blipvert

This morning, as I cruised through the normal feed of websites, I came to the front page of Talking Points Memo, which normally features short posts on the left, and some video coverage on the right hand side of the page.

This morning that video was an imbedded Qik video, an interview with comedian Harry Shearer (Mr. Skinner, to you Simpsons fans), recorded at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Recorded on a mobile.

Sure the quality stinks. If they’d used a thousand-dollar consumer-level HD camcorder (such as my own Canon HF-10), the video quality would be fantastic. But the folks at TPM already know that there is no “gold standard” for video. They are using an external, handheld microphone, which means they’ve grasped the importance of sound recording. In video, sound tells the story.

I wonder just how many other of the “Big Tent” bloggers are using Qik at DNC08.

With the advent of iPhone, there’s been a rise in talk about the “mobile Web”. The Web itself has been mobile for several years – at least since I strapped a wireless modem onto the back of my Palm Pilot (this would have been 1998 or 1999) and started surfing.

What we have now isn’t precisely the mobile Web. It is mobile, and some of it does involve the Web (or, more precisely, HTTP), but that is not the whole of the story, or, in eighteen month’s time, will that even be the biggest part of the story.

I’ve already installed my first 3G killer app on my iPhone – SimplifyMedia. It became immediately clear – just over the course of a 30 minute walk to the grocery and back – that I would blow through my rather meager 500MB Vodafone data cap very quickly using SimplifyMedia. Streaming media is just too irresistible.

Streaming media is not specifically a Web technology. It integrates well with the Web, it can even be delivered via the Web, but it is not the Web.

Qik and Flixwagon, which both provide live video broadcasting from my iPhone, do post those videos to a website. But very little of the Web is involved in moving the video stream from my iPhone to their respective sites. So, once again, this is not the mobile Web. This is something else.

And I’m convinced that using the term “mobile Web” will only constrain our ability to entertain the possibilities for pervasive 3G networks.