Like just about everyone else, librarians know and love Flickr, Pinterest, and perhaps Instagram. Most of us have heard of Imgur, Snapchat, and Vine, and know that they are wildly popular. But we may be overlooking the significance of this interest in pictures and video on the Internet. The phenomenon of the ever-increasing amount of images that get sent every day over the Internet has (of course) been named: the visual Web. The problem for libraries is that librarians have a strong tendency to communicate online in text, and the same goes for library websites. But the visual Web illustrates that Internet users are much more likely to prefer websites that communicate through heavy use of images.
- Twitter has been too slow to catch up with the visual Web (ReadWrite | Lauren Orsini) “People have grown tired of text. And with faster network speeds, their devices can load images just as quickly as they once loaded simpler applications. From the days of cave painting, humans have always been visual creatures. As attention spans shorten and Internet speeds increase, it’s clear which we prefer.”
- The visual Web: How it’s connecting marketers to customers like never before (Business 2 Community | Olivia Cole) “The great thing about the Visual Web, says [VP of Marketing and Insights of comScore, Andrew] Lipsman, is that it enables brands to connect with their audiences on a different level than ever before. Lipsman gives Starbucks as an example. ‘It’s easy to feel like a cog in a machine in the long line at Starbucks every morning. But Starbucks’ Instagram account shines a different light on the experience, making it meaningful and extraordinary.’”
- The growth of the visual Web in 5 charts (Digiday | Matt Van Hoven) “Certainly, one needn’t upload an image or video to share it; all you need to do is find something you like online and share it. But in terms of new content, the numbers are staggering just the same. Snapchat boasts 276,000 snaps per minute. If that was miles per second, Snapchat would be faster than the speed of light (186,000 mps). Facebook comes in just behind with an average of 246,000 images and videos per second, which is roughly the population of Plano, Texas.”
- Journalists need to know how the rise of the mobile, social, visual Web impacts them (Forbes | Lewis DVorkin) “For me, statistics like these confirm the news business is on another collision course. A decade or more ago, journalism collided with the freedoms of digital publishing. Next came the collision with social media. Now, it’s colliding with mobile, social and the visual Web. Journalists should take note.”
Articles from Ohio Web Library:
- A new way of looking at the video book trailer. (Quill, Jan/Feb 2014, p25 | Jack El-Hai)
- Here’s one to adopt early: Vine for video. (Computers in Libraries, April 2013, p26-27 | Donna F. Ekart)
- Cultural signifers of web site images. (Journal of Management Information Systems, Summer 2011, p147-200 | Fatemeh “Mariam” Zahedi and Bansal Gaurav)
