My VLOG children
: Well, two snowflakes do not an avalanche make, but it’s a start.
Justin Katz answers my vlogs with a vlog of his own, a neat job with some new tricks to teach this old dog (including taking a clip from my vlog and inserting it into his).
Having said that, Justin sees problems with vlogging — cost, bandwidth, added copyright armor around video. None of that is wrong.
But I still say that for the right content and the right voice (both of which I’m still trying to find and fine-tune), vlogs will be best (and bandwidth will increase and, thanks to the software and equipment I use, costs are already coming down).
Vlogs will snowball soon enough.
: I note also in my town paper that my town — run by tax-and-spend Republicans who act like drunk Democrats (because they are unopposed hereabouts and, as you know, power corrupts and so they spend to prove they are powerful, but I digress) — is debating improving the free access channel it controls on my cable system. They’re talking about taking $300k worth of equipment they already own AND adding $500k more AND hiring someone to run the thing, all to create something expensive (isn’t that the point) that no one will watch (isn’t that also the point?).
Well, folks, for a few cheap webcams and a cheap piece of software and one good high school teacher with some smart students, you can create a great channel that’s also accessible on the Internet anytime you want it.
Why, we could broadcast all those committee meetings where you don’t allow any debate (because you are all-powerful). That is what this revolution can bring.
: The point of this vlogging is that it will seed others’ imaginations. My kids just used my software and cam to record videos for their grandparents. My 6-year-old wrote her own script and read it on the teleprompter and chose her graphics. It is THAT easy. My sister, a Presbyterian minister, looked at this and imagined the videos she could create for new members or fundraising campaigns. Glenn Reynolds has unpacked his. Justin created his own vlog. BoingBoing points to a different kind of vlogging by a Dutch filmmaker (it appears to be off the air right now). And the folks at Macromedia put up video snippets — interviews and commentary — from a recent conference.
My goal was to prove the concept and see where it goes from there.
