Maryam buying meat

Can we use photos? Cause I think a few snaps of that counter could get the message across.

Abe: it probably would, but the act of uploading a photo and uploading a video is EXACTLY THE SAME! Exactly my point. No difference in how they get from my camera to your browser.

Yes, a photo probably would have given you 99% of the info. But that isn't the point I was making.

Yes, Abe, photos are indeed permissable. But it wouldn't have captured the bit at the end with Maryam smiling. Or at least not in the same way. Text, photos, video, it's all good stuff. Do whatever you want. But don't be scared of video. It doesn't have to be a big production.

Robert, I'm sure the barrier to some people is that they just don't know a good process for getting video on the web. Might be helpful if you took them through how you got the meat vid online, step by step.

I think the key here, regardless of if it is text, or video, or a audio PodCast is just to "make it worth the time it takes to download". I don't care what format I receive things in if they entertain me, or educate me, or engage me. THAT is the important part of this conversation. Ze Frank tends to do all three - that's why I watch him, and that's why he's popular.

Do I want everyone with a blog to start filming their breakfasts? Hell no! But if you happen to have breakfast with Kevin Costner or Elvis, then that might be interesting.

It's the content - not the delivery mechanism that counts.

Rob

The sound is just terribly, any words or conversation would be difficult to make out at best. Even if you can make out the words (or don't need to) the annoying background noise would deter me from watching.

So if this is meant to be a "look how easy it is to video blog if you don't need audio" then great, nice demonstration. I don't think there's a big market for such things though :)

Great Video Blog!! It really shows off the ease of creating one! I still like the old fashioned style of blogging (you know, with text) but something has to be said for integrating the two and offering a variety of mediums to get your message across!

Great work Robert!!!

Ok, so it's easy to point/click/upload. You've made that point.
But, shitty videos do not a vBlog make in my estimation. Or at least not anything worth wasting bandwidth for. It takes far more talent, post production, etc. to do something interesting/worthwhile. And wasn't that part of the original discussion?

How does that look at 56k?

My parents steadfastly refuse to migrate - it drives me crazy when I visit!!! If they still avoid web sites with heavy graphics and video entirely, doesn't it get across less information than text?

PXLated: who are you to say my meat videos aren't worthwhile? :-)

David: probably doesn't work very well. Yeah, for such a situation text is a lot better than video (text also works better on most mobile phones).

I understand the point you're trying to make Scoble, but I'm not sure you're making the right one. As far as I've seen the complaint is not that it's hard to make a video per se - the point is that people think it's hard to make a worthwhile one. And you're basically proving their point by posting vids of breakfast and the meatcounter :)

Guy: hey, if I'm not allowed to define what a blog is, then you're not allowed to define what a "worthwhile" video blog is. :-)

Video 1)

Wow...thank GOD you didn't edit, because otherwise, I might not have almost blown out my eardrums. Yeah, who needs audio leveling when you have a distorted, clipped, crappy background jukebox. The only thing it missed was you yelling over the noise..."THAT'S MY WIFE! AND HER BREAKFAST, AND MY BREAKFAST! SEE! CAN'T YOU JUST FEEL THE VIBE!!!"

Video 2)

YAAAAAY! No Editing! COOLER NOISE! So, was the idea to show the selection, or your suboptimal panning skills in a meat cooler? Because if it was the former, you didn't exactly pull it off, and 50 minutes of your panning would send anyone running for the Dramamine.

The point you're missing is that with every dimension you add...sound, and/or Video and sound, the ease of creation with any kind of decent quality goes up.

You showed that in almost no time, you can create crappy, loud, unintellible, pointless videos that say...nothing. Now, with that same effort, give us 50 minutes of a quality interview. Okay, when you HAVE a quality interview, or someone who is able TO interview well, do it then.

If you're the lead video blog cheerleader, it has a lifetime measured in seconds.

"PXLated: who are you to say my meat videos aren’t worthwhile?"
-----
Hee, Hee, Hee...A nobody.

