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February 17, 2004

why i don't think videoblogging is ready for alpha release.

the dowbrigade piece on why we need video aggregators really got me thinking so i went back to take another gander. i still think it's the boodiggity, but the more i read it, the more i realize that i don't agree with his final conclusion that everyone will become a video blogger. but there is nothing wrong with that.

i agree that most media consumers don't want to hear other viewpoints. as much as my neighbor likes to think that he reads Time in order to stay informed, it is more likely that he is reading in order to reinforce his current viewpoints on the world. And that isn't some elitist crap about the masses - the same is true for the person who listens to democracy now and the person who reads the village voice. anyone who sips their media from the same bottle every day is looking for a particular perspective and ultimately reinforcing existing behavior.

i also don't think it's always the high-IQs who want interactivity. smart people i know are still consumers who use the media they consume to shape the work that they do in another medium.

it is for this reason why i think that most people will not want to, as dowbrigade put it, get inside the tube. that sort of thing already exists. it's called public access tv and i don't see the masses pounding on their door anytime soon. sure, imovie and isight have made self production possible, but you still need to have the fundamental skills necessary to understand how to put together something flashy enough that people will watch.

and i guess that's been my major disconnect with the whole videoblog thing. text blogging works because we know how to write. most of us bloggers have been writing since elementary school. we write papers, we take grammar classes. we've learned how to form a proper sentence, how to structure a written argument, and how to write a good story. we know how to convert the thoughts in our head into text. we can talk with text.

most people can't talk with video. those who do have the skills are professionals - they're anti-bloggers.

add this to the fact that the tools that enabled the blog community explosion (easy content searches and rss metadata) don't exist in the video sphere. There is no google for video (or at least, there isn't one at the price point we need -- free.) Sure, metadata for video is starting to emerge, but we still need to deal with the fact that most potential videobloggers can't edit together a proper video "sentence."

but don't get me wrong - we can still have an unmediated revolution. we just have to take it one step at a time. if we continue to make the tools for expressing oneself through video available to the community from an early age, we may one day see a generation ready to express themselves through video blogs. the camcorder generation is now in their 30's. the imovie generation is just getting into high school and college. if we want to know how to better shape the coming video blog revolution, we need to take a look at the literacy revolution first. figure out how that went the way it did and see if we can tweak media literacy to get us there faster.

in the meantime, we can still effect immediate slow-moving change by leveraging the existing rss framework to create a community-based content filter for the stuff already out there. by using things like XMLTV and RSSTV to create a system for recommending and referencing existing media, we point people to what's good on the channelspace, making the act of teevee watching a bit more community-centric. so it's less triciaandthecity (personal blog) and more boingboing (metablog).

while i would love to see more personal VJs a la browsetv, i don't think it is going to happen anytime soon. you can't expect someone to express themselves effectively through video if they aren't already doing it in everyday life. like i said, public access has already tried it with the current general population, and their success has been nominal at best. so we take a step back and give folks training wheels first. we get them referencing the media that's already there. this way, when we get to the point where we're all posting rough but convincing arguments through video, we have the tools in place for hyperlinking whatever media we want to blog about.

Posted by yatta at February 17, 2004 2:11 AM

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Posted by: akb at April 10, 2004 3:51 PM