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.
Is it possible that this whole "blogging" craze has been the fastest flash-in-the-pan to hit the technology world yet? Dare I dream that the even the uber-geeks and posers have already come to the conclusion that "hey, you know what? I'm not really that exciting, and nobody cares what I had for breakfast today"?
"Blogging" has graphically illustrated for me the old adage, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you shouldn't."
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Umm... no thanks.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Don't camgirls with LiveJournals already do something like this?
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 just ate a bagle. It was pretty good.
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
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. But those are hardware problems, not software. The software worked perfectly right out of the box.
His initial concern is for his appearance, doesn't sound like "news for nerds" to me....
--My sig is bigger than your sig--
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.
I'd definately want to see the faces of the "F1r57 p057!!!!111 l337 dUUdz!!11" people.
I feel that any kind of camera, digital camera or video camera attached to my computer i anyway is bound to end up in my naked ass being posted around the world just after I've had a shower or something!
"Pushing little children, with their fully automatics, they like to push the weak around"
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'm really surprised nobody has brought up Ferris Bueller so far. You know, all the scenes where he speaks to the camera?
Frankly, I would differentiate between something like a personal web page or diary or whatever other exhibitionist crap someone wants to put up on the internet (gawd I hate the term 'blog') and the kind of infotainment we're talking about here.
I see lots of parallels to public access TV. You could get some pretty quality, amusing and informative stuff (like someone reminding you that life moves pretty fast, so if you don't stop and look around every
once in a while, life might just pass you by) but a large majority of random pointless drivel running about.
Rant rant rant. And that didn't all just have a point...
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
As I think it's only a matter of time before we're all paying by the byte for bandwidth in one fashion or another, I also believe that stuff like video blogs and other low value/size ratio internet artifacts will go away as well (like banner ads and other graphics that will be aggressively filtered out once you've got to pay for each one you look at...)
So, no, I don't think video blogs are the wave of the future...
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Yeah, all serious graphic artists use the command line version of Photoshop.
Free Hans!
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?
Is news blogging important? Ask Trent Lott. The news about his racist comments was small news on an AP wire that no major news organization covered. Instapundit covered it immediately (after being pointed to it by Josh Marshall, another blogger. IIRC, the comments were made on a Thursday. Instapundit was all over the story, calling for his ouster by Friday and Saturday, but the major news organizations didn't cover the story until Tuesday.
Now whether people would watch some weird geek's video blog is another story :)
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
Herein lies the rub. Imagine sitting at work during a break or some other time, and looking at somebodys full-media blog: "Hello my name is Ashtead and I have been eating peanutbutter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast ... "
Sounding loud and clear over the cubicle farm.
Besides, I tend to laugh when finding some funny web-page, and some of my colleagues already want to know why I am laughing for no apparent reason (to them anyways). Are they now having to wonder who all these other people in here are?
There will be no more looking at and listening to these things at work anymore!
Which could possibly be a good thing, considering ...
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
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!!
Video blogging isn't that bad of an idea. Even if you made a short 5-minute realvideo clip each day and streamed it from your standard HTTP server, it would only take up 5-10 MB of space, ISP transfer costs aside.
To me, the real problems with video blogging have to do with the nature of video (and not the problem of bandwidth.)
[1] Text is random access which means that as a reader, i can scan through someone's text blog and read it as fast or as slow as i wish, and instantly skip the parts I don't want to read. Video is linear which means that in order to consume the ideas presented, you have to scan audio, text, and images in order even if you don't want to.
[2] While it will take you ten minutes to produce a compelling text paragraph with links and some light editing before you post, It takes exponentially more time to create the equivalent video "paragraph." And adding graphics and links within a text layer of a quicktime movie is really really advanced stuff. It's not the kind of stuff I see most people doing anytime soon.
That is why I'm a lot more excited by things like the WiFi2TV project that plugs the functionality of the internet into an existing video network. Although that also presents a number of problems. We'll have to see how that one goes.
Serious Magic's software is really amazing, but is Windows-only. It relies on DirectX and DirectShow to work, so it is unlikely it will be ported to other platforms (and they say such on their web site).
Does anyone know of other software out there with similar features, that works on Linux or Mac OS X?
Some of it's very cool features:
- on-screen teleprompter
- real-time green-screen compositing
- cable news-style overlay text/graphics
I haven't found anything similar out there.
The concept of blogging isn't new, by any means. It's basically the UNIX finger service adapted for mass use on the web/AIM/whatever. There were even finger-to-web CGI scripts in 1995 that accomplished this same exact thing. Hell, I even wrote one of them for my personal use.
.plan files? Back at the height of Quake I/II/III development, I would suspect that the number of requests to his .plan files approached 100,000 a day. Many other notable people in the gaming industry had similar setups.
Remember John Carmack's (of id software fame)
I suppose it's really a catch-22, since famous/notable people generally do not share personal information on the internet. But that's exactly what it would take to generate a substantial volume of hits/reads per day.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.