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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.
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!
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...
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
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.
It would be much more fun to poke and laugh at a bad video blog than just reading an bad text-based one.
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.
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)
There's no such thing as "amateur" porn. It's all a scam to get you to pay to watch ugly people.
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.
Nonsense. All a blog is is a website that has a series of articles published in reverse-chronological order, optionally with comments. Nothing in that means they must contain authoratitive statements, and nothing in that means that they must be published by non-authorities.
Tim Berners-Lee has a blog - would you consider him to be an authority? Blogs that are nothing more than links to other sources are popular - do you consider them to be making authorative statements?
The word "blog" is almost as general as the word "website". Why are you making such sweeping generalisations?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
If we follow the pattern from "blog", shouldn't they be called "ologs"?
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)
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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.