Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

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This is a Lumiere video. The video contains no audio. Feel free to leave your own music running.

It's Vlog Anarchy week at Michael Verdi's place. He started off with some sour comments on those who tries to define videoblogging (or vlogging or whatever the buzzword of the day is). After talking at length about how people (like me) who'd like to try and define videoblogging should stop saying “you can't” when it comes to blogging, Michael tells me I can't make a text comment on his blog post…

We'll let that stand for a while.

Anyway. Michael has misunderstood my purpose when I say I want to define videoblogging. I'm not trying to put him or anyone else in some creative prison with the vlogging police cracking down his door, and I'm not trying to create for abstract elite. I'm looking at media and genres, and the differences between them.

It's about finding blogging interesting. It's about looking at blogging because it's inter-connected communication on a level unprecedented due to the fact that the inter-connectedness is inherent in the genre. That's a huge deal. It changes the way you have to think and talk about blogging, because you can't talk about it like radio, or television or print publishing. That's why I want and need to seperate podcasts (on-demand radio), on-demand video and blogging. They're not the same, and you can't treat them the same.

I'm not telling you what you can't do. You can do whatever you want. I'm going to call your works by different names, and I'm going to treat your works differently depending on what they are. If you're doing some form of media studies on-demand video distributed online is not new, it's just video. Videoblogging that taps into the blogosphere? That's new.

That's why it irks me when David Scott Lewis doesn't get it. Videoblogging is not just a video version of a podcast. Podcasts aren't audioblogging — as Eric Rice tells him, it's about the community, the blogosphere. Videoblogging isn't just video on your computer, a videoblog post isn't just the video.