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Why Video Blogs Will Suck
Ohreally_factor writes "Web Usability Guru Jakob Nielson has recently written a piece for his Alertbox Blog that does not bode well for video bloggers: Static, talking heads are even more boring on the internet than they are on TV. Nielson backs up his ideas with data from a study done on eyetracking while watching web video. One of Nielson's caveats: 'keep distracting elements out of the frame of your shots. If there's a road sign in the video, for example, users will try to read it and will thus miss some of the main content.'"
It is completely wrong to go out and say something like this without looking at the realities of any given creative market: the more people producing content, the more likely we are to find a few diamonds in the rough.
If 100,000 teens make vidblogs, they'll probably be terrible. Many will publish one, maybe 3 vidcasts and then stop. Yet I still believe that 1 out of 100,000 could make something worth viewing, and once we find it, we'll let others know.
I've been working with video since my Junior High School days. I started a video/film production house when I was 20 and sold it when I was 23: video was not ready for prime time then, because distribution was in the hands of the cartels, as it still is today.
BitTorrent and blogs have changed everything. I can seed a torrent and post it to my blog. RSS encapsulating these two devices will really make distribution easier for the layman.
The video editing capabilities of most new PCs surpasses what I had just 10 years ago! The easier it is to make, the more garbage we'll see, but the more likely it is that good content will be created by some rare creator.
I don't see vidcasting as a talking head-only style broadcast. I see documentary-style vidblogs (with a cameraman) and even numerous theatre-group concoctions to get recognition for their talent. I can even see the possibility of decent stories being videocast by student actors and geeks with free time. Give it time and the content will get better. Hell, most blogs are terrible, but if a writer wants to get better, we now have dozens of good "how to blog" blogs that ARE making a difference. Why would videocasting be any different?
The step from blogging to podcasting is big and takes time and talent to do properly. The step from podcasting to vidcasting is even bigger and takes even more time and more talent, but you can't dismiss it just because you're afraid that 1 million kids with videophones will clutter up your browser. They won't. You don't like it, you don't access it. There are millions of blogs I don't read, but the 10 or 15 that are well produced I read daily. I listen to 2 or 3 podcasts with regularity (that get better every day). I'll watch vidcasts as well, and the more people that are willing to try it, the more likely we are to see quality productions.
Perhaps someone should tell him it's a blog, because he doesn't seem to think it is one... and he's been writing it for 10 years.
Anyway, this isn't really about video blogs, just talking head video. Many of the early video blogs are focused on things like how to do things, not just a person speaking.
What did you expect from a webcam?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Blogs are just authoritative statements from non-authorities who want their narcisistic rush. I find the majority of them to be boring to begin with, why would video be any different?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Trust me, I am a vision scientist. People are pretty visually oriented and the vast majority of them when presented with images on the Internet, generally do not pay much attention to text content. (I've done a few experiments with content on my blog here.) When presented with a task however, or when looking for information, people will read through text to find out what bit of information they are looking for. And generally, people can decide pretty quickly if the information they are looking for is present. The problems with video blogging are manifold: First, people will not sit through a video blogging episode when they are looking for a specific piece of information. Next, video is not yet conveniently "searchable" or indexable. Next, as opposed to information configured for audio interpretation, usually materials presented for video are poorly prepared for acoustic interpretation and are poorly organized and fragmented. A simple example of this is trying to extract the days news by exclusively listening to the following content and not watching it on television 1) NPR 2) BBC news on television 3) CBS news on television and 4) Fox news on television. You will find that generally, NPR presents the information the best for acoustic followed by BBC, CBS with Fox on the bottom.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Seriously, I don't get what the rage is about blogs. Why would I? Why would someone else's boring day suddenly be interesting because they wrote about it.
Add video to that. Wow, now I get to see, hear AND read about someone else's boring day. Because you just *know* they'd still write about what you are seeing.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
On the bright side of course we can expect some pretty creative and funny videos being passed about. I can't wait until the product-placement folks start getting involved. This is gonna rock.
The article is about why talking head webvideo will suck. Not all video podcasts. There aren't that many out there, but there are some gems such as RocketBoom and the risque KitKast
What do you know I wrote a novel
Someone in the Old Camp saying that the New Camp won't work...
Where have we seen this before?
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
Sorry, but MTV proved to me that shooting a bunch of ugly young kids blabbing about crap in a still frame shot works... Either that or MTV is just a big money laundering operation, cuz after 20 years they're still on the air...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Because Catherine Zeta Jones isn't making them.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Just like 90% of the text blogs suck now.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Sir, I think you mean vlogs or vodcasts.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
MN Stories is a local blog that has received some attention when it was named a finalist in the 2005 Weblog Awards for best video blog.
Then there is Chasing Windmills, another Minneapolis based "vlog" which IMHO is really more of a running series than a "blog".
I don't particuarly care for them (or videocasts) right now, but they are a fledgling arena. I'm sure they will improve with time though. We'll see.
So a video blog at 15fps is worth 900,000 words a minute.
It would be much more fun to poke and laugh at a bad video blog than just reading an bad text-based one.
"Static, talking heads are even more boring on the internet than they are on TV."
Depends on whether it is Alan Bennet's blog or not.
as text blogs a video blog would only serve as something to bring meaning to the lonely and imbecil people that use it (although it doesn't really mean nothing). unless of course, someone use it as a tutoring tool or something like that...
There are MANY trends in tech/internet which are not good. Videos are one of them. A lot of sites now are making videos almost a mandatory part of their experience. Gamespot for example, did not have a text version of its top games of the year. Instead, you could only see the nominees and to see the actual winner you have to go see a boring video instead of just seeing who the damn winner is! Furthermore, it is one of those videos where you can't click around towards the end, even if the video has been downloaded grr! People use the internet because it has such a massive amount of information. While entertainment is certainly part of the Internet (EBaumsWorld or Timekiller for example), quick access to salient information is likely more useful.
