At the blogger panel at Fall VON (repurposed to be both video on the net as well as voice) Vlogger and blip.tv advocate Dina Kaplan asked bloggers to start vlogging. It’s started a minor debate.
My take? Please don’t.
I’ve written before on what I call the reader-friendly vs. writer-friendly dichotomy. My thesis is that media make choices about where to be on that spectrum, though ideal technology reduces the compromises. If you want to encourage participation, as in Wikis, you go for writer friendly. If you have one writer and a million readers, like the New York Times, you pay the writer to work hard to make it as reader friendly as possible.
When video is professionally produced and tightly edited, it can be reader (viewer) friendly. In particular if the video is indeed visual. Footage of tanks rolling into a town can convey powerful thoughts quickly.
But talking head audio and video has an immediate disadvantage. I can read material ten times faster than I can listen to it. At least with podcasts you can listen to them while jogging or moving where you can’t do anything else, but video has to be watched. If you’re just going to say your message, you’re putting quite a burden on me to force me to take 10 times as long to consume it — and usually not be able to search it, or quickly move around within it or scan it as I can with text.
So you must overcome that burden. And most videologs don’t. It’s not impossible to do, but it’s hard. Yes, video allows better expression of emotion. Yes, it lets me learn more about the person as well as the message. (Though that is often mostly for the ego of the presenter, not for me.)
Recording audio is easier than writing well. It’s writer friendly. Video has the same attribute if done at a basic level, though good video requires some serious work. Good audio requires real work too — there’s quite a difference between “This American Life” and a typical podcast.
Indeed, there is already so much pro quality audio out there like This American Life that I don’t have time to listen to the worthwhile stuff, which makes it harder to get my attention with ordinary podcasts. Ditto for video.
There is one potential technological answer to some of these questions. Anybody doing an audio or video cast should provide a transcript. That’s writer-unfriendly but very reader friendly. Let me decide how I want to consume it. Let me mix and match by clicking on the transcript and going right to the video snippet.
With the right tools, this could be easy for the vlogger to do. Vlogger/podcaster tools should all come with trained speech recognition software which can reliably transcribe the host, and with a little bit of work, even the guest. Then a little writer-work to clean up the transcript and add notes about things shown but not spoken. Now we have something truly friendly for the reader. In fact, speaker-independent speech recognition is starting to almost get good enough for this but it’s still obviously the best solution to have the producer make the transcript. Even if the transcript is full of recognition errors. At least I can search it and quickly click to the good parts, or hear the mis-transcribed words.
If you’re making podcaster/vlogger tools, this is the direction to go. In addition, it’s absolutely the right thing for the hearing or vision impaired.