Sharing and Celebrating Points-Of-View

Santa Cruz, CA: Video Killed the Blogging Star

Just when you got used to the blogging boom, along comes another savvy Web-related innovation

by Sergey Loginov

A lot of ink has been spilled about blogging, a Web-based activity that ranges from outbursts of verbal diarrhea and exhibitionism to what was highly regarded by media critics as acts of citizen journalism. Blogs have revitalized the meaning of the phrase “freedom of speech”—everybody who has something to say now has access to a cheap and effective medium of mass communication with the rest of the world. The clunky word “blog” comes from “Web log.” A few years ago it made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary. Pretty soon this solid publication may have to consider an even clunkier entry—“vlog.” As you have already guessed, it comes from “video blog.”

Vlog is a relatively new medium that promises to be the next big thing. Just as its ubiquitous text predecessor, video blog doesn’t require much money and technical expertise. If the number of blogs that exist now in the world has exceeded 60 million, vlogs are still in the stage of hundreds. But it will change pretty soon, at least according to Taylor Barcroft, a video blogger from Santa Cruz whose vlog FutureMedia.org was named as one of the world’s best by London’s The Independent. Barcroft thinks that the only problem that prevents people from mass adoption of this innovation is a lack of understanding among most people that this medium even exists yet, much less that they have the technology to receive it already in their possession. (more)

posted by JOlmsted @ 11:14 AM