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.'"

Comments

Talking heads suck?

[Black Parrot]

What did you expect from a webcam?

Re:Talking heads suck?

[SatanicPuppy]

Pssh. I expect what I'm going to see...Tons of amatuer iPod porn.

Of course they will suck

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, everything on the Internet pretty much sucks. That doesn't keep it from growing at about 8000% per year.

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.

Why Video Blogs Really Suck

[Nom du Keyboard]

Because Catherine Zeta Jones isn't making them.

A picture is worth 1000 words.

[Anonymous Coward]

So a video blog at 15fps is worth 900,000 words a minute.

Distracting elements

[Tackhead]

> 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.'"

...and that goes double for a pair of tits. Unless, of course, the tits are the content. There's such a thing as taking this approach too far -- our studies found that in contrast to heads, static talking tits were even more distracting than bouncing (but otherwise silent) ones.

Re:But blogs are already boring enough

[vertinox]

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.

Because in the blogs I read that someone else is a girl, has larger tits than you, and they post pictures of them...

oh why thank you internet

[SydBarrett]

Oh boy, another form of media to not give a shit about.

No wait, it's just home movies with meta tags wow.

Re:News flash

[Billosaur]

I can see the old joke resurrected now: "He has a face made for HTML".

What's this about The Talking Heads?

[Lxy]

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.

Re:90% of video blogs will suck

[Peldor]

Of course there's the +/-10% margin of error.

2d fighters

[I_heart_chunli]

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?

Re:Video blogs?

[Billosaur]

That phenomenom exists merely as the continued foreshadowing of stupidification of verbalized communication caused by the fact that human beings (and alternate intelligent, rights-bearing creatures) would front their preferences towards behaving as uni-syllable-ized moving corpses as opposed to learning pronunciation and extremely long, multisyllable words that other people only use because they think it makes them seem intelligent.

Thts nt wh i mnt at ll.