The challenges of a temporal medium

I agree with this critique of video blogging. A major flaw in the vast majority of vlogs is that they take, say, 10 minutes of rambling to say the same thing that would probably take me 2 minutes to read in a text blog entry. Video blogging is often the blogger using up your time instead of using his or her time to organize a presentation. The worst ones actually start out saying, "Hmm...let's see, what do I want to say here...?" This is the backstage process that text bloggers do outside your attention zone, so that when they do demand your attention you can quickly learn what it is they have to say.

As the linked critique says, it's also much easier to scan text than video. For example, you could probably scan the entire front page of this blog in one minute to determine which stories you are interested in. ("Humanist controversy, interesting...more stuff about YouTube, that's getting old...Flying Spaghetti Monster, funny...more Flemming self-promotion, what a surprise...there he goes on about PETA again, screw that...evolution...") But what if the entire front page were just headlines and YouTube video stills with the play button on them? Now you have to click each play button to see if you're interested, and you still can't quickly scan to the middle of a piece to see what's there. Meanwhile, as each second ticks by, you are that much closer to your inevitable death.

I have thought about doing more video blogging. I could easily do it, at a high level of technical quality, with the tools I have right here at my disposal. But I haven't figured out how to do it in a way that would actually be more valuable to the audience. Because you're going to die, and I can't imagine using up more of your precious time than I have to.