Salwa is a digital artist, designer, blogger, and writer from U.K. She authors a blog at www.blogriffic.com. She is also on twitter
The internet is an ever-changing thing. Trends come and go, but the good ones stay forever. It seems that the trend that originated in 2005, and has been steadily gaining popularity, is posed to take over in 2009. I am talking of course of video blogging.
In the world of Web 2.0, many people are looking to further interact with web content. Video blogging is a perfect medium for community interaction, and is closer to real human contact than a regular text blog. The obvious leader in public videos, YouTube, has quickly become one of the largest websites online today. The reason for this is, quite obviously, community interaction. YouTube is now the 3rd most visited site world wide.
Originally, the internet was used simply as a huge database of information. Today, people no longer want to just gather information, they want to interact with it and contribute to it. They want to give their own opinions, critique the content, and question the validity of it. Public interaction ultimately leads to an increased body of knowledge.
Another example of public interaction benefiting a website can be seen in the massive success of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the only major site that allows any content contained on the site to be edited by the general public. This allows for massive amounts of content, which is usually very accurate. Everyone is an expert in something, so everyone can contribute information to Wikipedia containing their personal knowledge.
In my opinion, people today are becoming sick of the isolation of the internet. With the success of Myspace, Facebook, and other social networks, it is obvious that people are looking to humanize the internet. Video blogging is perfect for this, because it is close to actually talking to someone. Take YouTube for example. You can watch a video of someone talking, then submit a text comment, or even an entire video of your own, to respond to the video you watched.
Up until now, common people, as well as internet companies, have been debating trying out video blogging. While a few private video blogs have sprung up, I believe that the popularity of video blogging will explode in 2009. People are always ready for change around the New Year, and I expect video blogs to begin springing up all over the internet, eventually replacing normal text-based blogs.
Up until now, most video blogging has online been done through free public networks such as YouTube. However, I think that once people realize how huge video blogging could potentially become, private blogs will become a common thing. Blogs are not that expensive, and anyone with a webcam can make simple videos for free.
Video blogging is not necessarily a new thing, but it is not very popular yet. In fact, there is already an award for excellence in video blogging. These awards, called the Vloggies, were introduced to the public in 2006. The first known video blog was created in January 2000, but no one really knew anything about video blogging until about 2004.
Nice post. Even I hope that video blogging would easily win over other forms. I believe it would take more time, though 2009 would see a huge amount of change but video blogging in full swing would take a bit of time. Do you think it is possible in an years’ time?
Phillip
Salwa, GREAT post!
I think you’re right, it’s not very popular to the mainstream, it definitely is to the internet community, but I think this will grow more mainstream this year.
Yes, truly video blogging is taking over this year.. Search engines loves video content. But other forms of blogging are still important and should still be use, they are other ways of how to interact and communicate after all..
Given the point that video is so much more effective than the other mediums like text and even audio, has anyone given any thought about whether or not video under some circumstances may be too powerful? Or asked another way, are there times when text is preferable in certain relationships? Just asking.
Great Post and Video Blogging is great and the search engines love video & Blogging. Blogging is truly exploding and if you don’t have an established blog what the heck are you waiting for.
Great Post,
DG