Image via CrunchBase
I’ve been spending time in lots of social networking places during the past several months. One of my favourites is Seesmic.
I first started hanging out and playing with Seesmic back in April. Since then, there’s been lots of comment from other bloggers on the pros and cons of video commentary/conversation and so on, and let’s face it, not everyone is comfortable with this form of delivery or response. But video blogging (‘vlogging’ to some … ugh!) is also undeniably attracting interest and new users. The BBC used Seesmic for the first time this month to secure user feedback and commentary on the financial crisis, and the use of video blogging itself. There it was on the BBC … the medium as the message.
Check out Seesmix for October below. It’s a short video of clips and comment to give you a flavour of the sociability, usability, global reach and diversity of this particular Flash-built platform, the brainchild of founder Loic LeMeuer.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Kia ora Kate!
I guess I'd be one of the bloggers you spoke of in this post. I'm always interested in what drives fashion – and not just in clothing or hair-styles. I may come across as disrespectful by raising this here (I hope I don't for I DO have respect for others opinion). But the things that drive the 'popularity' of a particular genre is what I'm broaching here.
I recognise that I'm of the 'old school'. I may have set ways of looking at things, thinking about it and analysing what's useful (to me).
I put time up as one of the precious things in life – and of course how it's used (just as precious and intimately connected).
What Seesmic and other videos do not give me options on are how I utilise time. When I click the start of a video, I don't know if it's going to deliver soemething to me. And it's something I like to assess before starting. So I find that I have commited time to a thing that I may not agree with, or enjoy, or indeed not want to see simply because I've met it before.
What videos and the like do not permit me to do is to scan them to make a first assessment easily. It is, of course, a totally different medium – I am aware of the major differences. Heading in a blog post have no real analogies in Seesmic. So there is no analogous part of the technology that can help me in the same way as headings do.
I find (and of course it is a very personal thing) that I have to make a committment to time to 'buy into' indulging in a video – especially if there is no text or relevant title that accompanies it and that tells me something about what's in it.
So I wonder about what drives people to be enthusiastic about Seesmic. And as I've said, I have no disrespect for those who enthuse over 'vlogging'.
Perhaps I'm missing out?
Ka kite
from Middle-earth
Good question Ken and one that's exercising a lot of conversation in print and 'face to face' on forums like Seesmic. Indeed I posted a couple of questions myself last week which asked why someone would respond to a conversation thread, and to gauge how long an optimal contribution might be. I'll be working that and a few things more up into a reflective blog post later. This is how I tend to be using my forays into social media these days.
I take your point about skimming for content before committing that previous commodity time to a post, but a poor post title on a blog can be as misleading as a conversational 'thread.' Quicker to spot of course. On Seesmic threads can and do get 'hijacked' just as in face to face live conversation. 'Hijacked' is the current term for taking a thread somewhere else than the title would indicate. However some contributors to a conversation thread can add key words to titles to indicate this divergence. An '@' before a user name focusses on a particular contributor's comments, and so on. I've seen this tendency so many times in long comments on blogs … usually towards the end. A kind of bloggy Chinese whispers.
I won't answer for all but it seems to me it's this (almost) immediacy of comment as well as the nunance of voice and facial expression which are compelling in a video conversation.
Not better, just different …
glad you liked our new Seesmix format! Thanks and see you on Seesmic
T?n? koe Kate.
Thanks for your point of view. I am impressed wih your reasoned reply. It's people like you that can communicate with curmudgeons (note that I didn't say that I was one
and get them to at least recognise your point of view.
I'm a great believer in Carl Sagan's Baloney Detector, though I do know that many people tend to be put off by the name of it. It's a series of processes for enacting healthy scepticism without being a sceptic, if you handle my tether.
Sorry for my late response. I'm one of these dogged commenters who will be submitting comments to posts on blogs long after the Internet has been superceded by the Intracosmonet. My hunch is that they will use quantum computers then. They'll be just the ticket for me.
They'll give me the capability to reply to your post before you post it, having already read your response to my previous comment to you on that same post. Cunning things, quantum computers. With those I'd be able to figure out if it would be worth my while visiting your site before I log on.
Ka kite
from Middle-earth
Mmmm. I bet right now there are a few pollies and bankers could do with a couple of those back to the future quantum computers to figure out what's going to happen before it does.
Has read with the pleasure, very interesting post, write still, good luck to you!