You may have noticed that some blogs around the Web, particularly TechCrunch have? added a? video commenting service provided by Seesmic who have recently come to market with this novel service. While I quite like the technology behind it, I’m not convinced video comments work for this medium. Any my concerns are also voiced by others around the blogosphere. ReadWriteWeb for example, has put together 5 reasons why they don’t think this will work:
- You can’t scan them
- Harder to moderate
- They’re inaccessible
- You can’t leave links
- They increase load time
(Another point was that search engines can’t index the content, at least, not until closed captioning is introduced)
I’m of the opinion that the worst downfall is the reader’s inability quickly suck up whatever is being said in the comment. It’s the same reason podcasts and vlogging don’t work for me. I’m innundated with so much content that I don’t have the luxury watching someone spending 5 minutes umming and ahhing before I find out if there’s any real contribution to the conversation. It just won’t scale.
This doen’t mean I won’t try out the plugin on this site, after all, my reader’s desires may be different to mine. And other sites are asking the same question. What do you think? Would you leave a video comment?
I’m reading your i-Follow post now.
