Blogs as Medium
Blogs are now a media commonplace with regular mentions and appearances in mainstream media and an apparently exponential rise in use within education, knowledge management communities, and various forms of Web based self publishing. While definitions of what constitutes a blog are, in the manner of all such definitions, problematic, videoblogs pose this problem afresh with recent and rapid developments in this nascent field.
My own views on video blogs are well documented, and have been for some time (Miles 2000). There are specific qualities or properties that a blog has which makes it different to existing forms of electronic writing and demonstrate that blogs are a medium in their own right.
For video blogging to be video blogging (as opposed to video within a blog), similar qualities or attributes need to be available to those who wish to make and view (or use) blog based video. A specific aspect of this is the granularity of blogs and ways in which we may conceive of video as being similarly granular - that video needs to be as granular as text. This hypertext essay is a discussion that has developed from an iterative theoretical and design project where video prototypes have been developed to explore and make visible the possibilities for alternative forms of video blogging practice.
The first prototype provides links to specific web pages with a combination of thumbnails and time based links, the second prototype begins to pose questions around quoting video within a video, while the third provides detailed commentary upon an individual, external videoblog entry.
note: This page forms a part of a hypertext essay by Adrian Miles. The homepage for this essay is located at:
http://incsub.org/blogtalk/?page_id=74
A long version of this paper (containing some but not all of the text contained in the hypertext version) is available at:
http://incsub.org/blogtalk/?page_id=76
