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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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
If we follow the pattern from "blog", shouldn't they be called "ologs"?
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
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.
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
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?
Thts nt wh i mnt at ll.
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