Emergent Video Blogging

AROUND A WEEK AGO, the Irish Blog Awards spotlighted the best of every sort of online writing. In 2008, the podcast category was dropped. At the same time, more Irish bloggers were embedding video blog items to their personal pages than ever before. I think online video is an important part of blogging, even if it means that people are merely discussing clips by linking to them. Moreover, I think there's going to be an explosion of video blogging in the year ahead because it's simply too easy to stream a video up to the internet from your mobile phone. That's what I did in the screen capture at left (scraped for posterity from Qik.com/topgold) and I think I'm going to do a lot more in the future.

We are changing the way we look at moving images on screen. At the moment, more people watch YouTube in Ireland than watch Pat Kenny's Late Late Show (the highest rated television show in Ireland). If people could select their online bookmarks directly on their television screens, more YouTube would be watched in the sitting room than on a computer screen.

The passive, network-driven model of television has already morphed into a new kind of viewership. The internet caused some of that change. Easy-handling mobile phone video recording did the rest. Everyone can be a producer and some of us will fare better than the rest.

Blogging with active video has just begun. We have just started seeing the first movers upstreaming on the go. When a few polished performers get the hang of it, the sitting room audiences will start looking for the best ways to see a whole new range of screen personalities.

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You can subscribe to my Qik feed and get frequent three-minute videoclips from Ireland. My study in Qik.

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