I think that everyone needs to get off their respective bandwagons and think from a perspective of actual utility to end-users. This goes for videos, people on MySpace with MP3's playing in the background, sites that seemingly all want to throw in AJAX even where it is 100% unnecessary, and so forth.
The ones that fail as talking heads are the same ones that fail as audio-only material. The secret is to be brief and get to the content straight away. I'm betting I'm not alone in having dropped otherwise-good podcasts and video podcasts just because they had a 10 second intro I had to sit through every episode, or because they ran more than a few minutes and padded things out with too much personal noise. One of the worst is when an otherwise great podcast or video blog has crap audio that keeps getting louder and quieter like the speaker couldn't stay close to the microphone. It hurts to drop those, but it also hurts to listen.
Sesame Street in the beginning of the show's history -- used to focus the camera directly on the puppet speaking. Adults and Children alike would drift into a mental state, brainwaves and such that would pick up less of the content, much the same way this study indicates. Sesame Street eventually began to film their characters off to the left or the right of center, and constantly changed viewpoint and moved the camera enough to maintain interest. Is it any wonder why that same lesson needs to be learned again and again, regardless of it being vblogs or some other video presentation?
I am often suprised that the Sesame Street experiments aren't mentioned more often when people talk about Video on the web, and even more suprised when people begin to compromise those lessons learned because they intend to save bandwidth by reducing movement. It comes as no suprise to me that the focus was on a sign (which provided something to read in an active field of view) and the other technology in use around it. The Web is an active and interactive medium that people want to be constantly DOING something with. Multitasking is a requirement in a multimedia environment like that.
What's more is, why expect someone will spend 24 seconds watching the same screen when the audio is there and they can listen instead because the activity isn't crucial to watch? No movement, it's just not that important. Toss a burning building in the background, a few people screaming.. now that you'll watch. Sad but true.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
I thought Video Blogs would suck because at some point we'd have to go back to looking at Adam Curry.
Of course the vast majority of video blogs will suck. The vast majority of standard blogs suck, the vast majority of podcasts suck and the vast majority of web pages suck. When anyone can create content, the majority of said content won't be very good. Some minority, however, like Rocket Boom will be pretty good to great. As far as I'm concerend the more content available the better. The real issue will be sorting through alll of the crap to find video blogs with content you're interested in. iTunes is doing a respectible and Google ... are you paying attention?
When you are sitting at your job surfing blogs instead of working you need a certain amount of stealth. A video won't provide this. People walking by will just think that you are slacking off watching TV. But if you are reading something intently and making troubled facial expressions, you can make it seem like you are very busy.
http://www.stockmarketgarden.com/
in keeping w/ talking tits:
--Jeff, from Coupling, "The Girl with Two Breasts"
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
This study really is just "proving" the obvious.
Talking heads? I would hope for a lot more than that, in an age of video camera phones and video digital cameras heading south of $100. People can now video all sorts of newsworthy and not-so-newsworthy events and post them on their blogs. That's actually a rather exciting development.
I have found some of these audio "podcasts" to be utterly boring and tedious to wade through; unlike with text, it's rather difficult to scan down to the end to see if there's an interesting point in there somewhere, and I have yet to find an audio player that accelerates the sound on the fly (why can't Real and WMP do these simple tasks yet?). Listening to some guy stuttering and umming and ah-ing, no thanks; would rather read a well-written piece than waste my time like that.
But video will be more fun and informative because a video is worth a thousand words, and the patter becomes almost irrelevant. Maybe I'm different, but I find video on the web still to be fresh and exciting while more static presentations are getting to be old hat. Of course there's the inevitable commercials you have to sit through to get to the substance of a video in many cases, and once again the video player won't let you fast forward but I suppose it's a small price for an essentially free service.
Bring on the video podcasts!
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
I can see a whole lot of video blogs appearing on the blogosphere for educational purposes.
You all know about how we all learn in different ways, and I for one learn from seeing and hearing. There's a lot of things these days that can be better explained with audio and video. From backing up DVDs, to game tips (think WC3 replays), to programming (or at least the things that can be better explained with visuals. For example, variables and trying to think of it as a box in which you can place times).
If I ever choose to do one of these visual guides in the future (I hope I have something to share) I'll be using video blogs. It's easy to maintain from my perspective, and it's easy to keep up with from the readers perspective.
There's a lot of useful blogs out there, even from the teenage generation (just look at PlanetKDE and PlanetDebian for young talent, I'm also only 17)
It all comes back to the content. That is, the writing.
If the writing is bad, it doesn't make any difference if there is video or not. All too often the temptation is to do video because you can. I have been involved in distance learning, and the -first- thing that most professors want to do is video. And yes, talking heads (mostly) make for boring video.
No matter what, it comes back to the fact that it is all about the message and not at all about the medium. Putting lipstick on a pig doesn't make it any prettier...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Seriously, you can just put different elements in this article and it'll sound the same:
[Affordable Desktop Publishing] will lead to mostly sucky [newsletters].
[Affordable DVD production] will lead to mostly sucky [DVDs].
[Affordable video production] etc...
Having said that, his point about talking heads is worthy. Some of my favorite podcasts have a video component, but they don't try to make the visuals interesting enough to make it worth the download. Diggnation is a perfect example of this. On audio, it's funny, funny. But when you download the video, it's two guys looking mostly at their computer screens and reading with the occasional graphic to show something they reference. I appreciate the effort, but it doesn't make the video a worthwhile download.
