Video Discussion: “Is blogging rewarding?”
Brian Kelly from the UK Web Focus blog, began a Seesmic thread earlier this week, by asking “What is the most rewarding aspect of blogging?” Given this weeks FOC08 theme of Blog Networks, the timing of this discussion is quite apt and I’ve posted a couple of responses.
Whether you contribute to the Seesmic thread or not though I think this question is an important one for every blogger to ask themselves, as it can be a valuable reminder of the motives, mission and values that lead us to maintain a blog in the first place.
The discussion began with a post from YouTube, and for some reason the embed clip that Seesmic provides is to the YouTube instance rather than the Seesmic one. So in the interests of providing access to the thread I’ll start with the first response from a Seesmic user. You can view the original YouTube post here.
Original Post:
Resulting Seesmic Thread:
The downside of video
With respect to online video discussion - and in fact online video in general - one thing I should have added to my second contribution of this thread, but didn’t, is the idea of indexing. Search engines enable us to locate relevant material on the web by indexing the content of posts and then cross-referencing search criteria against it to yield the most likely and appropriate results. In the case of online video this isn’t possible, because there isn’t much of anything to index. Aside from the title of the clip and perhaps key points (if any) included in a description field, the actual contents of the clip are unknown and difficult to determine until you actually view it.
In discussions with other colleagues this was flagged as a major downside of online video, as was the inability to quickly skim the content. Unlike text where the entire message is clearly visible all at once, the only way to consume the information in a video is to sit and watch it at speed. If you get to the end of the clip and it wasn’t what you hoped it would be, too bad.
I think this highlights the significance of properly annotating clips in the description field. Online video is a powerful medium, but it’s important to bear in mind the viewer of the content and give them as much advanced information as possible.
September 8th, 2008 at 8:13 am
Many thanks for your video response on Seesmic and for this blog post.
Your FOC08 event on Blog Networks is also timely for me. I have run a numbrer of blog workshops, including one half-day workashoped aim at the library community - see
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/ili-2007/masterclass/
The workshop is being run this year by two of my colleagues. I’ve published the video clips so they can include them in the workshop if they are felt to be relevant. And it is really useful to get the video responses form yourself and Alan Cann, as this provides additional views and comments which can be used in the workshop.
A number of briefing documents on blogs are available on UKOLN Web site from
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/documents/#blogs
A Creative Commons licence is available for these resources.
Finally I should add that I uploaded my video posts to both YouTube and Seesmic in order to avoid the risk of one of the services not being sustinable. I hadn’t realised that importing the video from YouTube would link directly to YouTube. I’ll need to rethink my workflow processes.
Brian Kelly, UKOLN
PS Note the spelling of my surname
[Reply]
September 10th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Key idea: I should ad…?
[Reply]
October 10th, 2008 at 6:59 am
[...] Seesmic may provide is the ability to receive video responses. This has already happened with the author of the TechTicker blog, in particular, having provided a number of useful responses, including one in which he describes [...]