Blogs are not the same as Podcasting or Vlogging.
I’ve noticed that there’s been a report around the blogsphere on coming vlog… vlogs? Video Web Log. Not to be confused with podcasting, which is an audio version of a web log, or blogging which is usually just text and still pictures.
Sneer. Technology will kill responsible blogging.
Let me go on record here… one of the reasons why I have a blog, why I’ve written a book, and why I code applications is because I’m using my given talents to the best of my abilities. It seems I have the talent of typing at 100+ words a minute and that’s a gift that currently lends itself to my selected hobbies: blogging, writing, and coding. Consequently, I don’t podcast. I sure as hell won’t be vlogging. I’ve been on TV before. I’m a licensed to be a commercial DJ (assuming that my DJ license from the FCC didn’t expire – it’s not supposed to). Technologically speaking, I can both podcast or vlog… but I choose not to.
I guess this comes from the decades old wisdom from DJ’s that sound great on radio but don’t have a “face” for TV and thereby stick to radio. This tradition has been going on since TV went color, and probably even a few years before that… to get work on TV you need to have a good voice, true, but you need to have a video presence as well… and not everyone has that. In radio, you need to have a good voice to be a good broadcaster, and yep: not everyone has that either.
To date, I’ve only ever downloaded one podcast and that was one from Wil Wheaton about a poker tournament he attended. I like poker. I remember Wil from various TV and movie roles, which made for an easy recognizable voice. What’s more is that his blog spans a number of different topics, so I read it as part of my daily subscriptions. On this topic, he posted the audio file before he recapped things in print, so I figured what the hell? The net result? As part of the casual reflection, he said “fuck”. And my skew’d brain simply filed as “hgoo! an older Ensign Crusher just said ‘fuck’ through my PC speakers!” It didn’t add anything to the blog entry. Didn’t do much for me, really – I can’t imagine that most blogs would benefit from the addition of sound, except for well known personalities like Wheaton or Adam Curry, and even then I question it [obviously]. I would say that 99% of them will actually be worse with video, unless they had a reason, like the Channel9 community [which is meant for a very, very targetted audience]. Bah.
Know thy limits, bloggers, and the world will be happy.
I hope that audio blogging and video blogging don’t catch fire: there’s an entirely different investment of my time and attention required to listen to an audio post, or listen *and* watch a video post, than to read a text entry. I can’t scan audio or video like I can text, and I can read words a lot faster than people can speak them.
I’ve tried a couple of audio casts and even a couple of video casts, but I was very unsatisfied. Maybe part of it is the twitchy pseudo-ADD that email and IMs have drummed into us, but I was frustrated by the length of time I had to spend to get the basic info out.
As a way of injecting personality, audio and video have benefits over text, but there’s also a way to inject a special kind of personality in plain old text, too.
Hey Randy,
interesting post. I agree with most of it, but Podcasting is not the audio version of a blog. Podcasting is the technology to receive any file automatically over the internet that you can subscribe to. That’s it. Doesn’t have anything to do with audio. It’s a misconception, because most Podcasts are audio files and because the popularity of “iPod”.
Hey Tommy,
I agree with you that audio blogging and video blogging are totally different from “text” blogging, but there’s also a reason they exist. Take audio for example, I can listen to audio whenever I am doing anything where I don’t need to “think”. So you can do this when you’r doing sports, traveling or whatever. You just can’t read while you do things like this. Video is great when it makes sense to visualize what you are talking about though Channel9 is not a good example since most of their casts could be perfectly fine audio casts. http://www.blinkx.tv is working on a speech recognition engine that automatically translates videos and audios to text and make them searchable. I am sorry you haven’t found a good podcast. Check out .NET Rocks! (www.dotnetrocks.com), it’s really great and IT Conversations (www.itconversations.com) has a wide collection of good podcasts.
Actually, no. Since it’s a “made up word” it takes on whatever the most popular meaning of the word is… right now, bloggers “podcast” entries, which means they are blogging in an audio based format… Time Delayed Broadcasting is more accurate a description, and I would even say blogcast would be a better fit, but the fact is that bloggers post their audio entries it takes the form of “Click here to get the podcast” which means they are podcasting.
Anyway, it’s a moot issue: I still won’t do it! :)