I've been fortunate enough to get some early insight into Seesmic. This company already provides video commenting capabilities to TechCrunch through a very easy to use WordPress plugin.
The first thing that struck me is that the camera loves me as much as Steve Balmer likes Linus Torvalds. I suck badly as a talking head. That puts my thought of doing some vlog posts soon to a horrible and necessary halt. Good thing this happened before humiliating myself more publicly.
But I dee-gres.
I don't see Video commenting as an opposition to traditional (text) commenting. I think they are complementary and that they yield options for the user. Loic and his team are doing a wonderful job improving user's experience and bringing options to people to interact with blogs, sites and brands in new ways.
The major benefit I see in video comments is that they let you take a more humane look at people that leave comments. Also some people are naturals at video commenting and are really interesting to watch (once again, count me out of the category).
Video comments can be a very good complement to multimedia-oriented sites and blogs that are heavy on direct interactions. I think it will get particularly interesting when the capabilities expand beyond talking heads allowing presentation-style comments to be shown and some basic on-line video editing.
I don't foresee video comments (or vlogs for that matter) running over their text-only predecessors. Why not? 3 reasons: portability, scalability and speed.
Video does not adapt well to all the different ways that we have got used to read our subscriptions in. Cellphones, blackberries and other portable devices aren't that great to watch and listen to videos, and, even when they do perform moderately well, there are situations in which users can't access other things but plain text.
Also, a lot of people might and will feel reluctant to appear in multicolor. Because they are not that great at it (ahem), because they are shy, have a bad hair day or because writing is much quicker, which leads to reason 3.
I know a lot of people who subscribe to tons of feeds. I am amongst them. Written data flows feed readers quickly and within a glance one can scan through a lot of information, discern noise from signal, pay attention to what's interesting and appealing and skip over what's not. Video, on the other hand is linear, there's no way to skip through it and know for a fact one hasn't gone over an important chunk.
Finally there's a psychology behind posting from the relative safety of text. There is a certain comfort in the sheer fact of not butting a part of the body into something. That is part of the reason why SMS text messages are so popular (that an pricing).
Video comments are a nice new alternative, but won't place a single nail on text's coffin. It is wrong to see this emerging technology as an opposition to what we are already used to, it is just another option.
Thoughts on Video Commenting
I've been fortunate enough to get some early insight into Seesmic. This company already provides video commenting capabilities to TechCrunch through a very easy to use WordPress plugin.
The first thing that struck me is that the camera loves me as much as Steve Balmer likes Linus Torvalds. I suck badly as a talking head. That puts my thought of doing some vlog posts soon to a horrible and necessary halt. Good thing this happened before humiliating myself more publicly.
But I dee-gres.
I don't see Video commenting as an opposition to traditional (text) commenting. I think they are complementary and that they yield options for the user. Loic and his team are doing a wonderful job improving user's experience and bringing options to people to interact with blogs, sites and brands in new ways.
The major benefit I see in video comments is that they let you take a more humane look at people that leave comments. Also some people are naturals at video commenting and are really interesting to watch (once again, count me out of the category).
Video comments can be a very good complement to multimedia-oriented sites and blogs that are heavy on direct interactions. I think it will get particularly interesting when the capabilities expand beyond talking heads allowing presentation-style comments to be shown and some basic on-line video editing.
I don't foresee video comments (or vlogs for that matter) running over their text-only predecessors. Why not? 3 reasons: portability, scalability and speed.
Video does not adapt well to all the different ways that we have got used to read our subscriptions in. Cellphones, blackberries and other portable devices aren't that great to watch and listen to videos, and, even when they do perform moderately well, there are situations in which users can't access other things but plain text.
Also, a lot of people might and will feel reluctant to appear in multicolor. Because they are not that great at it (ahem), because they are shy, have a bad hair day or because writing is much quicker, which leads to reason 3.
I know a lot of people who subscribe to tons of feeds. I am amongst them. Written data flows feed readers quickly and within a glance one can scan through a lot of information, discern noise from signal, pay attention to what's interesting and appealing and skip over what's not. Video, on the other hand is linear, there's no way to skip through it and know for a fact one hasn't gone over an important chunk.
Finally there's a psychology behind posting from the relative safety of text. There is a certain comfort in the sheer fact of not butting a part of the body into something. That is part of the reason why SMS text messages are so popular (that an pricing).
Video comments are a nice new alternative, but won't place a single nail on text's coffin. It is wrong to see this emerging technology as an opposition to what we are already used to, it is just another option.