Vlogs Ain’t Blogs.
At the risk of a little pedantry, here are the six pillars of blogging from Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations
- Publishable. Anyone can publish a blog.You can do it cheaply and post often. Each posting is instantly available worldwide.
- Findable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author, or both. The more you post, the more findable you become.
- Social. The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build relationships unrestricted by geographic borders.
- Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a newsservice. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.
- Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free “home delivery” of RSS- enabled blogs into your e-mail software. RSS lets you know when a blog you subscribe to is updated, saving you search time. This process is considerably more efficient than the last- generation method of visiting one page of one web site at a time looking for changes.
- Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.
Video fails.
It isn’t linkable. Oh yes, you can link to a video, like any other web page. But how does one, from within a video blog entry, link out to another site? How does one link into a video blog entry? How can you easily quote from a video blog entry? You can’t. The content is monolithic and opaque.
Because the content is opaque, it’s not searchable. You couldn’t build Google Blog Search, or techmeme around video blogs. Both rely on an understanding of the content, and it’s relationship to others in the blogosphere.
As a result, it’s a far less social and a far less viral medium than a blog.Â
Is a cat a dog? An apple an orange? No way. And neither is a vlog a blog.
So, Rob Hyndman, there’s no risk of turning blogging into TV. Vlog’s ain’t blogs.Â
Television’s idealists had grand ideas about the potential of their new medium, only to see television become… well, television. We run the same risk with video on the internet, in part due to the democratization of the process. It’s now so cheap to create video content for the internet that anyone can do it. And, oh, how we are!
The problem is this: one of the points made repeatedly in this debate is that some people may feel more comfortable with video rather than the written word. Written words can be difficult to use effectively. Proponents of video feel that being released from the strictures of the written word will allow ordinary people to communicate more freely, and more effectively.  Blarney! Communicating effectively is difficult, whether the medium is video, text, or audio. Brad Templeton, in the comments on his blog, says it best when he admonishes people to remember their audience:
People should not do video because they think it will be less work for them than taking the time to write well. And even if they will put in more work, they should remember the added cost to the viewer in time. They must make it worth it.
Amen.
I suspect that for most people, myself included, the majority of video on the network today isn’t worth watching. It’s just not good communication.