But, the video doesn't "necessarily" impart what you expressed in your post. Depending on the viewer, it could say a "small selection", it could be a complaint, "with all this meat, why can't we find something tender and delicious?", it could say "we have the best/worst butchers here in Half Moon Bay", it could say "all this meat and we can't get waited on, this store's service suck". Without a voice (good audio) or text commentary, it's hard to tell what you're trying to communicate.
I think you're saying, or imparting the view, a vBlog is easy. I'm of the opinion that that's not necessarily true without decent production values or post production and that makes for quite a bit more work the a blog or podcast.

PXLated: maybe that was the point I was trying to make! :-)

But, do 50 million bloggers or 100 million MySpacers all make good stuff according to me? No. Does it make it any less worthwhile for the person posting it? No.

But I don't think that was the point that the anti-videobloggers were making yesterday.

Now, if they say "it's hard to make professional-grade videoblogs like Ze Frank has" then I'd TOTALLY agree.

But, then it's also hard trying to keep up with Om Malik and Mike Arrington. Doesn't stop the rest of us from trying.

Great, now I'm hungry.

It's obviously not that difficult to make a video post, but let's give this some thought. For one thing, most people here at Wordpress are limited to 25megs of uploads. What are the practicalities of things on that side? And what about hosting offsite: will you be subject to someone else's approval process? How can you ensure the continued availability of your posts?

The British government recently insisted that YouTube remove a video because the government was the copyright owner. Turned out it was a video about how the open, responsive government was using technology to stay in touch with the people and it was, in fact, uploaded by the government.

Hi Robert,

I don't think it is difficult to get people hyped about video blogging (and video on the net in general), but the thing on my mind is bandwidth. From the time I click your link until it starts playing, there is a good 5-10 second delay ("I want it NOW!"). That is the first in a long series of video disappointment people are going to be experiencing in the coming months as reality sets in.

In the context of video blogging, IPTV, etc., what do you and/or your readers see happening over the next few years in terms of bandwidth demands?

Thanks,
Eric

Disclaimer: I do not work for any telecom company, but do work in finance/investments. My Ph.D. is in roughly the "physics" of telecom and when I try to draw a line between the hype of online video and the current physical capibilities in the U.S., I don't see it happening any time soon unless a massive migration to fiber is rolled out. As people have noted on your blog back in December, countries like Japan, South Korea, Sweden, etc are far ahead of the US in terms of bandwidth. I have a lot of opinions on the subject, but will spare them unless you're interested. I would love to hear what others think.

PS: This is my first comment to your blog. So, "Hi!" :) Still trying to wrap my mind around all this. I love your stuff. Thanks for all your time and effort.

Ok, maybe I'm loosing the conversation since topics like this tend to spread over several posts...sure wish you had comment notifications, would really help keeping up...
I thought the conversation/topic was vBlogs. What you have posted is nothing more than a video file just like millions on YouTube. I don't happen to consider the videos on YouTube vBlogs or even posts within a vBlog so to me you haven't proven anything about vBlogging except that "one part" is pointing/clicking, another is you can use some simple equipment.

"My Ph.D. is in roughly the “physics” of telecom and when I try to draw a line between the hype of online video and the current physical capibilities in the U.S., I don’t see it happening any time soon unless a massive migration to fiber is rolled out."

Thank God I don't have my PHD. I see thousands of applications. Fast hard core and functional. Thanks for the look see. I will apply it when and wherever I can find a bennie zone. Try not to stare into the light ... it has a strange way of blinding you.
SORRY DOC ; )

P.S. PHD's are hard to get. It is just that most of the Piled higher and deeper papers can be cut down to about 2 pages of useful data. No offense meant.
Donnn fer gt 2 chk fer spiln.
HSDO&ME

Ok. I regret admitting to my degree. I feel I just lost some "street cred" :)

For the record, I am totally excited about the future of IPTV, video blogging, 3D HDTV, immersive virtual environments, all of which will be massive bandwidth hogs. In fact, I think all the hype will ultimately be good because when the reality of the sad shape of our connectivity comes to light, it will hopefully spur rapid development.

I'm not anti-video. I'm anti-non-streaming and volume control. Just like any technology, it may be 'easy' to do the minimum... but to do it well takes a little more effort.

Respectfully,
Doug

While I agree that judging whether these videos are worthwhile is not under discussion, the format is. And these are a great example of the challenges of the format.

