Video Blog

From wsuwiki

1 What is it?
2 History
3 Community Appeal
4 Web 2.0 Catching up to Vlogs
5 References

What is it?

Video Blogs, also known as vlogs, are similar to normal blogs except that they are in the form of a video. This different form of information provides the user with a very different and possibly more appealing experience than normal blogs or other information mediums. Vlogs can be found today covering a huge range of topics. Some people have blogs where they rant about politics, some have blogs where they talk about videos on the internet, and there are some extremely stupid ones like this[1]. But that is what's so wonderful about Video Blogs. They provide anyone the ability to express themselves to the world.

History

The first known blog popped up on the web in 2000 and chronicled a man's move to Los Angeles in hopes of breaking it big in showbusiness. At the time though limitations on technology, mainly internet connection speeds and hosting problems do to the large size of videos, kept vlogs from growing in popularity until the technology caught up. Late 2004 saw the emergence of video blogs as more of a mainstream thing do to the popularity of it among communities of vloggers on the internet. In February of 2005 YouTube was born. Vlogging grew exponentially from there and is still in it's infancy. There are many great things to look forward to from vlogs and the community surrounding it.

Community Appeal

Vlogging has a huge community of dedicated followers and bloggers on the internet. Video blogging gained popularity in these tight knit communities and they still play a major role in video blogs. Often times when watching someone's vlog, they will reference another user's vlog and link to it so the viewer can go watch it. This linking creates connections within the community of all the users. Sometimes this linking is done to help out other vloggers to create popular vlogs or for trolls to make fun of them. Communities can be observed very easily in the channels section of YouTube[2]. These are all people's blogs that you can follow and subscribe too.

Web 2.0 Catching up to Vlogs

Vlogging is definitely a Web 2.0 technology. Web 2.0 saw the emergence of video hosting services which opened up the web to vloggers. Web 2.0 provides the structure for vlogging to occur, but it falls short in certain categories where it is catching up, mainly in linking and seaching. Folksonomy[3] and the tagging of video blogs by the creators helps a lot, but as vlogs are in a video format, there is no text for search engines to search and provide results to a user about the contents of a vlog. For instance if a user simply searched right now for a vlog about cell phones[4], they would not be provided a list of cell phone vlogs. They would simply be provided a list of sites or blogs about cell phones that may possible contain vlogs. Research is being done currently on improving this ability and someday it may be possible to search through vlogs, just as you search through websites.