To videoblog or not to videoblog:

There’s a whole debate going on over on TechMeme about whether or not more people should videoblog.

There’s a lot of opinions out there on both sides, so let’s do a little bit of “truth or fiction.”

And he runs off from there; you can read the post for details.

This videoblog "craze" completely escapes me. It takes far more time and attention to get information from a videoblog than it does from a written blog. Like many meetings I attend, most things people seem to think requires video could just as easily be done in some written form. Take the popular Rocketboom as an example. I'm hard pressed to come up with a time when I went to Rocketboom and got information (as opposed to skits) that I hadn't already read about via other blogs. If someone expects my bandwidth, time, and attention, they need to give me useful stuff I can't get elsewhere.

Scoble tries to use two examples of how simple video can be put to good use. First, he put up a low-quality video of breakfast with his wife. Perhaps it's because I hang out with a group of folks who are talented photographers, but I don't see a single thing about this video that wouldn't be better captured by some simple text and one or two high-quality photos. Static display would actually be far more useful here. That makes this a poor example of how simple it can be to get video. It needs to be more than just simple to be worthwhile. It needs to be effective. This video is not effective.

Worse yet is this video of a meat counter. Again, if the idea is to show the variety of meat available, several stills with labels would do an excellent job. What is the benefit of video here?

He claims:

Now, all you “anti-video” people, please write a post where you explain to someone who hasn’t been part of our society for, say, 20 years, all about the meat selection Maryam had to choose from this afternoon when she was buying her meat. It’d take you thousands of words to explain what this short little video clip can say (and, it still wouldn’t get close).

That's simply wrong.

I've tried the video-to-tell-a-tale thing. I set out several years ago to accompany all of Pashnit's California Motorcycle Roads with video. You know what I found? While video can often be a nice accompaniment, Pashnit's photos and text were far more effective at communicating what a road was all about. His descriptions of California's Highway 36 remained far better than my video, which has long been my most popular.

Video certainly has its place. As does audio, which I'm also not a huge fan of. But they're generally better at accompanying well written text, or explaining text that might be too dense.

Noted. I disagree, though. There are some things that simply are better experienced in video (and that are easier to produce for most people). Most people couldn't do justice to that meat counter in text, but they could shoot it with their camera and upload the video no problem at all.

I agree with your "use the right tool for the job."

But, most of the communication on blogs and MySpace is for friends and family anyway, not for a mass audience. I just wanted to demonstrate that it's as easy to do a videopost as it is to do a text one, or a photo one, or an audio one. It's just dragging a file. Text is actually the hardest to do. At least if you want to put the "worthwhile" tag on it.

I agree that doing justice to the meat counter with text alone would be difficult. Many people could do justice to the meat counter with photos and text. Doing it justice with video is more difficult.

So, perhaps one way to look at the videoblog users of today is to view them as early adopters of the technology. With many new technologies there are a raft of lame/bad/not-good uses of that technology by folks attempting to experiment and find the uses of the technology. You could look at the current crop of vblog'rs as folks attempting to find uses and debug any of the posting/usage problems with the technology...

Or they could all be lamers, I'm not a fan of the whole thing personally since a majority of the people doing vblogs I've seen (only a small handful) are 'radio personalities' at best. There is a distinct lack of people I want to watch talking about something I want to hear about :)