I waited 15 seconds to view a 10 second video (roughly). This is on 3Mbps downstream broadband. Robert, considering your understanding of attention, eyeballs, and the contract with a reader, I hope you intuitively see the issue here.

Sure, everyone independently judges the worth of any thing they read, watch, or hear, but you have to admit that with video the bar is higher. It's simple economics: The difficulty of making something worthwhile to an individual increases with the consumer's time commitment (basic Return on Investment, R divided by I. As "I" (Investment of time) increases, so must the "return" (value of the video) to exceed the "worth it" threshold.

Thirty seconds to show a meat video, versus a line saying "Went meat shopping. Wow, now dat's a lotta meat!", or a crack about "my wife hasn't seen this much meat since the last time I showered!"...sure, different messages, but also completely different ROI calculations. My meat comments may have sucked, but they took less than a second of your time.

Raise the cost to view, raise the need for return. Or, expect the number of consumers to decline to only include those whose "worth it" threshold is exceeded by an unusual interest in meat (or whatever) or an unusually low value on their own time. Pretty much the definition of a niche market.

Remember, even in a magical broadband-everywhere world where video is instantaneous, you can't skim the content (fast forward, if available, typically renders audio unintelligible). Again, higher investment in time to consume the same content (yes, if I read about meat for more than 10 seconds I'm on to the next topic...unless it's The Onion or Something Awful).

My conclusion? Vlogs will be a niche for a long time.

show me the produce!

One thing I like about video is—motion. It's like watching someone's life through their eyes, especially if they have a light cam attached to their head at roughly eye-level. It's almost like Being John Malkovich in a way.

In Second Life, I've been doing more video bug reports lately because pictures may not show the extent of before/after undesirable behavior. This has helped our developers on numerous occasions, and as bandwidth pipes just get fatter, it'll become more commonplace.

I am sorry this is a little delayed, I am in a different time zone to most of you!!

PXLated wrote
"Ok, so it’s easy to point/click/upload. You’ve made that point.
But, shitty videos do not a vBlog make in my estimation."

and whilst yes the vid's, vlogs, video blogs, (whatever they are being called this hour) that Robert posted lacked some ..... good content, Sorry Robert .... they were there to make the point that it can be done by anyone! All you need is a simple point and shoot and a tripod. My Nikkon point and shoot camera takes great videos and whilst I am certainly not a person who does well in front of a camera I know a lot of people, professional or otherwise who are naturals in front of a lens! So get someone who can present well and a video camera and you can make blogs come alive with a mix of Text, sound, Video as well as other methods! I am astonished at all the people who are slagging off video blogging, and whilst, there are limitations at the moment (see David Dalka's comment) with technology and bandwidth increasing all the time (especially here in the UK (I have 16MB broadband here for what 1MB broadband cost a year ago)) video blogging is surely the way everything is going to go!

Hi Robert,

I got your point. But I just hate having to install another player on my PC, especially when it is not very good. Why don't you use wmv?

Albert: because my Nikon spits out .MOV's.

And I disagree that it's not very good. I use it all over the place. It does exactly what it's supposed to do. But, it is funny that it works better on Firefox than it does on IE.

Robert - and to the guy who said WP only allows 25Mb uploads - why not just send the file to Youtube then embed the player in your blog post? It's a dead simple step, makes the download much quicker, and saves people from worrying about having the right player and codec.

As a technical exercise, this is fine. I assume you're load test your servers/feed. But when you come to the real thing, content is king (or god help Podtech). But then, you knew that already big guy, and all publicity is good publicity, right?

BTW, no healthy breakfast option for you big guy? :-)

Hi Robert,
Here's a video blog post of me taking Carol for a balloon ride over Boston:

http://stevegarfield.blogs.com/videoblog/2006/0...

A couple of notes:

1. I shot this with a Nokis N93 cellphone that I've got on trial right now. The video on this is amazing.

2. I basically took all the footage and lined it up and then put in an opening, close and some music. Just the footage is enough to convey the feeling of going up in a balloon ride for the first time, but I like to package my moment showing footage.

