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Are Video Blogs Ready For Prime Time?
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Mar 06, 2003 07:03 AM
from the be-your-own-nina-pineda dept.
from the be-your-own-nina-pineda dept.
Markmarkmark writes "Is video blogging ready for prime-time? Can Internet talking 'blog-heads' beat the talking heads on Fox? Is the next Andy Rooney-type commentator going to be a /.er? With new technology and a little creativity, this MSNBC article today thinks so. 'The big problems have been setting up lights and a camera in my study properly, so that I don't look dead, or hung over.'" The article is about the software / hardware it takes to set up a microstudio; the author does not really explore much about the video-blogging implications -- but you can.
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A Day in the Life of a Geek? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it possible that this whole "blogging" craze has been the fastest flash-in-the-pan to hit the technology world yet? Dare I dream that the even the uber-geeks and posers have already come to the conclusion that "hey, you know what? I'm not really that exciting, and nobody cares what I had for breakfast today"?
"Blogging" has graphically illustrated for me the old adage, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you shouldn't."
Re:A Day in the Life of a Geek? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A Day in the Life of a Geek? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:A Day in the Life of a Geek? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course Video Blogs aren't the wave of the future. At least not the near future. It would be high bandwidth instead of low, it wouldn't be easily searchable or easy to catalog. It's an order of magnitude harder to do with no tangible benefits except for a little bit of "cool factor".
Parent
Re:A Day in the Life of a Geek? (Score:3, Insightful)
As a side note, technology like that would have incredibly beneficial implications for the television/movie world - imagine being able to index all the speech in a movie and bring up clips based on word usage. This would improve the gathering of footage for news programs and could make editing documentaries easier.
Re:A Day in the Life of a Geek? (Score:5, Interesting)
Give me a service where I can hook up a text, picture, and video connection with my 'posse' and if I'm egocentric enough I'll take it.
The only blogs to make it into the mainstream - i.e. attract a wider audience than their network of friends - will have a tabloid interest - nudity, offensiveness, extreme views, or some other rally call. No offence to that special breed of
Personally I don't want my 'pub rants' preserved to be thrown back at me in 20 years time when Im up for head of the city council and one of my opponents wants to raise my past life as an ecoterrorist.
Parent
Oh Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Oh Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is obviously a large market for political writing, which is why such blogs are so popular. You don't have to read the same columnists over and over again, as political blogs contain many new voices and links to all sorts of news stories. Instapundit.com [instapundit.com] mainly contains links to other stories. But check out all the links to other blogs on the left side of the page. You have some blogs, like USS Clueless [denbeste.nu], that present lengthy analysis of the upcoming war. In the legal world, a blog about appeallate law, How Appealling [blogspot.com] is among the most popular blogs, but there are many legal blogs (sometimes called blawgs), as you can see from the compilation on Bag & Baggage [blogspot.com]. The key to these blogs I listed above isn't necessarily the content (and none of them are "what I did today" type blogs), it is the links to other stories.
Parent
Re:A Day in the Life of a Geek? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is largely true but I would add that just being offensive or having extreme views is insufficient. The thing about popular bloggers like Glenn Reynolds (who probably just attracted a million viewers today - the "story" on MSNBC was one of his two blogs) is that they are actually expressing informed views on topics they have some expertise on - Glenn for instance isn't just some wacko spouting off about politics, he is a law professor that teaches constitutional law spouting off about politics - and that makes a big difference. The democratization of the media obviously results in a vast increase in the amount of dreck but among that dreck there are also some gems and they will tend to rise to the top & as they do they will be refined.
I tend think that the democratization of video will not (for the most part) be anything like "blogging" since even amateur video takes time and forethought and the appeal of blogging is for writers and amateur (and professional) thinkers & pundits to get out their thoughts quickly in an informal format. Bloggers may occasionally use video and will likely link to those that do as fodder for their blogs but very little of it would properly be called "video blogging". As an example of what I'm talking about I'm sure Glenn is thinking about "video" and "blogging" because of this little sarcastic man-on-the-street interview/documentary [brain-terminal.com] a conservative blogger did at the Peace march in NYC - it was amateurish but also pretty funny and fairly well done.
Re:A Day in the Life of a Geek? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anytime I read an article on blogging, I wonder why:
A:) I've never met anyone personally who talks about them.
and B:) I've never, in all my research and surfing time, come across one. (Other than Dave Barry's, but that was from the
So I think I'll just ignore them until they go away, like I did with the Y2K thing.
Re:A Day in the Life of a Geek? (Score:4, Interesting)
If that's what you think Blogs are, you're reading the wrong ones. Nice strawman.
Decent blogs are either link centric, or commentary by someone who's smart. There are a number of crappy ones, but so what.
