In a time where rich media is used everywhere, Loic Le Meur's idea of creating video comments is starting to get a lot of traction.
Idea
Replace traditional text based comments with video.
Implementation
I have been talking about Seesmic, a company whose founder is Loic Le Meur, in a post where I was remarking that more and more content is produced in video format. Loic's bet is that the traditional text comments can be replaced by short videos where the person replying is expressing his thoughts on camera. Seesmic currently provides a WordPress plugin and plans on distributing plugins for more blogging systems.
One of the first sites that added this feature was TechCrunch, but at that moment I have thought that this decision was based on the fact that Mike Arrington has invested in Seesmic.
However, as crazy as this idea seemed originally, people like Jason Calacanis and Alexis Bonte are starting to praise it.
Today I'm glad to say I was 100% wrong about Seesmic. I still hate the name, but I love where he has taken it. Video comments on blogs are brilliant.
Alexis uses the "100%, 40%, 10% rule" to explain why video comments, even if sometimes difficult to produce, are are a good idea.
Details
While I do love rich media content (just check my site InfoQ.com where we've been using rich media for quite a while) and find it refreshing, I am still concerned by a couple of aspects of video content for which we are lacking some important tools:
- it is still hard to be indexed and searched
- it is hard to skim over video content and measure its relevance
- it is quite impossible to reference/quote specific fragments
- it is way quite hard to produce high quality content, while producing low/crappy quality is way too easy
2 comments:
I tried to watch that video but I got bored and lost interest. If it had been a text, I probably would have read or at least skimmed it all. You can have my text when you pry it from my cold dead editor.
Video is too slow, putting me at the mercy of the speaker. I very rarely commit blocks of time to watch videos, so they need to be damn good to get and keep my attention.
With text, I can skim and I am in control.
Video is also harder to watch at work without getting in trouble. With text, I can read a few snippets while waiting for a build, for example.
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