Seasoned (or even lightly-seasoned) television producers know this type of video would not go over well today. Can you imagine an entire news broadcast with one announcer, reading a teleprompter out of the shot and away from the camera with no breaks for stories? Even regular news broadcasts get their announcers to swivel the chair from time-to-time.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Oh boy, another form of media to not give a shit about.
No wait, it's just home movies with meta tags wow.
Video Blogs are nothing more than a BIG waste of bandwidth.
What about http://www.mobuzztv.com/? The format is quite simple and the episodes are short and a bit quirky, but it works fine because it gets too the point and not much extra stuff. Plus the episodes are only about 10 MB each so they are small and can be placed on iPod or other.
Lack of softing lighting and makeup. Not everyone's (self included) is easy on the eye...
static talking heads boring them to death, just
watch an episode of Battle Star Galactica.
There you can get all the shakey-cam you like.
Hey! That's an idea! I'm going to sell BSG Shakey-WEBcams(tm).
Put a little lopsided motor in the base to shake the camera for you!
This out to be a huge hit with the under 30 crowd!
You seem to confuse two distinct types of blogs here - or maybe you're not aware of the distinction at all, so let me recap that:
The first kind of blog is the one you talk about and that you find boring - personal blogs detailing personal experiences, kind of like a public diary. The second kind is blogs dedicated to certain subjects etc.; these are more akin to professional journalistic media such as newspapers etc.
The "rage" about blogs is mostly about the second kind; and FWIW, the second kind are the only ones that are meant to attract readers not otherwise acquainted with the writer, too.
Nobody expects you to find the personal diary of Joe Average to be interesting; but then, the *purpose* of blogs of the first kind is not to attract you (or others), anyway, but rather to allow the writer to keep their own circle of friends informed about the going-ons in their life. Think of it as some kind of multicast communication - instead of telling the same stories over and over again to everyone who asks "how was your day?" (be it in an email, IM, on the phone, in person, or whatever), Joe Average just writes these things down in a central place *once* for everyone to read.
There's advantages for the reader, too: they typically will be able to read the blogs of many of their friends in an aggregate fashion, by means of an RSS aggregator or on a social networking site such as MySpace or Livejournal or so; and what's more, they can also decide when to catch up, and - when they do catch up - what to read in depth, what to gloss over, and what to skip completely.
So, yes, most blogs of the first kind *are* boring, but complaining about that just shows that you misunderstood their purpose: they're not *meant* to be interesting or to attract readers. That's the second kind you're thinking of there.
As for video blogs, those don't seem to make much sense to me with either kind - it seems that it's more of a combination of buzzwords, a marketing ploy or PR gag without any real value. Not that there aren't situations where video feeds could be interesting, of course, but I do predict that text-based blogs will remain in the majority for now - and probably for quite a long time, too, simply because they distract the reader/viewer less and do not force them to focus their attention as much as video does.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Nuff' said...
The talking heads on TV have no other function than to look good while reading in a clear voice.
Technoli
... documentary filmmaking is impossible!
video blogs will suck is because I will get caught slacking by the VP of Ops making his rounds. He likes to walk around our cubes to keep us low level coders in check, so its much easier to sneak and read a blog rather than listening to a video blog. In addition, when watching a video blog I run the risk of the audio-commentary masking the sound of his jingling keys, which is a dead giveaway that he is coming and I should make use of the minimize function on gDesklets' CandyBar. Besides there seems to be no safe alternative and a muted video blog is just pointless, isn't it? [rant]
The nice thing about text is that you can speedread or skim over the boring parts, mentally pick out threads that interest you, and read more deeply into those. You can get more information in a shorter amount of time from reading text (and adding in a static picture here and there perhaps) than you can from video or audio.
With video or audio blogs you either have to find out from other people the ones worth viewing/listening to, but you have to have extra time to watch or listen to them. Notice how books on tape take much longer to get through than just reading the book yourself.
Not only that, but these bandwidth hogs take a long time to download if you don't have the fastest connection. If you're cheap like me and have a bandwidth restricted cable connection at home, it would take a long time to download anything and not worth the effort to see if they're worth listening to.
Great, so your average college student, who's been told his or her whole life that THEY are a beautiful and unique snowflake, that protesting outside Starbucks BEFORE they go inside makes them virtuous, that everyone is special, that every child can learn, and that mommy and daddy can't wait to hear their next opinion, now are going to be out video blogging, spewing content into the ether in hopes that its picked up by someone. College girls already do this, but at least they show their hooters. Not while they're protesting WTO or advocating Fair Trade hemp-based guatemalan thongs though. College guys already do this, but its typically things like the video of the guy shooting the fireworks from his butt. How will this be any different, because its related to blogging and somehow related to the iPod, then its cool?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Tabbed browsing, broadband pipes fetching multiple streams of data at any one point in time, RSS collating possibly hundreds of site updates,
and I am supposed to stop all of that and more, so I can watch some person slowly pronounce some words?
Why? I am literate, I can read. If I wanted to watch TV I would go and watch TV, I love the web because it is mostly a textual medium, the density of data on it is much higher.
Occasionally Channel9 has SOME good video blogs, but even then that is only when I am very interested in something that the particular video is talking about, and even some of the Channel9 stuff that I am interested in, I do not watch the video for because I do not want to devote an entire half an hour of my life to watching some video that could be summarized in a few minutes worth of reading text.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
... that non-video blogs suck.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
I know for a FACT that I manage to obtain all the vital information I need while ignoring distractions apleanty on nakednews dot com. I mean, I know they are supposed to talk and all, but it doesn't distract me at all. :)
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
It's like watching other people's vacation videos, only worse.
There's this place in San Francisco called Artists' Television Access, which has video gear and an editing suite so that artists can produce videos. Of course, they have video showings. The stuff they show is crap, and that's the better stuff. It's like watching auditions of garage bands.
