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Nine By Blue founder Vanessa Fox is author of the critically acclaimed Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business, which has been called the “search marketing bible” by technology leaders. Be sure to pick up your copy today.
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April 23, 2007
I read a lot of blogs. I like keeping up on what people are talking about — things people like, stuff that’s new, the issues. I’m also pretty busy during the day: email, meetings, actual work squeezed in between email and meetings. So, my blog reading goes a little like this:
Email, email, phone call, email… OK, need a break from email. Oh! Feeds! That looks interesting. I’ll just open that in another tab and get back to — phone! Right, email, (twitter), write this blog post, wait, wasn’t I doing something else? Oh feeds. Meeting now. Break during meeting as everyone’s getting dialed in. I’ll read a few more feeds. Hey, that seems interesting, and that too. I’ll just open these in tabs. Oh this one has a full feed. I can read it right here. Oh, meeting’s starting. I’ll mark that as new and come back to it.
Wow. Where did all these tabs come from?
By the end of the day, I have managed to get through all of my feeds in 30-second increments. Sometimes, I still have 50 tabs open at the end of the day, but hey, Bloglines doesn’t have any bolded items, mocking me, so I can at least feel like I’ve accomplished something. (And then I give up and close all my tabs and read SearchCap to find out what I’ve missed.)
Now, imagine throwing video into that mix. By the time I got the headphones on and the video downloaded, I’d be on to designing some new feature (or, more likely, answering more email). I’d only get to hear three words at a time, which just doesn’t seem very satisfying. I can sometimes have podcasts on the in the background, and those are easy to download and listen to at the gym. (I have a working shuffle! I can once again listen to things while I work out! And I can still do email at the same time.) But videos?
I realize this is my own personal shortcoming, my short attention span that accelerates my multitasking tendencies, but why can’t all videos come with transcripts, like closed captioning for those of us with attention deficits? (I realize also this wouldn’t work so well with videos of cute jumping cats.)
Am I the only one with this problem?
I agree. You can’t pause videos and get context in a glance when you return. Additionally, everyone who has the slightest problem with English (like them furreners) will have 10x the trouble trying to understand the video – you can read as slow as you want, but you can’t play a video in half-speed or copy-paste words to look them up. It’s (imo) a sign of disrespect towards an international audience. The web is international; if you have international visitors it makes sense (to me) to make sure that they are not locked out. Not to mention everyone else who can’t “read” videos; users with screen-readers or those with other unsupported devices …
Bloglines!
I’m glad you’ve made this case. You work in a large company (so the rumours go!) with co-workers and meetings galore. Sometimes I wonder if Average Joe who may have a similar feed list as me works where they can watch a video at any time and listen to sound over their speakers without hassle.
I do draw the line, though. I’ve seen some people get annoyed by verbose bloggers. I don’t think that’s fair. “George” may be busy and may want short and succinct posts – but tough – I don’t think “George” has any right to dictate writing style to people.
We’re lucky though. At work we all tend to have headphone microphone for Breeze conferences (Google used Breeze – I guess that’s going to change though, huh) and so watching videos in possible. I’m just arranging tomorrow night so we can grab beer and pizza and come watch Eric’s video on the big screen in the boardroom!
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3 things that could make videos more manageable:
1) Transcripts: Author submitted, user submitted (wiki-style)…whatever. Anything to make it easier to skim, and search.
2) Playback rate control: I’d like to play back video in double speed without the chipmunk effect or half speed without the sleepy caveman effect.
3) Resume: I’d like to be able to start a video, then pause and close the window (or browser) but still be able to continue where I left off. I don’t know how many times I’ve been sent a 7 minute video that I never finished.
When I need information, I need it fast and dense, wherever I am. Sometimes it’s on my teeny tiny little Treo screen. I’ve watched videos on it before, but let’s just say I don’t visit the optometrist often enough to do it regularly.
Fancy graphics and video, all useless eye candy if you ask me. Give me information, and give it to me as text! Preferably ASCII, but HTML will do too. In line with this, I appreciate that you provide your full blog in your RSS feed. Subscribed! (In Bloglines)
Great post!
I pretty much work the same way. The only problem is that while I don’t have the bold items on bloglines, I do have rather a large, growing number in the parentheses that I kept new…
@JohnMu Try babylon, way more comfortable than copy paste lookup. It’s cheap and understands even switzerdütsch or whatever the weird primary language in your multi-language-country is
Does this mean YouTube wasn’t a good purchase as far as you’re concerned? :O
Really, I agree completely about most blogs. Still, some items warrant video.
Thank you! I hate watching videos and listening to podcasts, and I was feeling hopelessly behind the times. But I seriously do not have enough time in my day to focus on a video. I read pretty quickly, and it takes forever to get the same amount of information out of a video.
You really need some of those virtual reality glasses.. perhaps they could be called ‘Google Goggles’ – or maybe even the ‘eye-pod’ – now that’s a 20% time project if I ever heard one.
Me, I’d like a pair too.. perhaps I could retire that carrot on a stick I usually have hanging off the treadmill when I’m at the Gym, and replace it with an image of a big mac hanging tantalising just out of arms reach..
M
Nuh uh.
Check out SearchAnyway or 1939 Media. I prefer them to reading blogs because
1) They’re short. Avg 1 min 40 secs per post.
2) They’re more human. Listening and watching someone talking to you feels more real than reading what he/she wrote.
3) They’re great self-marketing tools. If you want to sell yourself and not just your ideas, do it with video.
that’s what commuting time is for – watching videos
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Vanessa ..”Sometimes, I still have 50 tabs open at the end of the day.. ”
Just curious to know what browser you are using .. For me Firefox will kill the machine if I open more than 20 tabs in one instance..
I use Firefox, but 50 in one browser can be difficult to navigate around. So, I don’t really like to have more than about 20 open in one window. Once I’ve got that many, I open up a new window. I generally have about four windows open by the end of the day. I have two monitors, so I’ll have two in each.
You would think I would be organized about what’s in each window, but I’m not. I just randomly have tabs everywhere.
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Videos fit a different kind of “browsing mode.” When you’re very busy you can’t really check them. But when it’s that lazy Sunday, you might be happy to see the face of the person you’ve been reading for some time. When Matt Cutts started to video-post, it was an interesting experiment (but there was also clearly a demand from readers for transcripts). You should try video-posting here too every once in a while.
In terms of news blogging, there’s a bit of a conflict: if the blogger decides to post some news bit in audio or video ONLY, then those who can’t digest this format will miss out on the news. On the other hand, if you only turn existing text stories into audio or video, you’ll be adding duplicates, splitting the comments discussion, and not delivering new stuff in the audio/ video.
RECOGNIZING YOUR QUALITY, I have also added my digg….we can hope Digg ALGOS will become like Google ALGOS and better know QUALITY.
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I agree completely,always have loads of websites tabs open but never time to load the videos,if a transcript was provided it would be much quicker.
I too end up with loads of tabs – these days firefox doen’t take so kindly to that.
I love watching videos, but I try and separate feeds that are likely to have a video from those that aren’t, for exactly the reason as you state. Then I watch video feeds hwn I have a decent chunk of time. But it becomes a bit of a pain if a video ends up on one of my non video feeds! I also try to separate bloggers who are likely to have short blog entries from those with long ones!
You question “why can’t all videos come with transcripts” ignores that fact that video should be a visual medium, and not just a stream of words. Sadly many of the videos on there internet could just as well be audio (and therefore text).
I think ted.com deals with the transcript issue very well very well because you can jump to parts of the video via the transcript.