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Oh boy, day 1 of Web2.0 Expo is about to kick off here in San Francisco and I feel like a kid waiting in line to meet Santa at the Mall. The Expo starts with a day of Workshops (optional) followed by the Expo itself (’Trade show’ to us Brits) tomorrow through Friday. Each day there are themed Sessions covering Strategy & Business Models, Marketing & Community, Design & User Experience, Fundamentals, Development, Mobile Web, Operations, and Social Platforms. The great and the good will also make a string of Keynotes, including Tim O’Reilly, Max Levchin (Slide) and Marc Andreessen. ooh I think I just peed myself.

More later.

So raise your hand all of you who think that video is big on the internet? Keep your hand up if you think that video over the Internet will challenge traditional Tv any time in the next five years? Now all of you with your hand still in the air are candidates for American Idol rejects. You know who I mean, the delusional character who walks in looking like a bag of spanners, sings like a cat being throttled and expects to get to boot camp. So put your hand down and listen carefully you poor thing. Web video will not replace TV viewing until there is sufficient critical mass of good quality content to be watched. Why?

1. Comscore estimates that in February the average ‘web’ viewer watched 75 video clips with an average length of 2.7 minutes per clip. That’s a paltry 3 hours a month. The average US citizen watches over 8 hours of television A DAY. Assuming a massive 100% growth in web viewing per year it would be 70 years before web video matched traditional Tv viewing.

2. There is a school of thought that says the ‘kids’ of today who have been brought up on the virtues of the Internet will shun traditional Tv and increasingly seek their entertainment from the web. Its a myth. Kids spend around 7.5 hours a day watching TV. And judging by my kids, they probably have a laptop on their knee while they are watching the TV.

3. Despite the surge in personal digital recorders that let you skip ads, advertisers will continue to plough their billions into TV rather than the Internet because TV wins the eyeball challenge. Total hours of video viewed on the web is approximately 14million a day. Total TV watched IN THE UK ALONE is approximately 199 million hours a day.

4. The majority of users do not want to watch long videos on the internet - why would they they still have a TV and a PDR? So they prefer to watch drossweb clips whilst messaging and watching TV at the same time.

So do you still believe that Web video will storm our lives in a 5 year time frame? If you do, say hello to Simon Cowell for me.

I just love the yanks. Their hamburgers, ball-games, national ‘world’ series, huge lardy behinds, flag waving, gun toting, whooping. I could go on and on about what makes them just the cutest darn people. Before you shout ‘racist’ at me it is my experience that the Americans are among the nicest people I have ever had the pleasure to meet. Sure there are exceptions but we Brits don’t have to look further than our own backyard to see that our own dick-head-to-genius ratio is actually quite high.

So why is it that the Americans hate us so? Yep, they do. Think about it. First they kick George’s ass to take over the country. Then they infect us with break dance and deedly boppers. Then just as we are reeling they hit us with rap and export Madonna to us. Now, just as we are becoming the scumbag breeding ground of Europe they smite us with social networking. I’ll swear that they have a plan to screw up our economy by grinding it to a halt while we fritter away our time tweeting, blogging and friending total strangers. It must be some kind of mind game sponsored by the CIA. Through the pervasiveness of the internet we have become Americanised. We worship the very essence of theweb, celebrity and gasoline. Before you know it our yobs will be too busy posting on Facebook to get drunk and mug an old lady. No lager louts. No Saturday night fights. No football hooligans. All locked away behind their screens, tapping away their dreams.

Well my fellow Brits it’s time to fight back. Zap your accounts, bin your blogging, stop your surfing. We are going to recover the very essence of Britishness: tea and scones, tiffin, fighting the French. Back to the good old days. Rebel. Now!

photo credit: Martin Pettitt

So the great Mr Scoble has come clean as to what he saw at Microsoft that made him cry. It was a “World Wide Telescope”. What’s so special about that I ask myself. Well Robert fills us in .. 

But it has one difference between any telescope you’ve ever looked at.You can zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom.We picked a point of light inside the big dipper. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Holy shit, it’s two galaxies colliding. It looked like a star. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom.Now the magic happened.Curtis Wong said: “let’s switch to a different telescope and see what these two galaxies colliding are spitting out.”He clicked a button and we saw a completely different view of the same colliding galaxies. This time we weren’t looking at visible light, but at something else. I think it might have been infrared, or maybe a look at radiation being kicked out. He had about 10 of the world’s telescopes to look at. I forget all the names, but that detail is in the video coming on Monday.Zoom out. Zoom out. Zoom out. Zoom out. Pan over to Mars. What a glorious view. You’ve never seen Mars like that through your $2,000 Celestron Telescope.   

  OK my eyes are welling up a tad. But there’s more …. 

So, why cry over a telescope?Because I just saw the world I live in, er, excuse me, the universe I live in in a new way that I never had imagined before.I cried because I imagined all the kids, like my sons, who will be inspired by what they see. It took me back to the days when John Kennedy wanted us to go to the moon. Hint: there’s a lot more out there to explore.I cried because I realized just how much work, money, and all that went into making these images. I never had access to them before. Certainly not in this way so I could compare them by clicking a button. As a taxpayer who’s helped pay for some of these telescopes it’s the first time I’ve seen the results of my and your, investments in our scientific research.It’s human to look out at the sky and wonder what’s going on out there. This takes us a LOT further into our understanding of just what is.And,, yes, that’s worth crying some inspirational tears. Thank you to Microsoft Research for inspiring me in a way that Microsoft hasn’t inspired me in years.    

I guess you had to be there.