I think video blogs are a bad idea, because it eliminates some of the advantages of the text and static image based web; you can browse, skim, and follow links from text, and you have mroe flexibility in how you parcel out your attention (close read all at once, reading here and there while doing something else, etc)
I think there's *some* room for this kind of format though; anyone remember the very funny daily (and now defunct) Internet show "Computer Stew"? ZD Net pulled the plug alas, but they had some funny stuff...and the got started with less than $3000 of consumer grade hardware.
(Hmm, looks you can still see episodes [thesync.com] -- I should see if they still have their music video tribute to Notepad.exe
Parent
OK... (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm... no thanks.
Re:OK... (Score:5, Interesting)
The current rates for bandwidth at this scale are about $1/GB of transfer. You will be spending about $180 a year for bandwidth for just 500 people. By contrast, you can get a text blog out to 4000 people a day for $50 a year (easily).
Even then your blog is going to be low production quality, low recording quality, low compression quality, and in a postage stamp sized window. I wouldn't watch your blog.
Maybe the 500 person thing is a bit to high given that nobody will watch. But say your blog does get popular. You will be spending 35 cents for every person that views a 1 MB download every day for a year.
My back of the envelope calculations show that video blogging is not ready for primetime.
Parent
the problem isn't the price... (Score:3, Interesting)
To me, the real problems with video blogging have to do with the nature of video (and not the problem of bandwidth.)
[1] Text is random access which means that as a reader, i can scan through someone's text blog and read it as fast or as slow as i wish, and instantly skip the parts I don't want to read. Video is linear which means that in order to consume the ideas presented, you have to scan audio, text, and images in order even if you don't want to.
[2] While it will take you ten minutes to produce a compelling text paragraph with links and some light editing before you post, It takes exponentially more time to create the equivalent video "paragraph." And adding graphics and links within a text layer of a quicktime movie is really really advanced stuff. It's not the kind of stuff I see most people doing anytime soon.
That is why I'm a lot more excited by things like the WiFi2TV project [slashdot.org] that plugs the functionality of the internet into an existing video network. Although that also presents a number of problems. We'll have to see how that one goes.
It's been done (Score:2, Funny)
I honestly hope it will NEVER be prime time (Score:5, Insightful)
I think text blogs (not even pictures) are much better - it depends on your ability to describe things well, and it puts a comfortable anonymity for you *and* your reader. Who was it that said "After TV is in every american household, you will never see another president in a wheelchair"?
Granted, often a picture is worth a thousand words - but I don't think video blog is worth the bandwidth / storage area. Even pictures needs to be sorted out to the last 5% of the cream before they are put on magazines, etc - video is just nasty. Slide show, maybe - video, no. (Just how many people go back and watch, minute my minute, their old family videos? exactly)
And yes, I blog; pretty regularly too, so maybe I don't speak with authority, I have (some) experience in this
Re:I honestly hope it will NEVER be prime time (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, but what if you were reading your ex-girlfriend's blog? Don't you want to see the look in her eyes when she talks about how much she misses you and
Oh, wait, this is
Blog entry for today (Score:3, Funny)
If it turns mainstream, can we have the bandwidth? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can the current Internet take that kind of an onslaught?
Re:If it turns mainstream, can we have the bandwid (Score:3, Insightful)
Now whether people would watch some weird geek's video blog is another story :)
Re:If it turns mainstream, can we have the bandwid (Score:2)
You're missing the point. The question I raised had nothing to do with the probability of people wanting to watch these blogs. I'm simply hypothesising, and wondering if the net can take it or not.
Nerds on TV (Score:4, Funny)
His initial concern is for his appearance, doesn't sound like "news for nerds" to me....
One more step toward the irrelevence of literacy (Score:5, Insightful)
But at least we geeks had computers. They were arcane and baffling to most people. We had JCL. We had 80 column cards. We had numbers in bases 8 and 16 we dared to call "octal" and "hex". We had RCPM and BBSes and MODEMS. And we had nearly everything in text.
Now command lines aren't needed because of GUI interfaces (which seem easier at first but are a pain to use to get anything serious done). Don't get me wrong, I love good graphics (like watching the approaching storm on weather.com), but video weblogs will be another step towards turning the internet into interactive television. Watch screen. Move mouse. Click. Watch screen.
I'm tired. Would someone read Slashdot to me?
Re:One more step toward the irrelevence of literac (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, all serious graphic artists use the command line version of Photoshop.
Parent
what's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Otherwise, what's next? Slashdot video postings? Shudder.
Great... (Score:2, Funny)
How about a video version of /. (Score:2, Funny)
Cameras (Score:3, Funny)
Always 'on' (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever read "The Light of Other Days" by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clark?
ob.sig: My Cool Gadgets and Technology blog [blogspot.com]
all is vanity (Score:2)
Is this what people want? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you can provide video doesn't mean its the best format for weblogs.
Even with video phones I think you will still find more people SMS than audio call, and more people audio call than video call.
What utter pish! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yaaawn...
We want real news!
