I won't go into extensive predictions for the new year (wishing my readers a most happy and blessed year BTW), but an easy one is that 2006 will be remembered as the Year When Personal Video Came To The Web.

Openvlog already allows you to record videos freely and add them to your blog. I'm not sure how they will cope with the load if they have any significant success, but it's a cool thing anyway!

I'm working on a similar thing currently, using (as Openvlog does) Flash to record and replay the video (I'll tell you more about the project in due time). It works very well, but there are two slight problems: you need the Flash Media Server (at 4500$ a pop) and the FLV format that it uses is not fully open. The video uses well-known codecs, but the audio does not, at least that's what I've found out until now.

So, converting the recorded FLV videos to open formats is a problem currently.

The red5 team is working on an open alternative to the Flash Media Server, and it works pretty well already but from what I've seen doesn't allow video recording yet.

Anyway, it looks like we'll see much more personal video on the Web in 2006. That's good and bad news: remember all the ugly documents produced in the early days of Desktop Publishing? This is more of the same, but unfortunately with pictures and sounds included...it will be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.