Million well chosen words may not be enough
Shel Israel, a pioneer in blogging and co-author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, believes, in time, more people will be using video cameras than posting text to blogs. For one reason, he believes it's easier.
Shel's no fool. And as a journalist and writer he'd be reluctant to acknowledge the role of video. So I'm watching a few episodes of Shel's new 'Up Close' video shows at Your Truman Show.
I'm already picking up a few gems in his videos that I may not have picked up in text. One, the title of the post coming from something Shel said, 'a million well chosen words may not be enough.'
Shel tells the story of years ago of when a young video news reporter covering the same story as Shel in New Bedford, Mass climbs out of TV station van with satellite dish. No matter whether Shel did Pulitzer quality writing, his story was not going to be in the paper until the next morning. The Bozo with the camera and makeup was going to have the story on news at 11.
My guess is that video on the net will become much bigger. And though I do not see video replacing text altogether at anytime, Shel has peaked my interest. I am looking at video cameras. And you may see me with 120 second tip of the week videos coming soon.
As way of background and disclosure, Your Truman Show says it's '...committed to helping great storytellers to share their stories on video. It provides a free platform that enables anyone to create their own personal channel, share their stories and review other people's lives.' Shel's on their board. I'm not.
Thanks for the great mention of my video debut. Like you, I do not believe that video will replace text online any more than HipHop will replace Rock. But I di think it will be a bigger phenomenon and I need to do it to understand it. So far, the seven episodes I've posted would indicate that I should stik to blogging.
Don't be too judgmental about the quality of your videos Shel. Suspect it's like blogging in text where ones' posts improve in time.
It's analogous to what Rebecca Blood said in her Weblog Handbook when she said 'You can write bad, but for only so long.'