It's all about scanning... (Score:5, Insightful)
When I go to a web page, I can scan down it in a fraction of the time it would take to read the text. Voicemail and Video can't match that. Video can, if you are watching it for visual content instead of audio content. While you can "zzzzip" through messages on some voice mail systems, you still don't get what you could get from scanning a text message.
With video blogs, you would be forced to either watch for as long as it took the author(?) to record it, or miss parts. That is part of the "killer app" of email and current blogs that video blogs can't shake a stick at.
-Pete
Don't think so on this one... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not if they're by geeks, no (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the area where video blogs are likely to take off, for the same reason that standard weblogs shot up in popularity in the past two years. People are increasingly concerned with the state of international relations and public policy, and increasingly dissapointed in the established media's ability to keep up with events and to provide coverage that is compelling, insightful, and (perhaps most importantly), honest about it's bias. Many of these people have turned to weblogs to fill this information gap, and I think the same will be true of video blogs. I'd even venture to predict the possibility of the most popular video bloggers "going pro" - just like Reynolds when MSNBC offered him an online slot, perhaps we'll see major news networks give video bloggers space in their online, or maybe even broadcast, video feeds.
Repeat after me... (Score:3, Insightful)
Are Blogs of any Kind Worthwhile? (Score:2)
It might be fun to write blogs, but how many people are actually interested in them. Most blogs I see are just narcisistic capsules describing the innermost thoughts and feelings of some guy I don't know.
The problem with blogs is they are unstructured --- if you want to make a website about goldfish, make one about goldfish with nice links and structure. Don't just keep appending news --- no-one will be interested in scanning through it all to derive some information about a particular topic.
Video blogs make the situation worse --- searching is impossible and you'll end up with scores of media documents, once again about some average bloke's activities of the day.
This is like those guys who strapped cameras (before they were "webcams") to their head in the mid-90s and transmitted every unexciting moment of their unexciting day as a mathematics graduate student, before people Jennycam et al realised there is only one type of "video blog" that will successfully captivate web users.
A Common Question (Score:2)
Re:A Common Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Is news blogging important? Ask Trent Lott. The news about his racist comments was small news on an AP wire that no major news organization covered. Instapundit covered it immediately (after being pointed to it by Josh Marshall [talkingpointsmemo.com], another blogger. IIRC, the comments were made on a Thursday. Instapundit was all over the story, calling for his ouster by Friday and Saturday, but the major news organizations didn't cover the story until Tuesday.
Save Ferris (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm really surprised nobody has brought up Ferris Bueller so far. You know, all the scenes where he speaks to the camera?
Frankly, I would differentiate between something like a personal web page or diary or whatever other exhibitionist crap someone wants to put up on the internet (gawd I hate the term 'blog') and the kind of infotainment we're talking about here.
I see lots of parallels to public access TV. You could get some pretty quality, amusing and informative stuff (like someone reminding you that life moves pretty fast, so if you don't stop and look around every
once in a while, life might just pass you by) but a large majority of random pointless drivel running about.
Rant rant rant. And that didn't all just have a point...
Metered Internet will kill this off eventually (Score:4, Interesting)
So, no, I don't think video blogs are the wave of the future...
What you need to get started (Score:2)
Re:What you need to get started (Score:2)
There's no reason why you couldn't do the same with video files.
btw, I made Andromeda and if you're interested in trying this sort of thing, please let me know...
"Paid Articles" on news sites. (Score:2)
I hope Slashdot does not go down the same route. I have recently stopped reading The Register [theregister.co.uk] after a spate of blatent "Paid Articles".
do it yourself tv-show more like. (Score:2)
boring webcams exist already.. so to be anything different from them these 'video blogs' would have to have something intresting-> be more like tv-show than just mumbling that you took a dump at wc..
Damn Andy Rooney (Score:2)
He just reminds me of Abe Simpson wandering through a store...
"Look at these army toys! They break the first time I step on them!" [crushing army toys under slipper]
I used to watch 60min every week. I never watch it anymore.
remember (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe video blogs aren't ready for prime time quite yet, but remember the words from H.M. Warner at Warner Brothers in 1927:
Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
The next Andy Rooney... (Score:2)
Maybe the first will be Internet "rock star" Jon Katz ? He is nearly as relevant as Rooney.
Next at your service... (Score:2)
Pictures yes, now how about sound? (Score:2, Funny)
Herein lies the rub. Imagine sitting at work during a break or some other time, and looking at somebodys full-media blog: "Hello my name is Ashtead and I have been eating peanutbutter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast ... "
Sounding loud and clear over the cubicle farm.
Besides, I tend to laugh when finding some funny web-page, and some of my colleagues already want to know why I am laughing for no apparent reason (to them anyways). Are they now having to wonder who all these other people in here are?
There will be no more looking at and listening to these things at work anymore!
Which could possibly be a good thing, considering ...