Scoble’s Link Blog

Wow, how can one man be so wrong. Andreas Haugstrup was right to get pissed off about David Scott Lewis’s article on Always on.

Video Blogs and Podcasts :: AO

It’s so ridiculously wrong. His expectations seem to be that video blogging should be like TV. His terms like “podcatching” are so off. His suggestion that podcasting is the same thing as audioblogging with more hype is flat out wrong. His assumption that shilling super bowl ads is “the stuff of a good vlog” is absurd and actually made me laugh out loud. This is one article that so badly written with so many misconceptions and improper definitions that it would have been better if left unwritten, and I don’t say that much.

At least he did call video blogs refreshing in the second paragraph. But this just makes me laugh.

Forbes’s Rich Karlgaard recently touted vblogs as one of three key trends for 2005. Also, as many of us noticed, AO was pushing vblogs from Davos. On the hype meter, vblogs reign supreme. I think the world of Rich and even plan to use his recent book, Life 2.0, as a guide when I return with my family to live in the States. But he’s dead wrong about vblogs. They are not a key trend, at least not for this year. His column cites tsunami coverage as a prime example of why vblogs are hot. Bad example, Rich. Although certain events will capture massive audience attention, vblogs are not ready for prime time. My point: The tsunami, Bill Gates’s blue screen of death at CES, the Diet Pepsi commercials during the Super Bowl: this is the stuff of a good vblog. But they’re more like special reports, not the content of a standard feed. And let’s face it: even the AO vblogs from Davos were a big dud.

I perhaps have a special understanding of blogs. I’ve studied them meticulously. To date I keep tabs on over 150 feeds though it’s growing so fast that as of this week I think I’ll no longer be able to keep tabs on all the vlogging community with video feeds. There are vlogs that do nothing but distribute news clips, vlogs that do nothing but redistribute viral media, and quite a few vlogs that are personal logs. Yes, there are even vlogs that do nothing but redistribute movie trailers or TV ads. Vlogs are not a genre. They are a medium and they are as varied as blogs.

Then there’s the following quote.

Due to bandwidth requirements vblogs are impractical today. If a service such as Orb Networks decides to provide the feeds, this might work?but not until then, or until faster downloading speeds take hold. Although in theory vblogs can turn anyone into the web equivalent of a TV producer or host, I can’t imagine too many people willing to download lots of vblog enclosures. Sad to say, but a porn or beheadings feed might be popular. (What does this say about our global society?) Shorts might be popular, such as the new 24 series designed for mobile phones. Still, all in all, it’s too early for vblogs. vblogs are more than an order of magnitude greater in bandwidth consumption than podcasts.

Video blogging does have bandwidth issues, but the suggestion that, Orb Networks, some over-hyped steaming media service for cellular devices could solve that is, hysterical. I propose cows. Cows have a closer chance of solving the issue. When did he write this? Vloggers already have solutions. One is OurMedia.org and another is Archive.org. They provide nearly endless bandwidth and storage and the community is working tirelessly on longer term solutions with technologies such as bittorrent.

Moving on… This appears to be the heart of all misunderstanding.

Regarding podcasts, it’s important to note that “podcast” is the trendy equivalent of “audioblog,” which doesn’t sound very sexy. One might say that audioblogs are like blog-based news or talk shows, and podcasts are a superset of audioblogs including musically oriented blogs (and perhaps vblogs). Think of audioblogs as “informational podcasts.” To the best of my knowledge, I’m the first one to note this specific difference, so I’d rather play nice and say that “podcast,” “audioblog,” and “blogcast” are synonymous. However, Marc Canter verbalized that the term “podcast” is too specific to an Apple product line. Noting that there are indeed differences, I think “podcast” sounds better than “audioblog.”

Ok, I think the problem here is David Lewis thinks the terms podcast, audioblog, and blogcast are like genres of medium or something when in fact they are technical terms with very specific meanings. An “audioblog” is a web based log that contains audio. It could be any kind of audio. It could be a song or someone talking. It is NOT an “informational podcast”. What in the hell is that supposed to mean?

A “podcast” is an RSS enabled distribution of content (syndication) with the end focus on getting it onto and playing it on a portable device, hence pod. It could be audio or even video, but mostly audio, because there aren’t to many PVR (portable video recorder/players) on the market yet. A podcast need not even be in a freaking blog format. Some radio stations don’t even have a blog element at all. They have articles and transcripts in a newspaper format and just drop the urls to audio clips in an RSS feed for syndication. A podcast is not just “a trendy equivalent of audioblog”.

A “blogcast” isn’t so well defined. But it does imply that it’s the act of broadcasting content using a blog format with an RSS syndication feed.

I think I’m going to just stop there. It would take all day to unravel the rest of this article. At least I got a good start.

Update: As if to perfectly make my point the following article was written by someone with more than a clue. It’s an excellent article which starts with properly defining the terms podcasting and video-casting. Either we’re conspiring, or perhaps we’re both right. Here’s something to enjoy.

Is Video-Casting The Next Big Thing? Move Over Podcasting - Robin Good’s Latest News