I posted on PlanetRecruit previously about Google Books now containing over five million books, which is pretty impressive. But even more impressive are YouTube’s growth figures, which have reached frankly terrifying levels. Every single day, YouTube receives and hosts another six years' worth of video. That’s 36.5 hours of video added every minute.
Start watching nothing but YouTube videos today and you’ll be five years, eleven months and 30 days behind before the end of the day. Tomorrow, you’ll be 12 years behind; the next day, 18 years. So perhaps we can all be forgiven for having missed the latest must-see viral sensation.
Video is everywhere on the web these days, in all kinds of formats and places. For instance, if you’re reading this then you’re probably a user of Skype or Oovoo or one of the many other VoIP (Voice-over Internet Protocol) services on the web. However, as the parent of two small children whose relatives live some on the other side of the world, I can personally vouch for the value of these services. VoIP joins the family together like no other technology I’ve seen before. Children today are growing up seeing nothing unusual in talking to real-time moving images of people on a screen when it’s late at night, even though it’s early morning here.
With this system, interview questions can be recorded by the interviewer in the UK, and answered by an interviewee on the other side of the dateline hours or even days later, removing the issues raised by job searching in differing time zones.
Not only that, everyone being interviewed gets exactly the same treatment from the interviewer – so the system is actually fairer. And with global outsourcing such a popular business option these days, it makes it simple for a company based in Birmingham to assess candidates from Bangalore.
So, with the science fiction promise of videophones finally being delivered, here's hoping that jetpacks aren’t too far behind!
Stuart Carter is employed as an SEO Web Editor for recruitment company Elan. He writes both on and about the web, which he loves.
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