Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

Many phones have automatic keypad locking and it's great. It does not however stop your children from repeatedly calling one person over and over and over.

Peter, if you're reading this: I did not return any of the 42 calls I received from your young daughter because I could not understand the messages.

During the website reading of this weekend I stumbled upon a small handful of people who are experimenting with posting small snippets of video to their website in reverse chronological order. Videoblogging they call it (or vblogging or the more exotic vogging).

Jay Dedman has started a videoblog called Momentshowing. It is proclaimed at the top of the page that: Videoblogging is a new language. It's about Momentshowing, not Storytelling. And Me-TV writes: This is a wiki about the new language of Video Blogging.

Two things:

1. Videoblogging is not a new language. Movies have been made for over 100 years and there is a very developed vocabulary for dealing with movies. Granted the concept is interesting and there may be possibilities for something new if you can mix hypertexuality with movies online — that might need a new language. What I've seen so far is a series of movies with no relation being posted to a website. It's just a collection of movies. Videoblogging is not a new language nor a new medium. At best it's an existing medium in a new context.

2. Showing moments with moving images is storytelling. No matter how cool you think momentshowing sounds.

With the cranky stuff out of the way let's get on with it because this is certainly very interesting even if it's not revolutionary.

Video on the web isn't exactly something new. Apple has been hosting movie trailers for longer than I've been online I think (I went online in '95 or '96). The new thing here is that videos are making their way into personal websites. Someone — I've forgot who — said that blogging is posting photos of your cat in reverse chronological order. Videoblogging will then be posting videos of your cat in reverse chronological order. Looking at how many people have cats this makes for some very boring videoblogs.

Blogging can be much more rewarding and interesting than posting about your cat, and I believe that videoblogging can also be more than posting videos of your cat.

It makes me a bit sad when Jay Dedman wants to distance videoblogging from storytelling. Because movies if there's one thing that movies are great at it's telling stories whether it's feature films, music videos or a ten second showing of a moment. I could go all David Bordwell and talk about a narrative as a chain of events in cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space., but that's not necessary. Instead I'll encourage everyone involved with videoblogging to focus on the stories… even if you call it moments. Don't just use this for movies of your cats. Be better than that.

Videos in blogs can have many more purposes than to tell stories, but I don't regard these as videoblogs in most cases. Posting a video might be the best way to show how something is done (how to fix your remote if you've thrown it at the wall), but that doesn't make the blog a videoblog. Just as this blog isn't a photoblog just because I have photos in my posts every now and again.

Videoblogging is different from text blogging (and photoblogging if different too). The medium contrains you in what you can do (and it opens doors, but that's obvious). Unlike text blogging you can't skim a movie. You have to watch it from begining to end at a set pace and thus you have to set aside time to watch it. Even if it's just ten seconds. Also bandwidth can be a real killer. It does take much longer to fetch a movie than a normal web page. For the same reasons there a videoblogger should never post a video with an an accompanying text. This will allow readers (viewers) to screen videos before initiating viewing and downloading.

So I obviously don't agree with Peter Van Dijck's manifesto when he writes that videobloggers should aim for quantity not quality. Every blogger (of all flavours) should always aim for quality over quantity or their blogs will get boring. Videobloggers in particular should aim for quality over quantity since the reader (or viewer) has to invest more time and energy into reading (or viewing).

I do agree with Peter when he says that Optimizing the workflow is important. Right now it's too difficult to get videos online and the phenomenon won't spread to the masses until the process of videoblogging is simplified.

I have more thoughts on videoblogging, but it is getting late and I have to get up early to spend the day at the university tomorrow. I will leave you with some videoblogging links. It looks like pages are being added to the Me-TV wiki fast so I will recommend that one first and foremost.

Futher reading:

• Me-tv.org: A wiki on videoblogging. Very informative.
• List of videoblogs by Peter Van Dijck
• Peter Van Dijck's random thoughts on Videoblogging.
• Vogma Manifesto: Rules for vogs