Ready for your close-up? Here come the vlogs

If you aggregate it, will they come?
Once you’ve produced a tasty video morsel, serving it to the masses is not necessarily simple.  Vlogging most famously came to public notice when amateur video of last December’s tsunami began showing up on the Web. But that was also when some early vlog sites learned that having a hit video could be costly — either your hosting company would shut you down for exceeding your bandwidth limits, or you’d end up owing thousands of dollars in streaming costs. Vloggers quickly learned to move highly popular video onto free hosting sites like San Francisco’s Internet Archive or else use a distributed streaming method like BitTorrent. 

The question of who hosts vlog video is still a stumbling block. There is at least one way to actually operate a vlog for free: You begin with a free blogging tool like Blogger and then, through some tricky steps, put the actual video on the Internet Archive, which currently offers vloggers free hosting.  But it’s not a particularly simple or flexible solution and if vlogging really takes off, it’s anyone’s guess as to how long the nonprofit Internet Archive can afford to be the world’s indiscriminant video server. 

Thus there are a handful of startups on both coasts looking to be the Blogger or Typepad of vlogging, with various business models ranging from paid hosting to advertising support to we’ll-think-of-something-later. The publishers of Vlog It! plan to offer free hosting to purchasers of their $99 software. Another hosting concept, vimeo, is currently being tested by one of the brains behind the blissfully brainless (and lucrative) collegehumor.com.

On the audience side, the experience of watching vlogs is still clumsy and not nearly as convenient as clicking around text blogs. Sometimes a video begins quickly, but more often there are long and mysterious delays — and occasionally you may have to download an entire 10 megabyte file before there’s anything to watch. So vloggers are already working to streamline the vlog experience.

One approach is to create a videocentric version of the RSS tool that lets readers “subscribe” to multiple text blogs and view them in one place. A video version would essentially let viewers create playlists of vlogs, ideally all in the same digital media player with easy transitions between each. One of the most advanced efforts thus far is called Ant, available now for the Mac and with a Windows version soon to arrive. Mefeedia, another effort at aggregation, now offers over two hundred vlog feeds.

The ethics of "quoting"
A bigger problem than technical hurdles lies in wait for vloggers: What are the rules about using clips from professional video? The pioneer vloggers are much more interested in creating their own material, but sooner or later we may see a style of vlogging that integrates clips from existing media. Text blogs can easily link to professional sources of content like newspapers and magazines because so much text is available and free on the Web. But vloggers may find the material they want to “quote” doesn’t exist online except when they capture it themselves as a clip.

“What will really be a breakthrough,” says Scott Rafer, CEO of RSS (and video) aggregator Feedster, “is when someone comes up with a tool that lets you drag and drop TiVo clips into your vlog.”

That, of course, will bring intellectual property issues to the fore.  Already sites like onegoodmove post long clips from commercial programming like Jon Stewart’s "The Daily Show," and thus far most content owners haven’t complained.

But they have certainly noticed: One of the most-quoted facts at television industry conferences these days is that while about 900,000 people saw the Jon Stewart /Tucker Carlson “Crossfire” dust-up on CNN, well over two million saw it on the Web over the next two days. For now, that’s good promotion. But every television executive today is thinking about how to slice-and-dice their content to make extra money on alternative delivery devices.  Clips from "The Daily Show," for example, might make great for-pay content on cell phones. Already some networks put invisible digital watermarking into their video so that if necessary, they can send software robots out to scour the Web and see exactly how and where their video is being used. 

Most broadly, the rise of vlogs is going to provide an interesting study about the differences between text and video. Text offers organized, abstract idea compression, a fundamentally different communication mode than video. A text blog can be scanned quickly for items of interest, for example, while a video needs to be watched. Some vloggers claim vlogs can be scanned using the forward button in the Quicktime player, but that’s not exactly the same thing. Video needs to be watched — and you thought you were wasting time on blogs now.

My own dream is that the Web will mature into a seamless metamedium, in which one can use video, text, graphics, audio or animation at any moment, depending on what you’re trying to say. And even though we’ve struggled for years with how to do that on professional news Web sites, we’re still far from a truly fluid and intuitive solution. Perhaps it will be the vloggers who will help figure out exactly how our metamedium in the making will ultimately play out.

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