Vblogging: Will You Be Watching?
I don’t pretend to know much about video-blogging, but I get the feeling it isn’t going to come close to the popularity of written media.
Why?
Time, mostly.
With print, we can scan to see if something is of interest top us. We can listen to our favourite sounds whilst doing so. Video, however, demands our full attention, and it is very difficult to scan the content of video media quickly (I’m a little skeptical about podcasts for the same reason). Also, home movies are almost always unwatchable because there is more to crafting television than the ability to point a camera. Essentially, this is the Flash vs HTML argument all over again.
The pretentious Wikipedia entry for vblogging doesn’t provide a lot of insight:
“Vlogging is for humans to express visual stories – to other humansâ€
Glad they qualified that statement. After all, you wouldn’t want Martians watching stories about what you had for breakfast, now would you?
Now, I’m sure some great, watchable, entertaining vblogs will emere, and video certainly suits some applications better than print. However, 95% of anything is crap – 95% of written blogs are crap, but at least we can scan ‘em and discard quickly, eh.
June 6th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
But, with really simplied video creation tools, anyone can be a Vlogger. It’s what I call the upcoming creation of “..millions of communities of two”., ie., no matter how bad your stuff, there will always be at least one other person willing to watch.
[edited]
June 6th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
True, but I guess my point is that video, like Flash demos, demands a lot of time from the viewer. People will give time if they want what the site is offering, but my guess is it will be more difficult to build an audience because it will be harder for the audience to decide if their time is worth giving in the first place.
With print, we scan.