time to reconsider video blogging?

Forbes.com is running an intriguingly titled article, "How Videoblogs Will Change Newsgathering", which unfortunately does very little to shed light on that question.

The latest shot over the bow of the good ship Business As Usual may come from an unexpected quadrant of the Internet known as blogs specifically Vblogs, or video web logs. To say this is phenomenon is nascent may be giving it too much credit for being established at this point. But with the power of the Internet to spread ideas and the inclination of hardware vendors to throw capabilities at cell phones, video cameras and PDAs until those gadgets catch on, VBlogging may one-day soon present challenges and opportunities to television news departments.

Fine, this is old news. But the article did raise some interesting ancillary questions for me:

What does it mean when a conservative moneymag like Forbes picks up on a speculative trend like this? Is it a sign that vidblogging is heading toward mainstream visibility? Does someone on the editorial staff believe it's an important area to watch? Or are they simply buying some offbeat-tech-news feed package from the byline outfit Pinnacor? And isn't that byline kind of weird in itself: "Provided By Pinnacor"?

And, what is the state of video blogging today? There was a lot of v-blog interest about a year ago, so what's new? My sense after a quick unscientific survey is, still not too much. Given the relative technical complexity of producing and delivering video, and the limitations of tools, systems and networks for dealing with large data objects, I'm not surprised that few people are yet actively exploring this emerging medium. But there are certainly some interesting experiments going on. Vidblogs is frequently updated and there are some fascinating video authors in that group. Lisa Rein still has way more energy than me, I have no clue how she does it. Audiovisceral is an MIT PhD candidate's experimental site. And we can't forget Steve Mann, the borgfather of wearable computing and protagonist at EyeTap, whose visionary work continues to move closer to a pragmatic expression.

Hmm, maybe there are some new threads to follow here. Pick up later, for now duty calls ;-)

Posted by Gene at March 8, 2004 09:54 AM | TrackBack