Slashdot Mirror
Are Video Blogs Ready For Prime Time?
Markmarkmark writes "Is video blogging ready for prime-time? Can Internet talking 'blog-heads' beat the talking heads on Fox? Is the next Andy Rooney-type commentator going to be a /.er? With new technology and a little creativity, this MSNBC article today thinks so. 'The big problems have been setting up lights and a camera in my study properly, so that I don't look dead, or hung over.'" The article is about the software / hardware it takes to set up a microstudio; the author does not really explore much about the video-blogging implications -- but you can.
Umm... no thanks.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
I have trouble looking at myself in the mirror. Even thinking about people being able to see me talking in a demur tone to a webcam just makes me shudder. Through the internet is nightmarish.
I think text blogs (not even pictures) are much better - it depends on your ability to describe things well, and it puts a comfortable anonymity for you *and* your reader. Who was it that said "After TV is in every american household, you will never see another president in a wheelchair"?
Granted, often a picture is worth a thousand words - but I don't think video blog is worth the bandwidth / storage area. Even pictures needs to be sorted out to the last 5% of the cream before they are put on magazines, etc - video is just nasty. Slide show, maybe - video, no. (Just how many people go back and watch, minute my minute, their old family videos? exactly)
And yes, I blog; pretty regularly too, so maybe I don't speak with authority, I have (some) experience in this
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I like the idea. What I'm thinking about is what happens when ten thousand people start blogging and a million watches their blogs?
Can the current Internet take that kind of an onslaught?
.: Max Romantschuk
People used to read. Then came television and people chose to watch the story.
But at least we geeks had computers. They were arcane and baffling to most people. We had JCL. We had 80 column cards. We had numbers in bases 8 and 16 we dared to call "octal" and "hex". We had RCPM and BBSes and MODEMS. And we had nearly everything in text.
Now command lines aren't needed because of GUI interfaces (which seem easier at first but are a pain to use to get anything serious done). Don't get me wrong, I love good graphics (like watching the approaching storm on weather.com), but video weblogs will be another step towards turning the internet into interactive television. Watch screen. Move mouse. Click. Watch screen.
I'm tired. Would someone read Slashdot to me?
Terrycloth Lobster
Otherwise, what's next? Slashdot video postings? Shudder.
Actually "Just because you can, doesn't mean you shouldn't" is a driving philosophy behind a lot of stupid things getting done.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Ever read "The Light of Other Days" by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clark?
ob.sig: My Cool Gadgets and Technology blog
weblogs are short, text based, easy to skim or ignore. Video you have to sit through it. You can't compile a big list of the videos and look at them at a glance. Its a different medium from tv.
Just because you can provide video doesn't mean its the best format for weblogs.
Even with video phones I think you will still find more people SMS than audio call, and more people audio call than video call.
I don't care how you moderate me, that article was rubbish. At best it was an advertisment for some video editing software and the fact that computers and cameras are now cheap enough for anyone to get in to making terrible vid-clips of bits of their lives that no one else cares about.
Yaaawn...
We want real news!
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
Video blogs will never catch on for the same reason people hate voicemail after using email. While it may be a more fully featured sensory experience, a major feature is lacking; Scanning.
When I go to a web page, I can scan down it in a fraction of the time it would take to read the text. Voicemail and Video can't match that. Video can, if you are watching it for visual content instead of audio content. While you can "zzzzip" through messages on some voice mail systems, you still don't get what you could get from scanning a text message.
With video blogs, you would be forced to either watch for as long as it took the author(?) to record it, or miss parts. That is part of the "killer app" of email and current blogs that video blogs can't shake a stick at.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Personally I'd rather read things like blogs and news websites than watch video or listen to audio. If you want to know why just play any of a number of video games or computer games where the dialogue track sounds like it was recorded by the programmers...most people just don't have that interesting a voice!
A lot of the comments I've seen so far have been to the effect of "how interesting can a geek on video be?" Probably not very, but consider the source of the article. It's worth noting that the article is by Glenn Reynolds, the most popular true blogger (as opposed to quasi-journalists like Drudge) on Earth. While he's certainly got a geek side - his "chief interest is in the intersection between advanced technologies and individual liberty", and he's been executive chairman of the National Space Society - he's a law professor, established commentator, and author. Tens of thousands of people visit his instapundit.com for his commentary on technology, culture, and politics news every day.
This is the area where video blogs are likely to take off, for the same reason that standard weblogs shot up in popularity in the past two years. People are increasingly concerned with the state of international relations and public policy, and increasingly dissapointed in the established media's ability to keep up with events and to provide coverage that is compelling, insightful, and (perhaps most importantly), honest about it's bias. Many of these people have turned to weblogs to fill this information gap, and I think the same will be true of video blogs. I'd even venture to predict the possibility of the most popular video bloggers "going pro" - just like Reynolds when MSNBC offered him an online slot, perhaps we'll see major news networks give video bloggers space in their online, or maybe even broadcast, video feeds.
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
...richie - It is a good day to code.
instapundit.com (Glenn's original blog) has topped 200,000 daily visits on at least one occasion, and his readership is growing monthly. His fellow top-teir bloggers boast similar numbers. And they're just talking about boring ole' politics and such. "Millions" might still be a long way off, but I don't think it's all that farfetched.
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
I agree. In fact, I don't understand the whole blogging thing, and I've gotten pretty deep into the cyberworld.
/. story and I didn't stay long.)
Anytime I read an article on blogging, I wonder why:
A:) I've never met anyone personally who talks about them.
and B:) I've never, in all my research and surfing time, come across one. (Other than Dave Barry's, but that was from the
So I think I'll just ignore them until they go away, like I did with the Y2K thing.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Maybe video blogs aren't ready for prime time quite yet, but remember the words from H.M. Warner at Warner Brothers in 1927:
Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
Now whether people would watch some weird geek's video blog is another story :)
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
To all the people that are saying it's not feasible to run a video blog because the cost of bandwidth is too much or most people don't have the necessary bandwidth available, you need to rub both of your braincells together just a little faster:
use p2p.
A text blog can still be maintained, and the video could be made available there, whether it's streamed or a downloadable binary. You could even provide a transcript. But produce the video and release on a p2p network or three. Out of the 60 million people on kazaa, someone's likely to be interested, right?
BLOCK STRUCTURE breathing apparatus required for special maneuvers!!
We have technology available that allows you to search audio files by phonemes. That can be rolled together into dictation software and could provide a text track/file that would be searchable. This would require a bit of new software to be written. It would probably end up with an XML style document where each word or sentence is marked by data describing its time index.
As a side note, technology like that would have incredibly beneficial implications for the television/movie world - imagine being able to index all the speech in a movie and bring up clips based on word usage. This would improve the gathering of footage for news programs and could make editing documentaries easier.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit