Are Video Blogs Ready For Prime Time?

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.

A Day in the Life of a Geek?

Come on, with all the far more provocative reality TV out there (viewers choosing a spouse for someone, 16 whiny crybabies dumped in the Amazon, a dude pretending he's a millionaire), who's gonna watch Linus recompile his kernel?

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?

Actually "Just because you can, doesn't mean you shouldn't" is a driving philosophy behind a lot of stupid things getting done.

Re:A Day in the Life of a Geek?

Anyone else think that this article sounds like a Jon Katz [slashdot.org] article [slashdot.org] ? The way it tries to predict the future while sounding like it's got some great insight to the social signifigance of technology without actually understanding said technology? In my mind, he's a bit like the way some people describe Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh. I can't stand him, I think he's an idiot, but I miss him! What ever happened to him?

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".

Re:A Day in the Life of a Geek?

Blogging sucks. No blog is going to attract millions of viewers a day. But a million blogs might.

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 /.er who have 'popular' journals. But look at the content - hardly recommendations for new distros!

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.

Oh Really?

instapundit.com (Glenn's original blog) has topped 200,000 daily visits on at least one occasion, and his readership is growing monthly. His fellow top-teir bloggers boast similar numbers. And they're just talking about boring ole' politics and such. "Millions" might still be a long way off, but I don't think it's all that farfetched.

Re:Oh Really?

instapundit.com (Glenn's original blog) has topped 200,000 daily visits on at least one occasion, and his readership is growing monthly. His fellow top-teir bloggers boast similar numbers. And they're just talking about boring ole' politics and such.

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.

Re:A Day in the Life of a Geek?

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"?

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 ....

OK...

...so I'm a blogger. You're telling me that I can go from having a easy to read and search text site with quite low bandwidth costs to paying through the nose to give a video stream to everyone?

Umm... no thanks.

Re:OK...

So lets figure out how much video blogging will cost. Lets say that you produce a 10 minute peice a day, and that 500 people tune in each day. Lets say that you put your video in a postage sized window and it comes out to 1MB. Thats half a GB a day.

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.

I honestly hope it will NEVER be prime time

I have trouble looking at myself in the mirror. Even thinking about people being able to see me talking in a demur tone to a webcam just makes me shudder. Through the internet is nightmarish.

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

Blog entry for today

I just ate a bagle. It was pretty good.

If it turns mainstream, can we have the bandwidth?

I like the idea. What I'm thinking about is what happens when ten thousand people start blogging and a million watches their blogs?

Can the current Internet take that kind of an onslaught?

Nerds on TV

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. But those are hardware problems, not software. The software worked perfectly right out of the box.

His initial concern is for his appearance, doesn't sound like "news for nerds" to me....

One more step toward the irrelevence of literacy

People used to read. Then came television and people chose to watch the story.

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

GUI interfaces (which seem easier at first but are a pain to use to get anything serious done)

Yeah, all serious graphic artists use the command line version of Photoshop.

what's next?

Text nicely separates the message from the messenger. That's something that's desirable in most communications. If we didn't have it, we'd have to invent it. Leave the video to dating services, where the messenger is the message.

Otherwise, what's next? Slashdot video postings? Shudder.

Cameras

I feel that any kind of camera, digital camera or video camera attached to my computer i anyway is bound to end up in my naked ass being posted around the world just after I've had a shower or something!

Always 'on'

Somebody using a camera cell phone nearby? In the locker room perhaps? Sure you are not 'on'? Progress in micro camera gadgets and wireless technology will keep us "always on" in more ways than one. Look at this wireless pen cam [swann.com.au]. And with blogs going the way of live audio and video feeds... Instead of Big Brother we get gazillions of networked Little Brothers :)

Ever read "The Light of Other Days" by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clark?

ob.sig: My Cool Gadgets and Technology blog [blogspot.com]

Is this what people want?

weblogs are short, text based, easy to skim or ignore. Video you have to sit through it. You can't compile a big list of the videos and look at them at a glance. Its a different medium from tv.

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!

I don't care how you moderate me, that article was rubbish. At best it was an advertisment for some video editing software and the fact that computers and cameras are now cheap enough for anyone to get in to making terrible vid-clips of bits of their lives that no one else cares about.

Yaaawn...

We want real news!

It's all about scanning...

Video blogs will never catch on for the same reason people hate voicemail after using email. While it may be a more fully featured sensory experience, a major feature is lacking; Scanning.

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...

Personally I'd rather read things like blogs and news websites than watch video or listen to audio. If you want to know why just play any of a number of video games or computer games where the dialogue track sounds like it was recorded by the programmers...most people just don't have that interesting a voice!

Not if they're by geeks, no

A lot of the comments I've seen so far have been to the effect of "how interesting can a geek on video be?" Probably not very, but consider the source of the article. It's worth noting that the article is by Glenn Reynolds, the most popular true blogger (as opposed to quasi-journalists like Drudge) on Earth. While he's certainly got a geek side - his "chief interest is in the intersection between advanced technologies and individual liberty", and he's been executive chairman of the National Space Society - he's a law professor, established commentator, and author. Tens of thousands of people visit his instapundit.com for his commentary on technology, culture, and politics news every day.

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...

... Internet is not TV, Internet is not TV....

Save Ferris

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

As I think it's only a matter of time before we're all paying by the byte for bandwidth in one fashion or another, I also believe that stuff like video blogs and other low value/size ratio internet artifacts will go away as well (like banner ads and other graphics that will be aggressively filtered out once you've got to pay for each one you look at...)

So, no, I don't think video blogs are the wave of the future...