There really aren't that many people who can do good video. It's not a technology problem.
See this guy's site. It's a site that looks freshly imported from 1995. I suppose Jakob follows his own guidelines and we can see the result..
So I say: I know it's hard to find subjects to talk about Jakob, but it'll be better if you acknolwdged innovation for what it is from time to time and not hold us back in stone age because of vague usability issues.
If people hate video blogs, they'll just not pick up. No study can beat the natural process of separating the winners from the losers here.
My thoughts exactly. Video might make me less willing to read new blogs because I'd have to spend more time to see whether they might be interesting. Anonymity is another issue. I don't put my name or photos in my blog for safety reasons. In terms of stalker bait, videos seem even worse than photos.
... because blogs suck in general and extending suction (with video) is the opposite of removng it? :-)
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
Many video blogs aren't talking heads, they are people recording video on the go and in nice locations. Others are more lecture style, with slides and voice.
And as usual, Nielsen overinterprets the data. Eye tracking data mainly just tells you about what people don't look at at all; most other interpretations beyond that are handwaving.
And not just the summary. Nielsen said NOTHING about blogs in his article. His article was strictly about talking head video. The summary writer added the blog stuff.
Cuz his site's RIVETING http://www.useit.com/ Including "Permanent Content" that only goes back to November 7...
I stopped reading after this:
Why This Site Has Almost No Graphics
Download times rule the Web, and since most users have access speeds on the order of 28.8 kbps, Web pages can be no more than 3 KB if they are to download in one second which is the required response time for hypertext navigation. Users do not keep their attention on the page if downloading exceeds 10 seconds, corresponding to 30 KB at modem speed. Keeping below these size limits rules out most graphics...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Video as a source of information is just plain annoying. If it's simply someone telling me information, then ultimately the video will just slow me down. People can read much faster than people can talk, so yes a video blog in that sense will be unsuccessful. Text has advantages in that you can read it much faster, and you can skim and search in text.
However, a video blog could be successful if it was done primarily as a source of entertainment (not information), or if it used video to communicate something atcually useful, such as a how-to for a hands-on project or something similar.
But no, I'm not going to sit through a talking head telling me something I could just as easily read. Unless that talking head was female and was really hot.
One of Nielson's caveats: 'keep distracting elements out of the frame of your shots.
This can't be right...the major networks have elevated the element of distraction to an artform. If not a scrolling banner across the bottom, then all manner of "cute" little animated junk (some even with sound effects). If not that, and you can almost certainly sit and stare at a crappy station ID logo (except for commercials, when you're faced with another form of distraction entirely). All of this to "enhance" your viewing pleasure.
I hate it, but they keep doing it anyway, so perhaps the larger audience actually likes it - similar to the way that they must like the crap produced by the RIAA, because they keep buying it (but only if they aren't copying it instead). Maybe our worst enemy here isn't bad podcasters, broadcasters, or music producers, but our own popular culture.
Dying, but that doesn't stop 10 out of 10 from doing it. It's amazing what people will put up with online that they would never tolerate elsewhere... I think it's a control thing. Users feel as if they have more control over content on the internet.
This just in! 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population.
WTF is this awful thing?
Static, talking heads are even more boring on the internet than they are on TV
On the contrary. I rather think that if The Talking Heads had a video blog it would be quite interesting.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I'd say poot_rootbeer has it right. I don't think calling someone on an obviously hypocritical statement is flamebait. After all, isn't stating an opinion as fact in itself an act of vanity? Isn't maintaining an identity in a public forum and posting your opinions essentially the same thing as blogging?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
in the world of web-radio, broadcasters outnumber listeners like 300 to 1. There are so many more people that think it would be cool to dee-jay their own radio station than there are people willing to listen that the signal to noise ratio has all but killed the whole concept.
How many hard rock/alternative radio stations can a person listen to anyway?
How unusual. So people busy themselves looking at other stuff when there's no action on the video - does that come as any surprise? No. Given the choice of an audio podcast or a talking head to keep me company on the train on the way to work, I'll take the talking head thanks.
remember the good old days: railroad: it was slow, it had breakdowns and a horse could bring you faster from point a to point b, if you have to pass some mountains or rivers that failed to have tracks. still nobody announced that it sucks. (besides the fact that the steam engine may blow but hardly ever suck)
... more real???... why you would ask... the point is: once everybody uses video-phones over internet to communicate (for free) with each other, then the human mind would also change the acceptance of such media would grow. you would accept a video-blog more than a podcast or a text-blog... not thinking of a classical letter or an article in a printed newspaper. how primitive we were the last 200 years, you may say, when i say to you that some years ago, people did write to newspapers to print their stories. kind of classic blogs... and the people could not imagine, how you can send images and text over a telegraph cable across the world. they meant that this telegraphing sucks. later, they meant that telephone sucks... then television sucked (and it still does)...
it takes 10 to 100 years for a new technology to become daily tool by people. maybe in the first years, things may be mis-used or some limiting factors may make it look not very solid... however, time will show if a technology is useful or not and if it is worth the effort or not. one example is SMS (for the people living in countries that do not know it: sending short notes from mobile phone to mobile phone). the whole SMS techonology was never intended to be so popular. the companies (IIRC) used this for status messages for internal communication. however, if there is usefullness around, somebody will find a way to make it usefull. now it's main business of the companies offering mobile phone networks... money goes where people are because money comes from people.
video blog... everybody can start one buying a webcam and playing around for a short time... but what is the message? if somebody uses it to tell the world "what i did on my last holidays" (have a look at Terry Pratchett's "Interesting Times" for whole context), then the audience will also be limited to this content. however, if somebody is an adventurer and is not staying at home in the holidays but is going diving and takes some nice short movies from a coral reef, then i would rather listen to him commenting this movies in an video-interview than reading a text on the internet containing some pictures of it... it makes the whole thing more true, more real...
so what are video blogs, if not simply television on demand (no, i'm not doing IBM-advertisements here)... imagine that it is not a company deciding what you look at but it's you who chooses what content to look at. and even better: this content was created by private people like you are... not a company...
do you still think, video blogs suck?
