The YouTube video count seemed to be down at the time I viewed the video. It was standing at 305,804. The Clark Retirement Community group made their YouTube debut on July 12, 2011. Less than a week ago.

I watched the launch live on one of NASA’s UStream clannels. At the time I tuned in there had been over 4 million views of the stream and there were 800+ of us watching the event at that moment.

The folks at NASA are committed to letting us know what they are doing. One glance at the text on the bottom of their UStream page gives an idea of how wide their reach to teach is.

They are also committed to connecting and communicating with both the scientific and non-scientific communities via social media. You can join their many circles on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Gowalla and SlideShare. If you want to follow NASA through any, or all, of these services go to their connect page.

I kept open tabs with the Twitter and UStream conversations as the launch progressed. At least I tried to. The streams were moving very fast with comments and well wishes.

This is one of the many reasons I am such a fan of social networking. People from around the world came together to witness, converse and just plain share a momentous piece of history in real time. That couldn’t have happened five years ago.

The NASA Shuttle Program is in its 30^th year. Now the last bird has flown and the nostalgia begins.

One of my favorite tweets came from Dr. Wernher Von Braun @DrVonBraun, ‘Well NASA, if you wanted to make the world’s foremost rocket scientist cry, then you have succeeded.’

You can follow the four Atlantis astronauts on Twitter; Chris Ferguson @Astro_Ferg, Doug Hurley @Astro_Doug, Sandy Magnus @Astro_Sandy,  Rex Walheim @Astro_Rex.

There is a lot that is right about this video:

• It is amazing to watch
• It is short
• It rekindles awareness of Cirque du Solei and Petco Park (noticeable placement of the Petco banners)
• It brings out the, ‘I just gotta share’ gene that has recently gone into hyper-drive in the human genome

The next video may or may not have been planned. According to the story a GoPro camera user put his camera down on the ground and a ‘curious seagull’ decided to take it back to his nest giving us a birds eye view of flight.

GoPro is the maker of amazing wearable HD cameras. Extreme sportsters have created dozens and dozens of dazzling on location footage with the cameras. Through video sharing on blogs, YouTube etc. GoPro is quickly becoming as common a brand name as Canon and Sony.

The video was uploaded on June 23 and as of July 1 it had been viewed 1,478,789 times.

Even though most of us have moved over to the digital world, some more willingly that others, the power and reach of the Internet in numbers seems almost unbelievable.

For example, the number of emails sent over the internet in 2010 was 107 trillion. This and a whole slew of other internet usage statistics was reported by Royal Pingdom, a web performance and monitoring service out of Sweden.

So what other interesting facts did they uncover?

1.    As of June 2010 there were 1.97 billion worldwide internet users – a 14% increase over the previous year

2.    The number of Tweets in 2010 – 25 billion

3.    The number of new Twitter users in 2010 – 100 million

4.    By the end of 2010 there were 600 million people on Facebook

5.    The number of new Facebook users – 250 million

6.    There are 20 million Facebook apps installed each day

7.    There are 2 billion videos watched on YouTube EVERY DAY

8.    35 hours of video is  uploaded to YouTube every minute

9.    As of September 2010 there were 5 billion photos hosted on Flickr

10. The per minute Flickr upload rate is 3000

To see the whole roundup of numbers head over to Pingdom.

Once in a while though the little kid in me just jumps up and down for joy and say, ‘Looky, looky, LOOK!  This is soooooooooo cool!’

It happened to me when I started using Twitter and it happened again today when I previewed Qwiki.com. As is often the case, the site was introduced in a Mashable tweet (you may have seen it on Facebook as well) titled 5 New Online Services Perfect for Small Business. Four of the services were interesting, indeed but when I viewed the interview with Qwiki’s founder, Doug Imbruce, my Wow-ometer blew through the roof.

They label their service (software) as, ‘the world’s first information experience, powered by a technology that transforms static information into interactive stories.’

It is wiki-like in that its algorithm gathers great amounts of data stored on the internet and magically brings it together on the screen for searches on almost anything. And it is quick because it doesn’t depend on individual contributors to add content. Rather in a very sophisticated way it blends photos, videos, maps and animations along with text which is read to you in a pleasant female voice.

Qwiki.com is still young so we need to give it time to grow. But hot, dang it’s exciting and it could just turn out to be one of the best new search tools, er ‘information experiences’ of 2011.

I can’t do service to Qwiki by trying to explain it here. You just have to give it a whirl yourself. Do it!  Qwiki.com cuz it’s waaaaay cool!

4 Point Perspective – 55,899 views

Reflecting Back – 55,672 views

Spherical Thinking Web Demo 11,458 views

A Round Town – 10,743 views

Good job Richard!

Recently, I decided I wanted to learn how to photograph a water drop so I headed over to our trusty friend, Google and typed ‘photograph water drops’ in the search box. Here are the results:

Digital-photography-school.com (#1 Google site) sent me off to this page. It is a nice, easy explanation of the setup and procedure.

But I wanted more information. So I bopped over to www.youtube and found a wonderful video from PhotoGavin titled How to photograph a splash of water.

Bingo, everything came clear. Before I went off to experiment though, I subscribed to the author’s Youtube channel so I could come back and watch the rest of his movies.

The point here isn’t to teach you how to photograph water drops, it is to show you how effective video is when it is mixed into your marketing efforts.

• Concepts become clearer when we can watch them in action.
• Fact – most people would rather watch a movie than read.
• A video of your company’s doings, facilities or employees makes you more “real” in the eyes of the viewers.
• Videos add value to your brand, they can make you the go-to expert.
• They can show the heart of your company. Do you do good deeds? Video, upload and share them.
• Video testimonials are powerful and much more believable than a list of text tributes.

I was impressed by the video so I went to PhotoGavin’s website and bookmarked it (I use delicious.com). I noticed that he has some DVDs for sale and they look interesting. And heck, I’m telling you about him too. So I’d say his video did a great job of establishing him as an expert, wouldn’t you?

Oh Google, we love you so but why do you have to keep stirring the pot? Oh yes, because it is your job, I forgot.

Last month Google rolled out their ‘personalized search’ for everyone. This isn’t new technology. It has previously been available to only those folks who were signed into their Google account. Now, we all get to have it, whether we want it or not.

A short explanation of ‘personalized search’ comes from Google’s blog:

‘Now when you search using Google, we will be able to better provide you with the most relevant results possible. For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.’

The long and short of it is now when I put ‘get hamster out of wall’ in the search box on my computer I will probably get a different list of sites than when you enter it on your computer.

This provides a whole host of perplexing problems for search engine optimizers starting with, oh, say keywords. Back in the old days (you know – the days of 2009) the search engines analyzed the words on a web page, then they psychoanalyzed each and every other component and Viola! a page rank is born.

Well, that was then and this is now. And this ‘now’ has your search history prominently filtered into your very own, private search results. (It’s just between you and Google and a few hundred million advertisers.)

So what is a site optimizer or owner to do?

Start with the two things that will always (probably) help with your search ranking

1. Update you site often with great content your audience will want to read
2. Get lots and lots of links from RELEVANT sites.
3. Keep an eye on your analytics.