Is 2008 going to be the year that video blogging takes off?
Not sure, but I’ve been watching people like Andy Piper and Chris Dalby (aka Yellowpark) start to play with Seesmic and it looks interesting. Services like this could encourage more of us other than the hardcore video bloggers like iJustine to give it a try. Scoble has been saying good things about Qik – which allows video blogging directly from your phone. Might this be a glimpse into how things might go?
At any rate, I thought I should try my first video blog post.
Well… sort of. After a few aborted attempts, I eventually bottled it and went for a compromise – I recorded a screen capture video of me playing with one of my PDAs along with audio of me talking as I did it.
A couple of observations:
1) I’m really not a fan of seeing myself on screen. Or hearing my voice. Still a bit too self-conscious for that. I think I find it a lot easier to hide behind the written word! Do I really sound like that to everyone? Argh.
2) I ramble. In hindsight, I probably should have planned what I was going to say first – I ended up spending about 4 minutes saying what could possibly have been said in half that time. Whoops.
3) I haven’t really got the tech for it. The screen capture worked okay, but I don’t have a proper microphone. Using the in-built microphone in my ThinkPad sort of works, but it sounds pretty poor – recording the running sound of the computer as much as it did my voice! It’s okay for a first post, but if I decide to do this again I’ll have to try and do a bit better.
I’ll find a place to upload my video to and post it here in the next day or so… YouTube is an obvious choice, but I wanna try a few alternatives first.
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You could try Viddler, which I like a lot for sharing video – enables bookmarking / tagging / note-making part way through a video, which I think is pretty neat.
I agree that I’m still not sure about the whole video blogging thing… if I get back into Seesmic I’ll see how I get on with it.
Your third point is the key here! The right hardware is a 3g phone enabled, with a “dual” camera (one in front, the other on the back). The right software is not youtube (yet, probably), but one that allows you to have a full experience when you have a “writer block”. The video on your phone should act as an “tape recorder” for writers, syncing in real time with a “cross platform” site – software, hardware and network independent.
Stage fright is a funny one. I still get it and still find it weird seeing and listening to myself. The more I use it, the more I want to use it. The funny one for me now, is walking around videoing myself with my HTC Touch. Since seesmic launched the mobile features, I am constanty walking around talking to myself. That is a weird one.
[…] done his review in video form, which is worth a watch. I wish I’d thought of that… I wanted to try the video blog thing more, especially now that I’ve got a Seesmic […]