Videos are becoming more and more common on the internet, and for some things, like mentos and diet pepsi, they're hard to beat.  For things I'm seriously interested in, though, I prefer text.  Here's why:

• Text goes at my speed.  I read quickly, and certainly faster than people can talk.  If I want to slow down and reread something, I can do that too.
• Video, outside of actual video chats, is not interactive, so I don't get the benefits of being there, being able to interrupt, ask questions, and so on, that can make the 'in person' experience superior to just reading about something.
• Text is searchable and indexable.  I can search within a page, and it's also more likely to be visible to search engines.
• Text is easy to scan and glance at.
• Given the ease of scanning text, it's also easier to filter: "is this something I want to invest more time in reading?".  In the time many videos use for people to simply introduce themselves, I could have already got an idea of a document is worth further perusal.
• Text is easy to manipulate; cutting, pasting, quoting, etc… are all easy.
• I don't have to put on headphones to read text if my wife is sleeping and I'm working late.
• Text has good, and highly visible conventions (various headings and subheadings) for indicating subsections of a large document and what they may be about.

Nearly three years ago, I wrote an article comparing Linode and Slicehost  having been first a Slicehost customer and then switched to Linode.  I would have been happy to stay with Slicehost, because they seemed like good people, but the 64bit vs 32bit issue, especially, tilted things very far in Linode's favor.  I thought the results were damning, and many people agreed with me, judging by the number of people clicking through the affiliate link I added later.   Based on some comments I read from this guy, who did a similar comparison, at http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison/ I think that between the two of us we drove a lot of customers towards Linode.

Those articles have been out there for years, and are very easy to find with Google.  Curious to monitor the situation, a while ago, I set up a Twitter search feed for "Slicehost vs Linode" to see if people were talking about my article, and what other people were suggesting.  Overwhelmingly, those suggestions have been for Linode too.

Recently, Rackspace, who acquired Slicehost several years ago, announced they would be shutting down Slicehost and transitioning their customers to Rackspace: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/05/rackspace-shutting-down-sliceh.php

And yet – people are still asking about Slicehost vs Linode on Twitter!

This is a useful reminder to me of how much, in our profession (and likely others, but I'm going with what I know) there is a core of the very clued in, who follow all the latest trends (and, negatively, fads too, at times), and are highly informed about everything that's going on.  Outside that, though, there is a pretty  long tail of people who are much less informed.  That's not a criticism of those people, either; perhaps they follow the latest developments in gold mining technology or something else that's much more relevant to their lives than "computer stuff".  It's something to keep in mind when marketing things – you think that everyone must have got the message, that no one could possibly not know what's going on, but it's actually quite difficult to really, reliably communicate something to a broad range of people.