Podcasts/Vidcasts - have people forgotten how to write?

[charleski]

At first it was amusing to watch a few video interviews on the net, but now it's becoming absurd. Instead of spending a couple of minutes to scan an article and pick out any salient points, I'm expected to set aside an hour to watch a video of a couple of talking heads - no thanks. Audio-only podcasts are just as bad, you can only listen to so much gumpf on your way to work. YouTube videos of someone's baby doing a silly dance are amusing, YouTube videos of some geek talking into his webcam aren't.

The reaction is starting to happen,(read the comments), though as long as venture capital continues to dump money into semi-literate 'Web 2.0' companies things aren't going to get better. Yes, in many ways it takes more effort to transcribe an interview or express an argument properly in writing than it is just to dump a video recording onto the web. But ultimately all this does is shift the effort away from the people looking to profit (blogging for pay from ads) and onto their audience.

[merdat]

Hi there Charleski, First of all nice to see you posting again - always enjoyed your intelligent and helpful post - thats what I feel Hexus is all about. Yes I could not agree more one gets sick of these vid and podcast thingies.

[charleski]

For several months I've been aware of the way my iTunes library grows increasingly cluttered with unlistened-to podcasts - stuff that looked vaguely interesting so I grabbed the rss feed, but turns out to be 20mins of audio with the content of a couple of paragraphs.

But what really irked me recently was this. IBM is doing some interesting things with the way they develop stuff, and their attitude to IP would be worth knowing. But... an hour of nothing more than a talking head? Do people actually have the time to watch this kind of stuff? There's no reason that it couldn't has been rendered down to a few pages of text that could easily be digested in 5 minutes.

[Mike Fishcake]

YouTube needs a "quality" filter. It needs better categories so that people can watch stuff that people have gone to the effort of putting stuff into, not just people falling off skateboards etc...

Videos such as the NEW ONES PROVIDED BY TEAMFISHCAKE for example