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This is an edited version of a post I made to the videoblogging Yahoo! group, about podcasting vs. videoblogging.
Typically I’d just post this rant to my blog, but blogging is a pull medium, so I’d be just preaching to my converted lunatics. 🙂 Now an email list, ironically, is a good old fashioned medium that we’ve been trying to make redundant for many a year, but has guaranteed eyeballs. So here it is: Podcasting, obscuring the real breakthrough in we the media.
Funnily enough, there’s talk on the podcasters’ yahoo group about forming a freakin association.
Podcasting is community radio, with an on-demand delivery mechanism. End of story. (In my humble opinion 🙂 )
Sure, it will change radio and the big media as we know it, but in reality it is just a cheaper on demand version of community radio.
Podcasting is not about content, it is about reach. Some a-list bloggers who should know better, confuse the content that they podcast, with their revolution. Sorry, but the amateur content of most podcasts has been around since at least the 70s, in the form of what we in Australia call community radio, and in the U.S. I think as college radio or a subset of public radio. I could podcast some radio I did back in the 80s and you’d think it was a groundbreaking podcast.
A good example is the Gday world podcast. I don’t want to dis these guys, because they’re fellow Australians, and they do a really good show if you’re interested in blogosphere theoretics. But all they do is set up known experts to talk for an hour (over skype), throw in a few questions here and there, use Australian accents (which most Americans love, because I’ve used this trick myself at conferences over the years), and throw in one or two pretty weak jokes. If I were to broadcast their show on community radio, few would know the difference. In fact I know several community radio shows which would trounce Gday world, if they decided to podcast. There is also benefit in being first to market.
The podcasting revolution has come about not due to the content, but because of three big innovations which all came to pass in the last few years:
- Mobile mp3 devices like the ipod became available, so you can download free content.
- The majority of internet users now see copyright as an after thought, and think nothing of reusing copyrighted content. (the end of DRM will follow, over the next 10 years)
- Decreasing cost (in dollars and time) of bandwidth.
Now let me rant about videoblogging, or as I call it now, vogging (vlogging sounds way too much like “flogging”, and in Australia that’s slang for screwing), and yes I’ve been drinking the cool aid, and did a video about it the other day.
With podcasting (audio), delivery of information is quite thin, you have to listen for quite a while to get the same amount of information as text. In fact most podcasts would work better as text, if information absorption was the issue. Go figure.
This is why most people listen while travelling. There’s little else to do, and if you have a computer handy you’ll probably find the same information quicker by scanning text and blogs. Unless of course the podcast is music, in which case you can background it while doing something else, but then the copyright problem kicks in. A song clip or two you can probably get away with. A show full of songs? It’s only a matter of time before you’ll need to deal with the legalities.
This is probably why the podcasters are thinking about forming an organisation. Every day another big media broadcaster starts legal podcasting, which means the clock is ticking for backyard podcasters to get the whole copyright issue sorted.
Video is different. You can’t background video, you have to watch and listen. This is why good video is a challenge. However, I believe video is also the richest information delivery format, richer than audio for sure, and arguably richer than text. A good use of visuals, audio and text in a vog post can be an exceptionally frugal use of time for extensive information delivery. That’s the challenge, and the only thing stopping us at the moment are the lack of tools to justify the time spent in production, but even that is starting to change.
And that’s why I think video blogging is important, and will be the real
mover and shaker in the world of big media. That’s why John Udel’s
screencasting is groundbreaking; that’s why Channel9 is so exceptional
(wink to Scoble); and that’s why podcasting will make a big impression,
but won’t be the medium which has the most chilling effect to big media
as we know it.Give it a few years, when bandwidth becomes irrelevant, and the production and aggregation tools mature, and I believe that today’s video bloggers will change the world.
I’ll say it again, video blogging will change the world.