Video is the new graffiti

Since the dawn of time man has yearned to express himself. Think cave art. While Kings and movie stars never have trouble getting an audience, the masses always do. And their outlets haven't changed much since the cave men. Think graffiti.

Of course nowadays teens have MySpace and the rest of us have blogs where we are free to express ourselves. But it still doesn’t mean anyone's listening. And blogging in China or radical Islamic regimes aren't as free as blogging in more open societies.

But I'm here to tell you that the big news in free expression is not blogs, but video. Video is the new graffiti. If you're thinking, "Wait, camcorders have been around for decades - what's changed?" I'm going to tell you.

1. Creation. High quality video capture devices have shrunken and are available on phones, still digicams, and other low cost consumer devices. Example: Casio Exilim. For $400 you can have a 30 fps video camera slimmer than a pack of cards and fits in your shirt pocket. It also takes 7 MP stills, and virtually unlimited audio.

2. Compression. Just in the last year it's become extremely easy to create and host video that streams over the Web without any serious delays or issues. Anybody really can broadcast their own video. At just $7/mo a hosting company will provide 5 GB of space, and a quick Google search will instruct even an amateur on how to publish a video stream that starts on page load.

3. Platforms. Video is not confined to the TV anymore. Now it's downloaded off the web and transferred onto iPods, phones, pdas, and more. This has two implications. The first is that people are choosing their own content which can be very specialized, and not just waiting for NBC or HBO to launch a new series. The second is that it lowers the bar for video and sound production, since a $10,000 professional video camera and a $300 camera phone video can produce the same output on a 2" square screen.

4. Distribution. New content discovery tools like Digg (for blogs) and a host of upstarts trying to do similar things for video (Grouper, YouTube, Stickam) give content publishers a more populist shot at getting an audience. Anyone can publish a link to their content and then the “masses” vote for what’s important, cool, or just whacky enough to be interesting. These get promoted to the top.

5. Filtering. Video can't be filtered so easily like blogs can. It's easy to block any blog that has the words "Free Tibet", but it's hard to find all the videos that contain the same words in the audio track or displayed visually on a sign by a protestor caught on tape.

The biggest obstacle right now is psychological, not technical. We don't yet think of ourselves as cameramen, producers, or reporters. But in time we might. Everyone with modest means and access to a high speed connection can express more complex and controversial ideas in the video format. And you don’t need a degree in non-linear video editing. Video - the "idiot box" format - isn't looking so dumb after all.