Embedding Audio and Video in Text
I like the way the New York Times is embedding audio in their frontpage now. The result is a true multimedia document (combining print and audio) not just multiple documents in different media (a podcast or its transcript). A lot of new media journalists and bloggers like to slam the NYT for being closed to new ideas. To me they seem like the Apple of journalism: hermetically sealed, but what a seamless and pleasurable user experience!
The trend to syndicate video through badges is another example of the hybrid document forms currently evolving on the web. Take for example the way this Japanese fansite integrates downsized Youtube screens into the flow of text. These sorts of compound multimedia documents were what Dan and I were thinking about last year when we played around with hybrid spoken/written documents.