3. I got a free ride since last year when I went the ride was closed and I put up some video of that.

4. Nothing was scripted and the owner wanted to talk about business opportunities for people. I could have cut that out, but I left it in. It's waht happened and he's a nice guy. It also gives people an idea of ways to incorporate advertising without having to actually create ads. It's user generated advertising. The future is huge for this type of thing as long as it's transparent. If it's not, I'd be questioning what is real. I dosclose everything on the blog post.

Enjoy.

There is one problem. even this short clips that u posted in 4 MB. A lot of us pay net charges depending on upload and download of data, so while video blogging may be "easy" its not so cheap for viewers. One might argue that this is stretching it a bit, but if more and more bloggers start posting video, it would be difficult for viewers like me to keep their already bloated bills, in check.

Robert,

Yawn.

Podcasting has the huge advantage that I can listen while I'm doing something else - while I drive, while I work out, even while I code.

Video, on the other hand, requires my full attention. I can't do anything else. Which for me - and I assume most people - limits the amount of time they have to watch video.

Which means that video needs to be more interesting and more compelling than audio. And it has to be good enough so that you can stand to watch it, *preferably* on a reasonably-sized screen. That generally takes a decent camera, a bit of care, and a bit of editing. And more than a bit of skill.

I'm in a group that revolves around amateur video, and I've looked at lots of user content. It's really painful to watch. Horrible lighting. Jerky camera work. Poor audio. As I'm sure you all know from your Channel 9 experience.

Now, Channel 9 worked *despite* the production values because the content was such high-value (delta my segment...). But I think that sort of content is a rarity. Sure, it's out there, but it's not widespread.

Say I wrote a blog post that said, "today, while shopping, I was marvelling at the size of the meat counter at our Top Foods. It's 40 feet (12 meters) long, and has a huge variety of meat in it - including beef, pork, lamb, chicken, and even some buffalo."

You would probably consider that a pretty boring post, and you'd be right. So how is the video any different? All I see is "lots of meat". Looks like some is beef. Some is ground. Wow.

I was in Europe a few years ago. In markets it's considered bad form to touch the produce with your bare hands, and the markets provide plastic gloves to use. That's an interesting different between US and European shopping, but it's only worth a sentence at best.

Content is king, and in my mind, there are lots more people with interesting things to say that people with interesting things to show.

If we are going to compare the merits of blogging, audiogging, and vlogging (it's high time we stopped making references to audio based blogs and unpaid ad for Apple) I think a distinction has to be made between what is best for the producer of the content and the consumer of it.

As you said it was “just as easy” for you to upload a video and it was 99% as effective as a couple of photos would have been.. In fact if your entire vlog post had been just the video,. you might say it was much easier for you to just do that.

Were you to add text to your entry, the hardest part from a content creation perspective would have been to compose the text, review your grammar and spelling, and (unless the software does it for you) format the relationship between the text and the link to the video, add the still image that represents the video, etc.

I think we can say with confidence that in the future, near future in fact, having a camera device with you and shooting interesting things as you see them and having those video recording made into a vlog will be as easy as pushing a button or a few on your cell phone (wouldn't it be nicer to have a full function camera with this communications capability built in?!).

From the consumers point of view though, careful selection of presentation medium will always be a plus. I'd really like a written summary of whatever I am about to hear or see, and in fact a full transcript would be the only professional way to do it . How many professionals are doing this? Remember the drumbeat to put alternate text descriptions of every image we put on web pages? Disabled people can't see those images, but the software they use can access those text descriptions and make the content more meaningful to them. How about the deaf? Doesn't a transcript of any video or audio content make perfect sense? Oh yes that might be too much trouble if you are putting something together that you know will only be viewed by sighted and hearing family and friends, but I maintain if you are doing this for a living, you have a responsibility, more accurately the organization you are working for has a responsibility, to make your content accessible to as many people as possible.

I think in the next few years, the variety of presentation formats available will lead to a shakeout of just who is doing this stuff in a professional capacity and who is doing it for fun or as an aspiring professional. To use an old sexist expression: we are about to “separate the men from the boys” in the world of online media.

The debate is already out there of whether or not we need another tech video podcast...but I think we definately need a meat vidcast.

Meastcasting is the future.