Just call me il primo
: Justin Katz finds an Italian blog that reports on vlogging and links to him, me, and Glenn Reynolds.
Neither of us speaks Italian but I do in any case love the description of me: “Jeff Jarvis, che
1 response to “Just call me il primo:”
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Jeff, I do speak Italian – here’s a translation of the Ipse blog for you:
While we are still discussing the blog ‘novelty’ here, in the Unites States, there’s a lively debate going on about 3G blogs: video blogs, or third generation blogs.
On InstaPundit, Glenn Reynolds says that blogs are starting to go beyond the text-only format, which remains the most common to date: “falling prices for storage, bandwidth, and digital cameras will result in weblogs going multimedia over the next year.” According to Reynolds, bloggers will add more and more videos and photos on their sites.
Jeff Jarvis, who is reputed to be the first video blogger in America (which probably means the first in the world) and has spent his New year holidays looking into the issue (as he says in his blog BuzzMachine), is even more optimistic. The future – he says – belongs not only to vlogs but to mob blogging, i.e. weblogs which can be accessed via mobile phones, such as PDAs and 3G mobiles.
David Galbraith goes on to forecast the rise of “bloggerazzi”, a blog version ofDolce Vita-type paparazzi: bloggers equipped with mobile phones and digital videocameras who take pictures of celebrities and post them immediately on their blogs thanks to an SMS to blog gateway (which is yet to be invented).
Justin Katz, from Dust in the Light, is less optimistic and more cautious. His main objection to those who foresee a widespread use of vlogs is that video weblogs have limitations when compared to traditional weblogs. For example, videos don’t allow you to set up links, which are critical to success not only for weblogs but for the entire web. The second issue, according to Katz, is that videos are not at all easy to “quote”: if you want to copy them and insert them into another site, you need to use different programmes and the procedure is fairly complicated, at least at the moment. Thirdly, equipment costs are hardly within everybody’s reach. And finally, working with videos requires more time than text and not everyone has time to waste.
Jarvis replied to these objections by saying that the technologies which will enable people to produce video blogs quickly and easily are on their way, thanks, among other things, to the American government funding technological development. In a BuzzMachine posting dating from December 31, Jarvis focuses on the most interesting things produced so far in the vlog world and presents the results of his research on the subject, including a fairly complex video blog which he produced together with the Sony group’s Screenblast.
Glenn Reynolds is law professor at the University of Tennessee, is passionate about music (Creedence Clearwater Revival) and author of books and articles mostly with the relationship between sophisticated technology and personal liberty. His Instapundit.com has been called by the Pravda “the New York Times of bloggers” (he says so
