Leave a Video Comment? Or, FU Jay?
Are you kept up at night by the lack of your mug being plastered across the blogosphere? Rest easy, my friends, the bug-eyed raccoon has arrived.
TechCrunch recently announced that they will be using the new Seesmic WordPress plugin to incorporate video comments across their network.
This isn’t the first company to offer such a service — Viddler has been doing it for a while.
I think it’s a fun idea, despite my belief that it will eventually crash-and-burn (or at least never make it above 2,000 feet):
Too Much Time
You can’t skim video. That pretty much says it all. It will take double or triple the amount of time to watch a series of video comments than it does to read them. Most of us don’t have time for that.
Too Much Spam
Do I have to meticulously watch every video for super foul language and spammage? It seems like moderating these will be very time consuming.
Not Enough Technology
I read alot of blogs on my phone throughout the day — unfortunately, my phone isn’t able to see these videos. Also, what happens when you’re at work, or somewhere where you can’t listen to, or don’t have headphones — the comments become useless.
Even with these doubts, I still think it will be a fun thing to play with, so I’ve incorporated it here. All the negative reasons sound understandable on paper, but who knows, people may love it. It may work here. I just wish they would give me the option of enabling video comments on specific posts rather than every single one of them.
Let me know what you think. Leave a video comment. Show me how pretty you are, maybe I’ll do the same.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
This video blogging “Web 3.0″ style is too new, and as you said, too little innovation. Unless there’s no eureka technology invented soon, I doubt videos will be an integral part of blog discussions.
True, but I can definitely see alot more video blogs popping up in the near future and this would be a nice addition.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you point out that you can’t skim videos.
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Sorry, no video from me.
the one thing that I don’t like about the vids is that people can easily figure out how to place the image they want to display, and then make the rest of the video about something else.
Imagine the shock of seeing a vid with Jay’s image, so you click only to have spam advertisements. Makes you lost faith in Jay - even if it ain’t his fault. /rant
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I can’t stand videos. I can’t stand podcasts. Or audio clips. The one website I will visit that uses them actually puts a written text transcript under the video so that I’m not jammed sitting there for 20 fucking minutes just to see what’s coming - and not even know if it’ll be valuable.
This is one innovative trend that I don’t want to participate in. Soo…
FU, Jay
James Chartrand - Men with Penss last blog post..Fiction Writing: Character Creation
So, that makes:
I love video: 0
FU, Jay: 4
I was thinking, have you all seen Fight Club? Remember the splicing. Man, moderating these things could really be a pain in the butt.
Also, there should be a way to have a clickable link pop-up if I mention one, how else can we leave resources?
It’s going to be very hard to make this work on large sites…like TechCrunch. I don’t see it catching on. Arrington will push it till the end though…his cash is twisted up in it.
I think video comments would be interesting to view on my own blog entries, assuming I never have a popular blog pulling dozens of comments on each post.
But while I often skim through comments of blog posts I enjoy, I definitely have no desire to watch video comments on these posts. Quick scanning is KEY.
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Bingo - video is a time dragger on both ends, both for the person putting it together and for the viewers. I get enough video I don’t need it on my blogs. In fact I often am watching video or TV through my computer and browsing blogs at same time, I can’t be watching two video sources on the computer simultaneously. I just can’t see this taking off, it’s got to just be a fad.
You’re all a bunch of video downers.
I agree, though. But, like I said, I really wish I could enable it only on specific posts, then, I can see it being useful.
Bit late into this discussion, but here’s my experience from the university of hard knocks.
I launched a blog in 2005. Spent about a week crafting each post, and built a subscriber base of 1500 email names in about 9 months.
In 2006 I experimented with podcasting audio on the blog. Takes less time to produce a good podcast. (Fewer words.)
According to tracking, four times more people got the messages and in three months the blog/podcast was ranked number 1 at iTunes for an astonishing keyword.
This year I launched video on a blog and have attracted 500 new viewers in just 4 weeks. Some full motion, some screen capture. Even fewer words. But just as much thought going into the posts.
Conclusions?
Broadly speaking the stats seem to suggest that for every blog post reader I got 4x more audio listeners in 2007 and 8x more video viewers in 2008.
Is it the same audience?
Yes. (I did an electronic survey a year ago using SurveyMonkey and repeated the survey two months ago. The audience is identical in its demographics and with its suggestions for future posts/podcasts/videos.
What about scanning?
According to the survey results my audience suggested - convincingly - that my audio and video posts were ‘easier to scan’ than the blog newsletter.
Blogging isn’t about writing anymore then?
I suspect that I need to pay as much attention - if not more - to headlines and opening paragraphs now. I sense that ‘easier to scan’ means I have a few seconds to grab and keep their attention with audio or video. My writing skills are more necessary than ever.
How long do people stay on site?
Google Analytics tells me users currently spend an average of 13 minutes on the site every visit and that 65% of visitors are new. So its early days yet and the site is still small. But video has definitely increased the number and quality of conversations I’m having with my readers/viewers/audience.
Big lesson for me: blogging is not writing. Or podcasting. Or videoblogging. Blogging is communicating. Who cares how?
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