Agreed on content == good. Especially if hot girls are involved ;)
But, videos are going to be a problem in terms of search engines. Unless we get tagging properly implemented at the same time, vidcasts will be essentially lost.
And what about linking? Will vidcasts refer to other vidcasts? What happens then? Will search engines be able to find out how many vidcasts talk about the one, very cool vidcast? Probably not.
So, why not, I wonder? Is it because we can't embed links in videos? Nope. But, it would have been a lot easier, if we'd all settled on a useful, extensible, open web video standard years ago, instead of allowing people like Real and MS to fight over who would dominate. As usual, they're greedy, society suffers.
Maybe it's about time someone did a usability study on Jakob Nielson. If I recall, he predicted the demise of Linux because it's gui was no good. These days, it's better than Windows XP.
I guess any hints and tips are welcome, though for the truly talented such rules are also there to be broken. As for things like "keep it short" and "keep distracting elements out of the frame of your shots" these are old chestnuts that can be found in any how-to book on the subject and even, for all I know, on the back of $10 disposable cameras. I just hope Mr Nielson isn't planning on charging some lucky corporation a couple of thousand bucks for advice like this because it's all there in Borders or wherever for less than twenty.
Like anything else, perhaps, a few folks will make great video blogs, most folks will make truly dull ones and a few unlucky souls will produce really awful ones. Perhaps the most effective ones will learn all their tricks from the masters of the advertising short. Some of those are awesomely clever.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Seriously, this guy stopped doing real research years ago. Now he just walks around spouting 1) unfounded grand pronouncements, and 2) semi-obvious tips and tricks for dealing with 1. Back in 2000 I was a student volunteer at a big conference. All the vols were gathered together eating lunch and socializing in a big conference room. JN strolls in unannounced and unsolicited, grabs a mic, and starts to babble. Now, up to this point, I thought he was a great, important guy. After a few minutes of rambling, it was getting awkward for everyone. I've never seen someone so in love with their own voice. His opinions should matter to the universe about as much as John C. Dvorak's.
[...]If there's a road sign in the video, for example, users will try to read it and will thus miss some of the main content. if i'm watching a movie in cinema and there appears to be a road sign, i hardly miss some main content. common sense (human logic) decides, if something is important or not... if the person speaking is so boring, of course the audience tries to do something else in the meanwhile... like trying to read signs or playing tetris. this author was never in an university lecture!
From what I've seen of animated video productions on the web involving the creators' own voices, it's a fair bet that any large number of live-action videos on the web are going to be almost universally embarassing.
Remember, people blog because they don't have enough social skill to keep their lives full otherwise. I'm going to watch no video blogs. Not even Paris Hilton's.
If there's a road sign in the video, for example, users will try to read it and will thus miss some of the main content.
Better yet, replace the road sign with advertising.
Add voice to that. Wow, now I get to HEAR about someone else's boring day. Because you just *know* they'd still send a telegram.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
blogs are teh future! the crowd can never be wrong. the people are always right no matter what they do
...and what I expected to see in your comment: he didn't compare video feeds on the internet to TV, but still maintained that the internet's talking heads were different drom TV talking heads just because it was the internet.
.edu email address I'd think you were a 14 year old.
Perhaps it's true, but we really can't know unless it's tested.
The distractions he mentions on a "vlog" distract me on CNN, particularly when Mr. Head is in a hurricane and stuff is flying past him. The flying debris is far more interesting than the anchor (unless said anchor is an attractive woman).
What is your science called? Nobody says "I'm a space scientist," they say "astrophysicist" (or whatever else their specialty is). Calling youself a "vision scientest" puts up red flags for me, and makes me wonder if you're really credible or if you're an 18 year old undergrad internet wanker.
If you really were a "vision scientest" you would know that having a huge single paragraph is incredibly hard to read. If not for your
Especially when you said "trust me." I don't know you from Adam, why should I trust you?
(MRC="clamped", Jed)
People already turn against quality video programming (the quality is in the production, mind you) on TV. They're not going to tune in to shoddy video programming on the internet when they could spend that time reading six web sites at once while listening to mp3s.
This is an age of multitasking. Videos and sounds are extra and won't be mainstream on the internet for quite some time.
dialup I can see - but we left 28.8 a loooong time ago.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
FLASH: For the 10th year running, web usability guru Jakob Nielson predicts that this is the year that micropayments will be big.
"No, really, 2006 for sure" a balding Nielson insisted hollowly. "See, I'm a web usability guru so obviously everyone should do what I say. It is the only way the web can work!" he continued shrilly. "Everything I say is Word Of God, you must obey me! Drop and give me 20 micropayments! And video blogs will suck! I say so, so be it!!!!"
After paramedics administered a sedative, Nielson was rushed to Arkham for tests, mumbling "I'm a guru...micropayments...blogs...dancing hippos..."
Using the video medium, you must make your video visually interesting. Otherwise, what's the point? Video or Audio blogs must have interesting content to keep people tuned in. Yeah, a static head is pretty boring. Mix in graphics or interesting scenery/locations or interviews, and you're got a good video blog. Case in point: http://www.kitkast.com/ Kitkast, a very deliciously hot Montreal woman that teases beyond belief. Visually interesting. A video blog about sex, porn, the porn industry, sex workers, etc that I check in on once in a while and it is always good.
Check out Snackboy for a good Vlog example!
