There don't seem to be too many of us around who were involved in commercial Internet ventures in 1994.

I'm talking about the pre-Google, pre-eBay, pre-Amazon, and even pre-Yahoo days.  (Yahoo didn't "turn pro" until 1995.)

First, people who were serious about the commercial potential of the Internet back in those days were few and far between.  Second, many of those who were involved in those early days have dropped out one way or another -  either cashed out or moved onto another field.

Today, of course, millions of people are professionally involved with Internet ventures of various sorts, from the warehouse workers at Amazon to venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

This sounds like a pretty mature industry at this point, so why do I say that "it's 1994 all over again."

One word: video.

Transmitting video on the Internet has been tehnically possible since the beginning. It just wasn't practical. Today it is. Not only is it practical, the requirements have become trivial. Video is the new paper. A very strange concept to wrap your head around at first, but a pretty accurate assessment of what's happened in the last year.

Paper itself used to be relatively rare and expensive. It didn't become a commodity until the second half of 19th century and when it did the world saw an explosion of newspaper publishing and the invention of new-fangled "inventions" like magazines and catalogs. (Look it up. These last two publication types which seem like they've been with us forever are less than 150 years old.)

Enter Internet video. It's now cheaper to shoot, edit and distribute a modest video (via the Internet) than it is to write a report and bring it down to Kinko's to make a couple of hundred copies.

So not only is video the new paper. It's cheaper than paper.

How many people really *get* this? How many people know what to do about it? How big is the gap between the tidal wave of demand for Internet video publishing and the number of people who, currently, can pull it off with panache?

See what I mean? It's 1994 all over again.  Enjoy!

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Hi. My name is Ken McCarthy. I'm your guest blogger this week.

You can learn more about me at kenmccarthy.com or read further ravings about Internet video at systemvideoblog.com.

But before you do that, I'd love to hear what you think of my proposition.

I'm Steve O'Keefe, co-host of "This Week on IAOCblog.com" and this week I dropped the ball!

I failed to introduce our topic and guest in a timely manner. So please forgive me and, more importantly, please join me in welcoming Internet marketing pioneer Ken McCarthy to our blog!

Ken McCarthy organized the first conference ever on Internet marketing -- in 1994 in San Francisco.  One of his students from that era, Rick Boyce, played an instrumental role in popularizing the banner ad at Hotwired. Ken also was very early to the pay-per-clik game, recognizing PPC not only as a source of traffic, but also as a superb testing and marketing research tool. Today, Ken is director of The System Seminar -- an online marketing training program -- and runs the "Looking at Video on the Web" blog at <http://www.systemvideoblog.com/>. Ken will be discussing such subject's as Google's purchase of YouTube and what it means for online marketers.

Ken McCarthy -- welcome to IAOCblog.com!