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?
Hello world? {seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/wtF6HQPHL8_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”Hello world? “}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/w3DMAB5DMg”}}}
hello from @critter {seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/Le8RrjMmAn_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”hello from @critter “}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/9vGpFzFG2Q”}}}
I do agree that it is about what your viewers and visitors want. I see you have two already.
However, what if other visitors want you to take it down?
@corvida: I suppose readers will vote with their mouse clicks.
Which is an interesting point, I wonder if seesmic will be releasing any analytics showing how often a clip has been watched. Would be easy to decide if there wasn’t actually any traction for the medium
(Love your blog btw, just subscribed)
Thank you! 🙂 I’m reading your i-Follow post now.
Video analytics, I would hope that it’s something they plan to release in the future, but if Seesmic doesn’t take off properly I don’t see such a feature coming from Seesmic’s developers, but maybe a third party if at all possible.