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Making sense of our networked lives
Two years ago, when I launched
my yearlong series of Prime-Time
Hypermedia columns on the O'Reilly Network, the term screencast had
yet to be coined. It wasn't until November of 2004 that Joseph McDonald and
Deeje Cooley would separately propose
the term that I picked. A year later I found 325,000
references to the term in Google's index. Today, there are 7
million. Screencasts are being used by open source
projects, by commercial
vendors, and happily, as of last week, by InfoWorld reviewers.
While I'm delighted to watch all this unfold, I"m also mindful of the
challenges ahead. On the standards front, media players and
delivery formats remain in flux. And as screencasts (and other videos)
proliferate, the problem of URL-addressable random access -- also unsolved in
the realm of audio -- looms larger.
On the tools front, commercial software for capture, editing, and
production is good and getting better, but there's plenty of room for
improvement. And the commercial stuff isn't cheap, which deters casual and
spontaneous use. Free or inexpensive alternatives could meet that
need, but the Audacity
of screencasting has (in my opinion) yet to emerge.
While these constraints will ease over time, here's one that won't.
It's just plain hard, in any medium, to tell a great
story. The best screencasts I've done -- and not
coincidentally also the most successful -- speak to questions of why as
well as how. Why does Wikipedia work? Why would I want to use
del.icio.us? As networked software increasingly mediates our lives and
our work, we'll need to to make sense of these new modes of
experience. Telling the stories that help us do that is the highest and
best use of the medium. It's also the most elusive.
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