Video, yeah, I heard it’s the big thing on the internets. I get it. YouTube gets a bazillion hits a day and Hulu rocks your socks. But seriously, video has it’s place and the things it is good at. It is also very bad at many things. Let me splain my position on this.

First let’s look at vlogs, video blogs, where instead of posting some text and pictures, or even text with a little video to highlight difficult topics, it’s just a video. Scoble posts a lot of these videos - typically they’re on an interesting topic and they’re fairly long. I hate this. I just don’t have the time or inclination to watch most of those videos, even though I’d love to hear what he has to say on the topic. In the 10, or 20 minutes the video goes on, I could go through a couple hundred blog posts instead.

Most of the time it doesn’t really add much to the information trying to be conveyed. It would have been just as informative as a regular post with some pictures or short videos. I simply don’t understand why. Sure it is easier to convey some personality, but really, that comes across in writing as well. It isn’t even the case where they’re like podcasts - I likes me podcasts because audio is great for commutes and just generally more accessible than video. Video requires too much attention.

The same thing goes for video commenting. TechCrunch just released the hounds and I’ve seen it spring up some other places as well. Amazon, for example, allows for video reviews. Video reviews? On very rare occasion I can see why that would work, but for most reviews? Why? What is the advantage? Do I need to see you laugh out loud to really believe that you did? It’s slow and a lot of these on a page will slow down the load time. And I won’t watch them, because I have better things to do.

What better things to do, you ask? Well, I could watch otters holding hands! Seriously, videos on the web are great for that, short silly bursts to distract you for a minute. Or else longer form programming, like TV shows that you’re used to watching. Switching standard internet things built for ease and quickness disrupts the flow of information without providing any measurable benefits most of the time.

I mean, I’m just saying. I truly hope this stuff dies down and we can all get back to an alphanumeric representation of the world. :) What do you think? You lovin’ the videos? Did I miss some great something or other that makes vlogs so much more awesome the blogs?

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May 8th, 2008 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: blogs