Podcasts are like the opposite of children, they should be heard and not seen.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Sounds like all your questions can be answered at rocketboom.com. Hot girl, video on HTML page with the vlog's topics listed in text so that they can be indexed by search engines, and yes, links embedded in the video.
Sounds like more people could be aware of what is possible now. I don't know about Windows Media, but QuickTime has had extensive interactivity and linking features built in for several years now.
I think you are bringing up minor imperfections, minor in that they can easily be fixed. What internet vlogs and such really have to offer is brief populist entertainment that contains political content that the tv networks and such will not touch. For example cheap comedy SNL type skits that deal with how mass immigration is killed blue collar American wages. And how that helps the rich and corporations make more money, and how the media is controlled by these rich elite, and how the media support mass immigration. Same goes for outsourcing and such.
Or how the American liberal political paradigm conveniently splits the white working class by using race-guilt propaganda, and how the media and entertainment industry, controlled by the rich, support such race guilt propaganda, and how the the rich and corporations make more money.
Or how about content that deals with how West Europeans get more out of their life, have universal healthcare, work less hours, travel more, becaus their govts are oriented toware providing more for the citizens as opposed to more for the investor-businesses, etc.
THis sort of political content is untouchable in American mainstrem and would satisfy a hunger in Americans.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
You'd be surprised at the number of sites out there which effectively charge subscribers to download videos and pictures of ugly people. If you can think of a kink, someone most likely has it. The ugly people kink was exploited a long time ago.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I'd take anything that Jakob Nielsen says with a grain of salt. His usability guidelines are nearly impossible to implement without looking like his site. Which, while readable with lynx, well, I mean, look at it. Bleah.
What I think Jacob misses is that 45 seconds of video can communicate more than text that takes 5 minutes to read, if what you are trying to communicate needs visual motion and sound to get across. A good example is video that teaches how to use an audio editing program to get rid of background noise by applying signal processing. Easy to do with "show and tell" video, hard to do with text.
The eye-tracking result is interesting, but it says little about the properties of video on the Web compared to television. Nielsen always likes to tell us how different the Web is, how users are more active, get bored and so on; but where is the comparative eye-tracking study of watching the same clip on television? Surely looking behind the speaker to read a sign or a trash can would happen just as much on TV. And might a TV viewer not glance out of the window or stare at the remote control just as much as the Web viewer looks at other bits of the display?
Many decades of experience have gone into making video for broadcast and I'd be surprised if Nielsen, from this single experiment, has come up with anything not known to television professionals. OK, having a road sign behind the speaker distracts people's attention; useful to know, but hardly a new insight and still less some pearl of Web wisdom that ignorant television people should be glad to receive from Jakob Nielsen.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
And this is coming from the guy who wants to keep distracting elements out of web design such as, well, pretty much anything with any sort of aesthetic value whatsoever. While sometimes he does make some sense, taking design (be it web, or now production) advice from him is like taking game development tips from Jack Thompson.
video blogs will at least give no lifers like me the ability to post personal match videos from various 2d street fighter games. Who wouldn't wanna see that?
In Toronto, we have a form of video blogging already. A local tv station called CityTV has this telephone booth type sitting area where for $2 you get to sit inside and have a video camera film what you have to say. For about 3 minutes you can talk about whatever it is you want and it just basically films your head.
The producers screen the tapes and eventually broadcast on a weekly basis. It's quite successful at what it does, and for the most part it is rather entertaining and informative (I suppose after all the crap has been filtered out).
This idea is catching on as other stations install booths at malls and regularly play what they record.
Live forever, or die trying.
I love hot pockets
:)
How's that for useless webcamming?
My Video Blog!
This article should clearly get a -1 Irrelevant.
He doesn't mention them and his example is clearly not about videoblogs. It's about talking heads on web pages. Look at the article. It's a guy reporting with the video embedded in a web page. That's not how video blogs work. Video blogs are like podcasts, you just download them and watch them. And if you'd watched very many, you'd see that there's not a whole lot of talking heads in them. Videobloggers, for the most part, realize that just talking to the camera is dull, so most of them avoid it and instead use their cameras to show things.
What the guy is clearly talking about is websites like CNNs or so forth. That's a completely different ball game.
Keith
Camera focused on 2 guys sitting on a couch, laptops in lap, drinking, talking drivel. Trying to deffend it will just show your lack of taste.
They post Video of them
(No real nudity... just cleavage).
Guess he hasn't seen Suicide Girls TV.
The submitter assumes that vblogs will be 'talking heads', parroting the 5 O'Clock news. Why would anyone bother making videos of themselves talking (egomaniacs?) when the newscasters fill that role already?
VBlogs will have the blogger behind the camera, maybe providing commentary if needed. Obviously the more interesting the content, the less it sucks. Video bloggers will actually capture video of things that are happening, unlike the news which shows you a talking head infront of a crowd of people that has gathered around the news cameras. A news team will not be able to walk into the middle of a riot or a firefight and start providing commentary. A video blogger does not have a corporate parent telling him that his Neilson Ratings are dropping.
has anyone found a grease monkey script to remove the background sounds, embedded videos, and embedded flash?
Do we really need an article to tell us why video blogs will suck? The phrase "video blogs" isn't enough?
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
but surely they'll feature sucking.
A successful blog has stuff that people want to read,then write about.
A successful video blog, by analogy, probably needs to have things that people want to watch and then act out responses to.
Offhand, I can think of one sure fire application for this idea.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Right, and you know what's just like the telegraph? The video blog. It's exactly the same in power and import!
New technologies mirror old ones. Telegraphs had hackers AND spammers.
