David's Vlog: Read my pixels

I am weary about video blogs (short vlogs): It takes time for them to start, you can't scan quickly, and the text is not indexed, so you will not catch it/stumble upon it when you throw out your Google search net.

But boy, what a difference it makes to actually see David Weinberger's vlog instead of just reading it.

David covered the Democratic Convention for the Boston Globe as an embedded Blogger. I really like the things he wrote, it was as if I was at the convention and that without moving a foot. It was one of the main things I read about the convention and it made me understand a lot better how media and politics work, like the Objective Rhetoric post.

I guess it helps, that I met David at the O'Reilly Foo Fest last year. He is a genuinely kind and passionate and I think this comes across also in his writing.

Understandably he was a bit miffed about Charles Cooper's article that more or less said: "Bloggers, you had you chance, you blew it". No weblog post could ever have brought Davids emotions across as good as his vlog. It is really amazing how well we are tuned to voice, facial and body expressions even when streamed over low bandwidth. Vlogs definitely have their place, it's just like salt, be mindful when to use it and careful with the dosage.

Sidenote, man what hoops I had to jump through to get a screen shot of the video. SnagIt wouldn't capture it, I couldn't find an option in neither the media player nor in Quicktime. It wasn't' that important, at the end I just wanted to make it. The clumsy workaround is: paste it into word and create a screenshot of the word screen, crap it to just the video and save it as .jpg. There got to be an easier way. Let me know.

Comments

[Kevin D. Keck]

I think your creative spelling of 'crop' says it all. : )