Ready for your close-up? Here come the vlogs
By Michael Rogers (MSNBC)
Updated: 2005-03-21 10:12

Adding video to blogs is getting easier, but bigger problems lie ahead.

Screenshot of the home page of Ryanne Hodson's vlog. Like many early vloggers, Hodson has a professional background in video production. [MSNBC]

Yes, that's vlogging as in Vladivostok, thus creating a neologism even more awkward than blog.

On its surface the vlog is simple: adding video to personal Weblog publishing. For now, vlogging remains an embryonic phenomenon with probably less than a few thousand regular practitioners worldwide.

But it already raises a raft of interesting issues ranging from intellectual property protection to the future of text on the Web.

The current range of vlog content on the Web varies as widely — perhaps even more widely — than its text counterpart. The oeuvre ranges from some very slickly-produced material (the daily rocketboom.com starring an actress who previously appeared on NBC’s The Restaurant) to a wide range of personal idiosyncrasies: a vlogger eats a grapefruit; video of a 1999 Silicon Valley pool party; a vlogger goes jogging; some guys in L.A. meet for coffee.

And there are already lots of kids: kids learning to ski, learning to mow the lawn, even learning how to vlog. (Indeed, an 11-year-old vlogger named Dylan Verdi ended up on the ABC nightly news in January as the youngest vlogger in the world; subsequently, her 7-year-old sister absconded with the title.)

There's also some journalism happening: Last fall, vlogger Steve Garfield reported on whether political workers were getting too close to polling places in the Boston primary; more recently, Ryanne Hodson (then an editor at WGBH) filed in-house commentary on PBS pulling bunny Buster's visit to a lesbian household.

There's even already vlog backlash: a vlog trashing vlogs, as well as a cautionary vlog about what will happen when vloggers sell out.

The most prolific vloggers at present for the most part have video backgrounds: day jobs as video editors somewhere in the cogs or at the edges of Big Media.

That's not surprising. Shooting and editing a nifty vlog entry, not to mention adding niceties like music or titles, involves a bunch more skill sets than simply typing. (On the other hand, once the technology gets simple enough, vlogging will open up blogging to those who can't manage to string sentences together via keyboard. Oh boy.)

Vlog It! is built around a teleprompter script that runs onscreen as your Webcam records your delivery.

Commands that you put into the script automatically cut away to other video inserts, such as footage you've already shot and edited.

The video inserts can start over your shoulder, just like professional TV, and then zoom to full screen.

A simple "green screen" button lets you put yourself in front of any background you'd like, from the White House to the Pyramids.

Throw in the ability to easily add titles and music and you can produce something that is startlingly professional even by commercial television standards. (Of course, vloggers are already arguing among themselves about whether they want to look like the Ten O’Clock News in the first place.)

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