Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Video blog or not, that is the question

November 24, 2003 | Comments: (0)

Video blog or not, that is the question

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Some interesting reactions to my video blog post - which I deliberately labeled an "experiment" by the way.

Jack Hodgson thinks video in blogs is an interesting idea, adding: "But I'm not sure if just pointing to a video clip in your weblog makes it a "video blog".

And after observing that life would have been simpler if I used a .mac account (hmm, maybe…), a reader commented on Jack's site that he too didn't consider the post a "video blog."

Sure, I'm not the first to add video to a blog, or any web site for that matter. Step one for me was to understand the mechanics of the process. As for exactly what constitutes a "video blog," I think that discussion is wide open. I'd argue a "video blog" is one that primarily uses video as the communication medium. The reality is that "normal" blogs are increasingly using audio, pictures and video as "quotable" sources. It's all about having a broad palette of media tools at your disposal.

Jon Udell writes that he wants to "understand how we might make it easier both to publish and to link into (i.e., quote from) audio and video."

The idea of treating audio and video as quotable text, as it were, is intriguing. Imagine being able to link to a video, but not just take the reader/viewer to the start of that video. In the same way that deep text linking can take readers straight to one portion of text, imagine deep linking to one specific segment of audio or video. Now that would be cool. Calling all Quicktime experts?

UPDATE: Jon Udell sent me an email pointing out that the post I linked above actually demonstrates the scenario I talked about. I'm guilty of not downloading Real Player and watching the clip, but regardless, it's great to realize we can already start treating video in this way.

Posted by Mark Jones on November 24, 2003 12:10 PM

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