The broadcast-only aspect of video blogging has been a hurdle to virality and scale. Some smart folks at Vloggercon took note, and worked up both test hacks and structural concepts that enable interactive videoblogging.
Blogging is the first personal content management system that allowed for conversation. What do we have to do to make vlogging more conversational? Shawn Van Every is an adjunct at NYU's Interactive Communications Program who has been doing research on what makes media social. Atop his list is both commenting within video and socializing through video - if these activities were enabled, video would be more than a closed black box on a blog. Tagging is a great way for people to find something, but comments add much more information.
Van Every and his colleagues created a widget that allows Wordpress users to comment at a certain point in time on a video. They only support QuickTime on WordPress currently, but the technology is open source and they encourage others to contribute to the project. He also showed off something called "flavored video comments" - his team took all of the comments on a blog, then created relationships between the videos and the comments that automatically exposed the vlog's context. It also links to that spot in the video. Since the comment was made at a point in time, you actually link to the specific point in the video at which the comment was made.
Josh Paul designed a system that would both play video and load videos back-to-back. These threaded video comments look a lot like what YackPack does with threaded audio. (Disclosure note: Omidyar Network is an investor in YackPack.) The comments play inline, but they can branch if they have been enabled by the system. You enter the URL where your video comment is, and then the link gets embedded into the tree within Paul's system. You can try this out by visiting Aweli.
If we believe that a vlog should be more than a video on a blog, then what needs to be developed? Markus Sandy suggests control, navigation, and conversation - all of the interactivity that we typically associate with a text blog. At a more practical level, I wonder where comment video should live. Folks in the room wanted the video to appear both on their own blog and within the other person's post. Of course, this means that comment video must work across formats, since you don't know what other formats the original post used or was published to. Standards for video commenting will be an important part of enabling interactive behavior.
Interested folks can join in this conversation at the Interactive Videoblogging wiki.
Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys vloggercon vlog media technology
