Steve Rubel is always interesting on the way the Internet works, in this case, why text is still "King of the Web". via Micro Persuasion.

Why text? There are at least five reasons...

• It's scannable - according to Jakob Nielsen users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average site visit and 20% is more likely
• Three letters: SEO [Search Engine Optimisation] - For all that Google Universal Search has done to elevate video, search results are still largely made up of text and everyone wants better SEO
• The workplace - It's much easier for cube-based workers to read text on the screen and get away with it vs. watching long videos. Watching videos (even work related vids) screams "slacker"
• Mobile Devices - Yes, of course you can put a video on an iPhone. But it's work and requires planning. Text is easier to pull up in a nanosecond
• Distribution - Nothing flies like text. It's so easy to cut and paste it and send it somewhere or to clip and re-syndicate it via email, RSS or social networks

I don't know about you but I love text. Now I have always been a reader. Today I am a scanner. So for me it comes natural.

There's plenty more that makes Steve worth reading.

While writing good text is an art in itself, it is at least relatively quickly done and can easily be edited later if needed. Multimedia such as audio and video are also hugely time-consuming to make merely adequate and, although you can link TO them, there are still no ways to link FROM a particular point in a video to a relevant point in another file, be it audio, video or text.

Until we can manage that little trick that http:// [Hyper Text Transfer Protocol] has been doing for half a generation now, the web will still belong, for the most part, to text.

What role does Multimedia play in your organisation? Comment away.

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