Anyway, that was my first attempt at a parody-response like some of the others I've seen on slashdot. I only give myself a 5/10 for it.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
All the technologies whether great or not begin with a negative review..so not surprised
One thing we run into is a problem of definitions. Heck, Jakob Nielsen's thing isn't a blog at all - in the movable-type, bloger, etc sense - but the poster called it a blog.
... well, it's art. I like 'em.
So, then, what's a video blog?
Do Robert Cringely's NerdTV count? It's updated weekly, high-quality.
Do StrongBad emails count? They're updated "whenever", and quality
Just like it's not easy to create good audio, good video isn't that easy either. Occasionally (and rarely at that) damn hella good content redeems poor production, but I think we're gonna start seeing videos captured by webcams, or handycams with no white balancing, or too shaky. I'm not saying that learning this stuff is hard, but someone, somewhere is always gonna have the iris too small, or the colour balancing off so the whole image will look yellow, or just have the image too damn shaky, or the head is right in the middle of the image.
Occasionally though, this ease of content distribution and creation will lead to more people who are actually GOOD to come out. I figure that if there's 1 truly amazing filmmaker in say every half billion, unless they get a chance to excersize that ability, they could live their life blithely and unknowingly that they have this amazing aptitude for filmmaking.
Oh, I know... Microsoft's ASF format can embed links and images and stuff too, but reading each of these formats is pretty tricky... in fact, reading at least Microsoft's is ILLEGAL, due to patents. So, search engines will have a bit of trouble extracting those links.
Having said all that though, I was thinking more along the lines of a well-developed content explanation encoding, which would include subtitles and tags to classify the content, and put the links in context, so search engines could really understand it. Basically, something like a parallel XML stream to the video stream. Things like that might have already developed, if the video people had cooperated, instead of fighting.
In the case of nerd readership, the reason is simple: Lack of blog babes.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I think that the author has a bit narrow idea of where 'video blogs' may go. The vision of simply converting the text and having it read is about as simple minded as it gets.
In reality, video 'blogs' are taking many forms. There's a blurring line between them and the 'vidcast' phenomenon which is getting a great foothold. And this isn't a bunch of teens talking into a cam, it's entire productions, some with sets, choreography, special effects. (Pure Ownage, others) Some of it is news oriented (aforementioned RocketBoom). Many of these shows are using web technologies such as RSS and Torrent distribution system, complete with 'subscriptions'. If the quality of this content keeps an upward trend, I could see this as a competing form of entertainment.
Many into the tech show scene already replace hours of our TV watching with these shows/blogs. The reality is a person can consume one form of media at a time...every hour I spend watching something produced on the net, is an hour less the TV networks get to shove commercials down my throat about the next reality TV show. And you know, the show I'm watching on the net may not have the special effects or production values of TV, but I have found some entertaining and original content out there. No Commercials. No DRM. No overpaid actors trying to convince me aliens are going to abuduct batman's wife. Just some people out there trying to do what they love.
If a persons video blog is them talking into the camcorder, I agree...unless I'm a family member, this is going to get tiring. But that's not what I'm seeing show up on the net.
for a list of shows I've found, under various categories, please check out:
www.vidcast.org
www.iptvshows.org
www.geekvideo.org
www.techtainment.net
www.getfireant.com (client to subscribe and download, but has an excellent list of shows/blogs)
Joe Farro
www.downstairstheater.com
His name is Jakob Nielsen. With an 'e'. Not an 'o'.
There's a great video podcast called Chasing Windmills. A fictional episodic series about the lives of a young couple. It feature very true to life writing, and it is filmed and acted very well. It should provide tangible evidence that videoblogs/videopodcasts don't have to suck. There will be good ones. To see it, go to http://chasingmills.blogspot.com/ I think the episodes are all worth watching, only two episodes were not so good. The others were all gold.
Public access cable.
I hate to burst your bubble but this has about as much to do with vlogging as your an article on "Why slashdot sucks... studies prove monkeyes don't like to read other monkeys long driveling and boring B.S."
Vlogging is... I say to whatever moronic and jaded hypocrite wrote this crap... is no more about talking heads than slashdot is about spanking one's monkey.
What in the hell is wrong with you? Have you forgotten what Slashdot stands for? Suddenly you're successful and around for a couple years and have barely just finished turning out your critics and you think you're the N.Y. Times... poo-pooing the next step in the inevitable evolution of freedom of expression... wait... I'm sorry... that's not fair to the N.Y. Times... they may not get exactly what's going on in new media... but at least they don't sh-t where they get their dinner.
I'm not saying you should jump on the band wagon... just pull your head out of your own butt and take a look around... a/v podcasting is a direct result of blogging and self expression... something slashdot has been a part of and stood for.
It's part of a larger movement of open and accessible culture... first there was open source... then blogging... and now open access media... and I hardly think any hype or silly anti-hype here is going to change the fact that self expression in media is an idea whose time has come... Argue with 20,000 podcasts... and now over 4,000 vlogs... argue with the fact that everyone from Tivo to the ipod... to the psp... and even cellular platforms are starting to open up to the fact that every piece of content that crosses their platforms will not be owned and or controlled by them through exclusive deals.
That in fact the way to legitimize their platforms in the near and long term future means creating platforms everyone can openly access. This doesn't mean every damn piece of media is for you... but I think we've heard enough tales about the "long tail" to know that everything is not the O.C. that in fact a vlog with an audience of two might be the best vlog in the world... when you're living half way around the world and your audience of two is your two parents... your wife and child with whom you're not traveling... your children... your business associates... what is the value on that? Is that just another 'stupid talking head'?
