Video blogging

_______
Update: Also look at "Can Video Replace the Written Word" from the Christian Science Monitor. It does address some of my concerns about video, an appeal to emotion rather than to fact, and the too frequent informational paucity--Rocketboom being an example, as discussed below.
_______

This article, "An early peek into the Vlogosphere" from the ClickZ e-newsletter discusses the video blogging (vlog) phenomenon. What interests me about this is the ability for people to create their own ads, and to create fan-ads for products or services that they like (or don't).

From the article:

Embrace the vlogosphere. The blog, vlog, and moblog phenomenon is nascent but powerful. Don't underestimate the power the medium can have on your brand. Monitor vlogs and learn from them. After all, they can represent free, incredibly useful customer feedback (that all of your customers have access to, particularly now that most blog entries have a long search engine shelf life).

Your customers will produce your commercials. What happens when every customer, or potential customer, can produce a commercial for your product or service -- damaging or championing your brand? Vlogs have reach and credibility, even more than traditional broadcast stations in some cases. Think about the Dan Rather fiasco. Reading a blog about the scale of a new IKEA store is a much different online experience than actually seeing it, as Christian Brower showed viewers on his vlog recently.

Harness the power of brand love. If you're confident about your brand, give your customers a voice, a community, even a camera, so they can share the love for your brand or actively participate in your brand experience. A great example of that is Microsoft's Channel 9. The site attracts 900,000 software developers a month, who flock to watch interviews and demos and share their experiences.

Know thy vlogger. Although I haven't seen any data on the vlogging demographic, based on the vlogs I've seen it's a younger, tech-savvy market -- ages 15-34. They are, of course, the most highly coveted consumer market, as they are the cultural tastemakers.
_______

The article has links to a story done by someone about the opening of a new Ikea store in Phoenix, as well as to Amanda Congdon, who does a "news" videolog called Rocketboom, which I found to be pretty news-less, or at least time-consuming for little if any informational payoff. However, the one good thing about Rocketboom is that they offer the choice of different viewing formats.

Separately in an article from today's Austin American-Statesman, about African-American quality of life issues in Austin, there is video about the plans to rebuild an African-American business that was destroyed by fire. Lamentably, the video is only available in Quicktime format, which doesn't work on the particular computer where I am writing this. (You will have to register for online access to the paper.)

For the start of the H Street Main Street program, Kevin Palmer, Anwar Saleem, and I created a 5 minute video that we showed at the selection committee presentation. At the time, I was very proud of it, as it was produced in 12 hours of editing on a Mac (by Kevin, with my kibbitzing); Anwar shot the footage, for which I acted as the producer-reporter. That was another 3 hours. Later people referred to it as amateurish, and I suppose I was hurt somewhat by that, but looking back, I still feel pretty good about it--however, since I've seen it about 50 times I'm "been there, done that" about it, although it has some decent images. I'm not sure that the link for the video works, but I'll ask Kevin about it.

These days, I'd like to produce vlog-type ads on land use and transit topics, but that's one of many things on my long list of things I'd like to do.

One downside is that as technologies become more widespread, local community groups are at a disadvantage in comparison to the architecture firms, government agencies, planning consultants, etc., that make presentations with bells and whistles and beautiful renderings that all too often don't translate that well into real-life projects that residents must live with.

Speaking of video, WCAU-TV in Philadelphia uncovered a documentary that they produced in 1961 about the problems of traffic. It's pretty interesting, a little slow, definitely an artifact of its times (smoking on camera by the host, etc.).