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January 28, 2006

vlog year+1.

It's been exactly a year since the first Vloggercon. Although I haven't thought about it enough to provide a comprehensive summary of everything that's gone down in the past year, I can think of enough instances to fill a partial blog post. ;)

In the past year, we've seen videoblogging progress from a small group of enthusiasts to a field of practitioners, tools, and services, each vitally important to the continued growth of the space.

Videoblog evangelism once took the form of RMS-style talks by Jay, the featured-in-Time-Magazine coverage of Steve's videoblog, the selfless contributions of Peter through Mefeedia, and the sudden 15-minutes of Dylan's superstardom. In 2005, the evangelism got organized and became things like Ryanne and Verdi's freevlog, Meet The Vlogger sessions beyond the Apple Store, my portable video workshops at USC ;) and node101.

Although the cameras are getting smaller and the players more portable, the automatically captured metadata isn't getting any bigger or better. Yet.

On the distribution side, Ourmedia emerged as what public access television should have been five years ago. They promised free hosting and bandwidth for all and delivered on their promise. But then came blip and YouTube and Google Video and everyone else in between.

There's been enough interest and dollars pumped into the "Flickr for Video" space that we now have the privilege of calling them "Yet Another Flickr for Video." The disappointment in dismissing the new vlog hosting services is probably from their apparent lack of innovation. Sure, FireAnt is a great feedreader, VideoEgg a fantastic plugin, and server-side mov to fla video transcoding has been a boon for user-created web video. But even so, there's only so much iterations of tagging, user ratings, and videoblog directories one can become involved in. And looking at moves like YouTube's newfound tolerance of pirated video, I have to wonder if videoblog hosting has become a race to grab the most registered users in a bid towards becoming the most attractive target for acquisition.

But that's not to say that innovation isn't out there. In fact, the only time I ever saw a room full of users get excited about videoblog hosting was the time Jakob demoed his automatic movie editing function in the alpha version of Vimeo. Upload your video clips, tag them, choose a soundtrack, and Vimeo would automatically assemble your like-tagged clips into a movie based on a SMIL playlist. It was so simple yet so engaging that everyone thought it was brilliant. But when Vimeo finally made it to public beta, the SMIL-based playlists disappeared. I can't help but wonder how much bigger Vimeo would be if it still included automatic movie editing.

The biggest story of vlog year+1 is without a doubt the success of Rocketboom. Amanda and Andrew have put together a well-paced 3-5 minutes of brain candy that is equal parts geeky, clever, and interesting. And by sticking to a consistent release schedule, they've attracted upwards of 100,000 downloads a day. They've even moved beyond the desktop by providing special feeds for mobiles and PVRs. But despite this expansion, Rocketboom will probably continue to have it's biggest audience in cubicle media (or as Peretti puts it, the "Bored At Work Network") in the near term. For many, Rocketboom is best viewed in between emails, IMs, and the occasional memo from the HR department, a fresh reminder that life continues outside of the business park. With a network of field correspondents, each just as talented and charismatic as the personalities in the New York office, you have to wonder if Amanda and Andrew are but a few hundred thousand dollars away from building "the Gawker Media of videoblogging." (thx, Josh)

But the entire space is still so young. We've still got so much to do. And in conversations I've had with a lot of the people mentioned in this post, I know you're already on it and way ahead of me.

Jay is already planning the next Vloggercon for April 2006. Can't wait to see what you have planned for vlog year+2.

Posted by yatta at January 28, 2006 8:13 PM

Comments

Posted by: sull at March 22, 2006 10:31 PM