So next time you're thinking about firing up that new cell phone gadget that allows you to 'watch video' that you're paying $15 a month extra for and you browse through a tiny little interface looking at "premium content" from exclusive deals your cellular provider has brokered on your behalf so you can watch Night Rider on your phone... perhaps you'll clue in on the fact... "heh, what if instead of Mitch Bucanan(sp?) this was my favorite slashdot editor... or one of my many digital friends... or my sister, uncle... cousin... associate" what would be the value in that?"... then maybe when you have your own head out of your own ass... breathing fresh air and and stop thinking that everything in video should be "entertainment" then you'll think... heh... now why doesn't my cellular provider pull their head out of their ass and instead of brokering useless exclusive deals to content which really has no value to me... why don't they just open up the platform to everyone and just make it up on charging for bandwidth... the value would be infinitely more relevant... and heh... perhaps the difference of open access video vs. "premiums exclusive video"... is more like allowing anyone to exchange SMS vs. the early days of SMS when only my cell phone provider allowed "premium exclusive news alerts" to go to my phone.
So yes... there is a wind of change... call it Web freaking 2.0 and hype it an poo poo it and stick a fork in it... Whatever you like but the wind of change much like this flatulence you call Slashdot is blowing toward open and accessible media... the 'two way web' as some call it.
So... think about that next time you can't play a CD in your computer... or find you c
I am a monkey. This is slashdot.
While I agree with Nielson overall, never underestimate the porn industry to put a new medium to good use.
... http://www.nakednews.com/ ... into a video blog or video podcast?
:-)
I mean really, how much of a stretch is it to turn something like this
I know I would sign up for Cameron's feed any day
OS X, Linux, Tivo, Amiga, my fascination with cult-like technologies would intrigue any psychiatrist.
Out of the thousands of horrible video-blogs, and millions of horrible weblogs, there are still some goodies. I have the lovely job of searching out good video content and video blogs for a living, and posting it via one of the available video blogging utilities (mostly auctionvideo, but also DMRevolution, as well as some standards, i.e. WordPress or Moveable Type's new utility, etc.) There are definitely some good vlogs out there, but no more as a percentage than normal blogs, and, as this article implies, probably less as a percentage. But many real bloggers can or will become real vloggers. Let's also remember that most people with video-enhanced blogs are not vloggers. By that I mean most people who use a video somewhere in their blog, or ocassionally vlog for a particular purpose, don't altogether quit text-blogging. Likewise, most people with videos on an eBay auction have it on one item, or their About Me page, not on every item as the central definition of their listings. Oh, one more point, video hosting still must be external. You really have to have your own servers, a huge hosting plan, or a separate video host to vlog, and those 99% of bloggers who aren't serious aren't close to being able to handle that bandwidth, no matter the format. (Plus, there's only one real format for video right now--Flash.) I have a 15Mbps upload at my house to handle what I do, and I'm not even one of the biggies... But my headquarters is in Japan, and I'm pretty satisfied in putting my money for futuretech anywhere Japan is now, and they're not only totally into vlogs now, but putting out some pretty entertaining ones.
--Colin Jensen
colinandbethany.com
As a college student, I am on TheFaceBook.com I'd guess that this audience is full of would-be adopters of video blogging, but video blogging isn't going to happen. People have enough of a hard time mustering up the courage to put up a static photo of their own self that I doubt they'll regularly post videos online.
Just take out the words 'why' 'video' and 'will'.
Regardless of what you call it, it is simply video delivered digitally--no different during consumption from your standard digital cable connection. Yet Nielsen feels qualifed to comment...perhaps because the back-end delivery is via the Internet vs. cable franchise? But it's the same from the user perspective.
Video is quite different from Web sites, which keys one of the most important rules of usability -- know your medium. There are decades of research and experience with video, far more than with the Web and with computers actually. IMO Nielsen would do well to keep that in mind and realize when he is out of his depth. He's put out some good products w/respect to Web site usability and should stick with that. Leave the video advice to the experts...it's not like no one has thought about what catches a person's eyes and attention in video before.
To point out just one failing of his post, he makes a classic mistaken assumption--that it really matters where your viewers' eyes are looking. In fact as the TV market knows, the most important thing is how long the viewer watches. It doesn't matter whether people get "the message" or read the background--as long as they don't click away. That is true whether it's a mouse or a TV remote in their hand.
Nielsen is out of touch with modern TV. Consider this quote:
broadcast TV is a medium for relaxation, where the "user" sits back and becomes immersed in whatever the program directors decided to air. In fact, TV users are usually called "viewers," emphasizing their passive mode of engagement. In contrast, computer users sit forward and drive their own experience through a continuous set of choices and clicks.
Any cable network executive would laugh him/herself sick at that assertion. They wish people just sat back and immersed themselved in whatever the station aired! In fact more and more, people approach TV viewing exactly as they approach the Web--with clicker in hand. And more and more, non-fiction television loads the screen edges with additional eye-catching content to keep people from clicking away. Yes, that directly contradicts Nielsen's assertion to "keep distracting elements out of the frame of your shots." Whose advice will you take--the Web usability guru, or the multi-billion dollar industry (the people who actually make money at this stuff)?
Remember--it doesn't matter if the viewer misses some of the "main content." The only thing that matters is that they don't click away. On the Web or on TV.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Try something like this next time:
.etc.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you telegraph fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a telegraph . .
It's sort of like mad libs. Go here, change words where appropriate, and voila! instant troll!
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
In UK we have vlogs but make use of signing in sign language. The human eye is attracted to movement and so you will see a wide varity of hand, hand and body movement for signing - which need to be watched to understand (there is no sound/talking). I would be interested to see how those type of videos are viewed by the Deaf. Vlogs are perfect for the Deaf, some whose English might not be very good (due to no "audio" memory which English use) but can follow signing easily. I feel that they might be different - I certainly watch a signing video in full.
Messagebaords work just fine, but maybe I am just old-school.
Getting old fast, Shit!