Why you’ll never see me video-blogging

I'm convinced that so-called 'v-blogging' is a fad. Why?

Because I can read ten times faster than anyone can speak: I'm not alone. In the time it takes a video from youtube to buffer, you'll already have read this paragraph.

Other reasons?

Text is searchable. That's the big roadblock. I know there are many sites out there claiming to be able to search video content using speech recognition, but until voice recognition takes a quantum leap the only option is manual transcription. And who's going to do that for the tens of thousands of videos on sites around the net? No-one.

There are already functional manual transcription processes: an example of this is Oh No Robot for webcomics. Webcomics have loyal fanbases who regularly read posts, and many are willing to transcribe a comic or two now and then. The difference is that few people are going to do this for videos many minutes long on a large-enough scale to make a difference.

Of course, the great irony is that if wide-scale transcription were widely available for online video, I wouldn't use it. RSS search engines like technorati make it possible to automatically search for certain strings. And if I liked the content of a video blog, I'd subscribe to the text version in my RSS reader.

Ah, the irony.