Today’s San Francisco Chronicle: Video bloggers claim spotlight. Online diaries looking a lot like television.
Headline aside — online video and videoblogs decidedly do not look like television — Ellen Lee nicely captures some of the currents of the online video revolution, led by people like my friends Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson, pictured above, neither of whom watches much if any TV anymore. Excerpt:
No longer satisfied with transcribing through just words or photographs in their online diaries, thousands of Web loggers, or bloggers, have turned to video blogging. In place of text, or sometimes in addition to it, “vloggers” use film clips. The clips last a few seconds to a few minutes and are archived one after another in chronological order, the most recent first.
They represent the latest means in catching fragments of life, made possible now that more and more people have access to high-speed Internet service and the necessary equipment, basically a camcorder, a computer and cheap, sometimes even free, software and storage services.
The community is diverse. There’s the soccer mom in Plano, Texas, who records her two children, ages 5 and 7, as they bake a bagel pizza, play softball and hang out with their grandfather. There’s a Peace Corps worker in Botswana who shows the daily life of people in the village of Nata. Hollywood actor-comedian Tom Green offers the TomGreen.com Channel, narrating, with his deadpan, irreverent humor, as he makes an appearance on the Carson Daly television show, hangs out with pal and skateboarder Tony Hawk and drives around Los Angeles.
“The everyday events in our life are special,” said Dedman, who along with Hodson was one of the earliest video bloggers, starting back in 2004. “They’re not dramatic, Hollywood moments.”
In less than two years, the number of video blogs, also known as vlogs and video podcasts, has exploded from a handful to more than 7,000, according to video blogging directory Mefeedia. “It’s Jerry Time!” — which consists by a single, fortysomething man’s rants on life — was even nominated for a special Emmy award this year, although it lost to an AOL production. And next month, hundreds of vloggers from around the world plan to converge in San Francisco for a conference dubbed Vloggercon. …
video blogging has some distinguishing characteristics. Vlogs build on the trend started by blogs, which have become a digital means of self-expression, publishing and communication. “Video bloggers are serious about video as a way of social expression,” said J.D. Lasica, co-founder of Ourmedia, a site that lets users store multimedia files. “They don’t just upload a video and walk away from it.”
Related: a podcast with reporters Ellen Lee and Benny Evangelista discussing video blogging.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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