In the second part of his interview with John Shinal, EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde talks about what he’s learned in a decade as an Internet executive and entrepreneur.

A good company starts with a great consumer experience, according to Wilde, a former executive with the search engine and Internet portal Lycos.

“If that’s high quality and a service to the user, the company usually benefits from that,” Wilde says.

Go to vator.tv to watch the interview or catch the previous segment here.

In a recent post, Video Nuze looks at the growing number of video-based “how-to” websites. The Video Nuze post highlights the logical popularity of how-to videos, asking:

How many of us would rather watch a video of someone explaining how to do something vs. reading a lengthy and often poorly-written guide?

Such sites have multiplied recently as a rush of well-funded competitors clamber for entry into the space. These companies have varied strategies, business models and content approaches. For the ad-supported sites, some strictly show professional videos while others focus mainly on UGC.

Both types of sites are seeing a good deal of buzz around advertising. One of the main reasons there is a lot of activity on the ad-supported side is that how-to videos sites deliver the highly-targeted and engaged audiences that sponsors crave. Great revenue opportunities exist for those sites able to aggregate enough traffic in a given category to attract advertising sponsors.

But with so many competitor sites crowding the space, how can each site effectively draw-in and engage users? With all of this video being produced, how will the companies ensure that when users search—either through Google or directly on their site—the most relevant content is delivered? Video content is at a fundamental disadvantage to text content in that it is largely invisible to Google and Yahoo. To build its traffic, 5Min plans to pursue widgetization, 3rd party distribution and SEO; this will be a good start, but SEO for video is non-trivial. That said, this category of video content lends itself well to speech to text to enable it to “plug-in” to the Search Economy. To succeed, these how-to sites must enable superior search and discovery of their videos. Solid video SEO and positive user experience through straightforward, accurate site search will be defining factors of the sites that manage to pull ahead of the pack.

As globalization increases, technologies grow more advanced and human knowledge expands, we must adapt on an individual as well as a societal level. Our knowledge continues to mushroom, becoming too great to store in our print libraries and, for each person, in our minds alone. As online networks and social sites become deeply integrated in people’s lives, the virtual becomes inextricable from our “offline” activities, communities, and lives. With greater amounts of personal information moving online, we need ever more powerful and accurate search to keep our contacts, photos, videos etc. accessible. Universal search will become invaluable as people take advantage of the free storage capacity the web has to offer for everything from pictures to videos to calendars and contact lists; as our lives and our memories move online, our need for comprehensive universal search will grow exponentially. Web storage—unlike our attics and basements—must be easily navigable.

Storage Capacity

There are a number of factors that point towards the exciting direction of information storage, particularly as it relates to people’s sense of their real and virtual selves and the steady merger of these concepts into one cohesive identity. As Bhavin Turakhia, Founder & CEO of Directi highlights on his blog, Web 2.0 applications act as extensions of our desktops, storage costs are continually dropping, and people now expect nearly unlimited storage online.

The Implications

Dropping storage costs and free space to store data online—particularly within social networking sites—mean that more and more you can store anything and everything about your life at little to no cost. YouTube, Flickr, Facebook et all are already accumulating multiple facets of people’s lives online. The virtual world has grown so that what we do and how we represent ourselves online are now essential components of our identities. A recent report from accustream entitled, “User Generated Video 2005 - 2008: Mania Meets Mainstream” shows that the market for user generated videos grew by an estimated 70% in 2007, up from a total 13.2 billion views generated in 2006. These are videos average people are making and uploading; these are vignettes, pieces of our lives on YouTube. The same report forecasts that the market will continue to grow by 52% in 2008, reaching 34 billion views.

Social networking sites only want to encourage these trends. In a MediaPost article about the coming launch of the MySpace Developer Platform (an initiative in direct response to the success that rival Facebook has had with its own open developer program), MySpace COO Amit Kapur states: “This is a critical year in the evolution of the Internet” describing his focus for MySpace as creating an increasingly “personal, portable, and collaborative Web.”

The Transactive Web

And what about our own personal storage capacity: our memory? MediaPost’s Search Insider blog had an interesting couple of entries by Gord Hotchkiss recently relating to what he calls “transactive memory” and its place in the digital age. As he illustrates, we have different methods for storing our memories. Hotchkiss explains that as some people are better at remembering certain types of things, we have adapted to extend our memory capabilities collectively by using transactive memory. This neurological plasticity allows our brain to prune itself, getting rid of capacities we no longer need while strengthening those that we do.

Hotchkiss raises the questions: What about computers, and, by extension, the Internet? What about search? New technologies let us dump the details of our life on a hard drive or website somewhere and search for it when we need it. In the place of all this memory digital storage is freeing up, Hotchkiss thinks we may develop greater skills in navigating online spaces. We may improve our navigation skills, but more importantly, we will expect comprehensive, powerful universal search technology to make finding all things virtual as easy as a simple click of your mouse.