A lot of people saw Al Gore's movie - An Inconvenient Truth.

Amazing how many people say it was depressing and still don't do anything about it.

Here is the problem according to New Scientist:

"Large amounts of greenhouse gases are currently locked in the permafrost and if released could accelerate the greenhouse effect," says Balzter. Hansen's paper concludes that the effects of this positive feedback could be huge. "In past eras, the release of methane from melting permafrost and destabilised sediments on continental shelves has probably been responsible for some of the largest warmings in the Earth's history," he says.

We could be close to unleashing similar events in the 21st century, Hansen argues. Although the feedbacks should remain modest as long as global temperatures remain within the range of recent interglacial periods of the past million years, outside that range - beyond a further warming of about 1 °C - the feedbacks could accelerate. Such changes may become inevitable if the world does not begin to curb greenhouse gas emissions within the next decade, Hansen says.

As the headline of the article says - One more degree and we are done for.

Time to become active. To lobby government. To disinvest in companies that contribute to global warming. To organize. To talk publicly. Not time to be depressed. Time to act.

Now.

Last year was the podcast debut. This year things are coming together. LiveOffice offer corporate users the ability to turn conference calls into podcasts. (You ask them to fix the issue.  Hand over some money. They tape the call. Tag it. RSS it. Post it.)

A yawn? Nope. Think about all the sales calls, analysts discussions, academic conferences, minutiae; where participants make useful contributions. Then think time and place transference so others can listen.

Think Sarbanes Oxley or continuous disclosure where the full market can keep tabs, even when they can't be part of the conference call. This marches podcast another step forward integrating them more fully into the work arena. And as well creating another viable business model.

Cisco are a smart opportunistic company. Often they don't R and D something. They buy their way to leadership. Or do what it takes. Monday they announced that they were going to offer
 a set of products to allow large corporations to create and distribute video a la YouTube.

We live in a n era where the corporate is following the consumer. To see YouTube or My Space is to see the corporate future. You know then that we have barely scratched the corporate video surface. Cisco in? It's big. Very big.

Analysts are projecting 30% growth a year. That'll be conservative. Once companies realize the power of short video for their enterprise it'll explode. Analysts are saying that Cisco initial offering is strong but lacks some features. Expect them to start buying companies.

So now we see action across the board in every stage of video. It's going to get white hot.

Videoegg allows websites to publish video clips easily. They nailed 12 million dollars more of Venture Capital overnight to expand the business. Video is going to be everywhere.

Mobile Video's hotspot is afternoon and early evening. according to Telephia.  Around 30% of mobile consumers use their cells  midday to 4 or commute time, 4 pm to 8pm. It's down to 9% during normal TV prime-time (8pm to 11)

50% of mobile video users are 25-36 yrs old.  But they're only 24% of the total mobile population. ie this groups consumes twice as much. Perhaps a money thing?

7 out of 10 users are men, yet its even Steven male/female ratio for mobile subscribers.

Consumers say 25% of viewing is at home. (strangely!)  22% of their viewing while commuting, 16 percent shopping, 14% at work.

Of course these are still early days of use. Like everything it'll change as the bulk of the populations takes up the mobile video habit.

Very interesting analysis here that deals with why the housing market in the US is a bubble, why it is bursting, why it wont be a soft landing....

If you live in the US and you own a home or are thinking of buying one, read it. If you live somewhere else then it may be worth doing this kind of analysis...

Here is an excerpt:

In addition to the above, one of the main reasons why I believe it will take years to work off the excess housing inventory is the denial of the bubble by home construction companies. The annual rate of population growth has been running around 1% since the mid 1960's up to the present. From 1965-1985 the average increase in U.S. population was 2.2mm people. Even using today's U.S. population of approximately 300mm, the number of new individuals who need to purchase a home is about 3million per annum. The average number of people per household is 2.6. Therefore, additional dwellings need to increase by about 1.15 million units to maintain equilibrium. According to the commerce department, in the month of August, the annual increase in new home construction was running at 1.66 million units for 2006. That is a decrease of 19.8% below August of last year when the rate was 2.075 million units. What this tells us is the rate of new home construction is still outstripping the intrinsic need to house the increased population. Forget about absorbing already superfluous inventory, homebuilders are still putting up units for flippers and "investors."

During the NASDAQ collapse of nearly 80% from March of 2000-Oct 2002, the index was purged of many of its speculative companies as they were de-listed from the exchange. This facilitated a partial recovery in the average as it removed some of the excess supply of equities. Real estate is different. Once a home is built, it remains in the supply equation until it is absorbed. While a decline in home values anywhere close to the extent experienced by the tech bubble is close to impossible, a long protracted bear market in real estate which brings prices nation wide down 20-30% is likely.

I came across an interesting white paper (written by Erik Brynjolfsson (MIT), Yu “Jeffrey” Hu (Perdue University) and Duncan Simester (MIT)) when browsing Chris Anderson's site (he of Long sTail fame).

It is about the changing cost of distribution of long tail products with the increasing utilisation of search.

Not just of academic value - a very interesting ingredient in the debate about continuing disintermediation, and worth a read...

Google launched their video search in Australia yesterday....

Here are some of the launch partnerslisted in  their press release:


This seems to mark Australia becoming a key market for Google.

In Stat is offering a study on User Created Content that shows the following:

By 2010 downloads and views will surpass 65 Billion

Revenues tied to User Created Content will surpass $850 Million

YouTube has the most downloads of video but MySpace has the most visitors.