube and Google video certainly helps as well.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, the challenge is to make sure it's a GOOD picture, so those thousand words are positive! :)

Christopher Rees
Palaestra Training

You hit the nail on the head in your closing there, Christopher. Video, well done, can be very valuable indeed. Video, for the sake of video, though, is a "solution in search of a requirement".

One thing a lot of web-nuts ignore is, we live in a world of multi-million dollar video (TV and movies). Our eye expects similar levels of sophistication.

We read A-list bloggers who can't tell the difference between there, their and they're (Hi Jeremy ;-). Our brain puts up with these incongruities because we make a conscious decison to look beyond the mechanic s to the subject matter.

We listen to scratchy, start-stop podcasts and "Web Radio" chit chat because our ears and brain are used to picking "fly specks out of sand" ... hearing a conversation in the middle of a noisy restaurant, for example.

But the eye-brain interface is not nearly so forgiving. We have been watching pro video since we were babies propped in front of Sesame Street and the average "one man band" blogger or site developer ought to think of something other than video to deliver his/her message.