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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.'"
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.
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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
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.
90% of everything sucks.
However, audio blogs somehow defy Sturgeon's Law and 98% of those are crap. I expect video blogs to be even worse.
Audio blogs are such a jarring disturbance to the way I work in front of a computer, I can't listen to them at all. I pretty much have to stop everything else I'm doing and listen. That blows up multitasking for me. And there is no-one online interesting enough to have 100% of my undivided attention for the length of a blog entry.
Get off my lawn.
But Amanda Congdon is.
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.
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?
/Mikael
Seriously, I don't get what the rage is about blogs. Why would I?
A random selection of things I've learned from blogs this month:
These are things that are all directly applicable to my job, and most of them I wouldn't have learned about had they not been mentioned on a blog I read.
I know the Slashdot trolls like to describe blogs as nothing more than adolescent whining, but that's never been true. All kinds of professionals use blogs as a way of disseminating information.
I found something right off the bat that speaks to the same general issues but isn't specifically the study I was referring to. Check this out:
r ticle.cfm?id=1900
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getA
It speaks of a study by 1970's graduate student Barbara Bragg about children's attention patterns. It wasn't just about Sesame Street, but the Electric Company as well. I urge you to read this, it's a great place to begin. I will find the original study and provide you a source though. I have it around somewhere.
Cheers.
-AT
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)