Green Tea Ice Cream

Stowe Boyd has expressed something I’ve often thought - how do people find the time to consume video blogs?  Two other thoughts - how many people actually watch all these video blog posts?  And what exactly are they for?
Context for me has been those tempting links through to ‘watch X’s presentation here’ or ‘and here I am pretending to be Jeremy Paxman interviewing XXX Venture Capitalist’. OK, I’m being mean - but for the most part, how do I have any idea that there’s any worthwhile nugget buried in the middle of these full-on epics? I can generally find out whether there’s something worthwhile in the midst of the longest blog post in less than a minute.  The only way to do the same for a one hour interview with so-and-so is to watch the damn thing.  You can skim text but until I’ve mastered fast-forward lip-reading, I’m hardly able to do the same for video.  There’s a reason why the fab Online Video Watch doesn’t issue it’s missives in video form - a podcast or a video, no matter how tied up with other forms of interactivity, is still a broadcast medium, something fundementally different from a blog or instant messaging or other social media.  Blogs, Twitter et al are social media.  Videos are still an object that needs to be wrapped up in it but remains a distinct object. (Yes, I know you can slice and dice video and remix and mash it up and whatever - but seriously, the conversation’s going to move on faster than you can edit and what you’ll be left with is another monolithic block in its own right.)

The lip-reading gag has a serious aspect, though.  Two of my colleagues are deaf and video without transcripts is meaningless to them. Even a summary of the contents can be better than nothing.  Text isn’t universally accessible - doesn’t help if you’re you’re illiterate - but it’s the closest thing we’ve got.

Now I’m not doing an Elton John here  (even Ask A Ninja has its moments) and the availability of video of conferences, seminars and the like is a tremendous boon.  I’ll always make time to watch battle royales such as the Weinberger/Keen face-off at Supernova and if a piece of programming sounds interesting, I’ll watch it or link to it.  Two key take-outs though - videos need really rich, thorough metadata and choosing to use video instead of text in a blogging ecosphere (you can’t put over the impact of a live discussion in cold print, only the impact it had on you - which is a different text altogether) is also a conscious choice to reduce your audience.

Scoble, meanwhile, seems to have been stung recent criticism and has included a handy summary with his latest epic.  Well, that’s 45 minutes I can now apply to sorting the loft out and tracking down dusty bags of clothing for new-borns.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I won’t make time for genuinely interesting audio/video (and these podcasts come complete with transcripts).  Or that monkey boy clip.

P.S. Video instant messaging.  Not today, please.