Things will hopefully become more normal in the next few weeks, however, I’m still having difficulty getting to a computer and putting together a post. Everything from crashing computers to unemployment toÂ? strange growths has kept me busy and away from here lately, but I’m trying to get it together and put it online. Last week I wroteÂ? a post about Wireless/Mobile technology and the importance it will have in the future. An article on GigaOm.com suggests I’m not completely out-to-lunch with that line of thought.

Paul Kedrosky has an article, Fun With Mobile Apps, that mentions a website called CallTheFuture.org. Although I believe in the idea, something that is long overdue in my opinion, the site only offers computer generated, text-to-speech regurgitation of your message.Â? There is also the question of privacy that comes from using the site, with your number being a potential target for telemarketing and text advertising.

Google and Yahoo! are just two of manyÂ? companies thatÂ? are pushing forward with digital voice technology - like the ability toÂ? send and receiveÂ? voicemail. I posted yesterday about these companies needingÂ? to move more into the mobile market, and this would be an ideal first move to make. People could send themselves voice notes. Some cellphones probably have this type of built in feature, but these functions are often foreign andÂ? less user-friendly than an online model. Especially if the user is already familiar with the feature, like Google and Yahoo! users would be. These sites are probably easier to trust with information like cell numbers, or at least they would be much more discrete in the way they exploit the information.Â? The creation of these types of mobile apps are great, but they still seem way behind whatÂ? current technology should support.

Back in August, I made a post titled On the NetÂ? that commented on the 50 Coolest Websites according to Time magazine. At the end of the post, I listed off a few different sites that I had visited that week, and commented on their relevance on the Internet. The Good Blogs was one of those sites. The Good Blogs was something that immediately appealed to me, and I was excited to join.

Since joining the network, there have been several different upgrades to the site and the service. As The Good Blogs team has toiled away, The Good Blogs has shaped up into a great network that provides participants and readers with a great resource. The exposure of new blogs gives readers the opportunity to findÂ? fresh voices on the topics that interest them most, and new bloggers have aÂ? means of getting their voice heard by a larger audience. Like I said back in August, The Good Blogs is part of the evolution of blogging. Congratulations on the release of the Public Beta guys!

Back in June, I wrote a post titled Google, The Video Gatekeeper?Â? I basically disagreed with this notion. Although Google would have its share of user generated video content, I argued that more traditional Entertainment companies would control the more desirable content on the Internet. I listedÂ? two sites, MySpace and YouTube, as examples of why Google would probably not become the video gatekeeper. Google Video simply wasn’t taking a large enough piece of the pie in that market. With the purchase of YouTube, Google has really changed the picture.

Google will now be able to direct traffic fromÂ? their search engine into the largest video sharing site, which happens to be their property. But control of the content is what matters. If, for some reason, users move on to another site, the property loses value. One might argue that, much like MySpace, YouTube has reached that point where it will sustain itself, but YouTube relies on a very specific type of media - video.

Something that the winning entry at Yahoo! Open Hackday illustrates is the changes in mobile technology. Very shortly, your cellphone will alsoÂ? be your camera, video camera, iPod, and Origami all-in-one. If a large online video contentÂ? site secured a deal with a large mobile phoneÂ? company that makes it cheap (or free) to transfer video content from their cellphone to their profile online, it could have a huge impact on video sharing sites. With Google making a $1.65 billion purchase for a video site, would they look to do the same thing with a cellular compnay? It might be a bold move, butÂ? it’s in line with the YouTube purchase.

Google has made a huge gain in the area, but it still isn’t what I would describe as the video gatekeeper. Rather than looking at another major purchase, the company will probably look to make some money back, but I don’t think this will be the end. Google’s domination online still has some more pieces to complete the puzzle.

It’s hard not to write about this deal. There are so many different ways to look at the merger that it seems almost impossible to avoid a post. Google, the search engine giant, has made what will likely amount to one of the most controversial acquisitions of this new Internet era - just ask Mark Cuban. In YouTube, Google has acquired the greatest source of online video clips. A site that has 65,000 new clips uploaded a day and over 100 million video clips viewed a day. The downside is the cost of the bandwidth that all these videos require, an amount estimated to be $1million in April of this year.

One of the first questions is how this will work with regards to Google Video? Would it not make sense for the company to start copying the database of YouTube video clips into Google Video? And how about making Google the search engine of choice on YouTube? These are both quite obvious steps to take as the company moves forward and looks to monetize the investment. With control over the Internet’s largest and most used collection of media, the company has several different avenues for generating revenue. Sponsored search results, commercials/ads before clips or every few clips, and the potential to create more of a market for the independent producers. But there are definite concerns about making money on the site, too.

People who are uploading their content onto the site aren’t necessarily going to continue to do so the site can make money. Will there be some sort of profit sharing for those who are providing the best or most viewed or most marketable content? It’s been shown before how even the simplest of changes to a popular site can create a great deal of backlash by the users, and since these sites are typically dime-a-dozen, risking rocking the boat too much could have irreversible affects. Facebook faced huge backlash when minor changes were made to the inner-workings of the site, and quickly had to recover. How much would it take for users to stumble upon the next big thing for sharing media? And this doesn’t even begin to look at the copyright concerns that are growing regarding the content contained on the site.

It would seem that Google has admitted defeat on their project and taken an if you can’t beat ‘em, join em stance. Rather than tackle the task of competing in the fairly clogged market, Google purchased the big daddy of them all. That gives Google control of their own content, completely free, or with some sort of revenue sharing model. Based on that alone, the deal might make sense for Google. Online media is well on its way to becoming the next big thing. Probably the biggest since cellular devices, DVD players, or the Internet itself, depending on how you rank the impact of each. The entire movie and television industry will basically be moved online, and until this point, Google had no content of their own. Now they have 65,000 free videos being produced daily.