Distribution
Video Blogging and Podcasting

Andrew Burke
August 2008

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Only a few years ago, the words podcast and blog created a new buzz. However, it wasn't anything to do with video. While Webster's Dictionary hailed podcast as the "Word of the Year," a State University in Michigan was handing blog its hat. Fast-forward to today, and both words are still with us. Both survived and are arguably more popular than ever before. In fact, there's a lesson that comes out of the past hubbub: funny as they may sound, blog and podcast may just replace our beloved diary and broadcast.

A general rule of thumb on the web is that, wherever digital photos and music work well, video is sure to follow. This applies particularly to blogs and podcasts. Both recent forms of distribution share similarities: subscribing is easy and they get regular updates. Blogs advanced beyond simple text to allow publishing of photo essays. Podcasts evolved from featuring unique talk-radio to indie music videos and TV documentaries. Generally speaking, a video blog offers a single, customizable space in which we can show our video. The advantage is having video centrally located.

Video podcasting, also called vidcasting, zips our video to computers in the far corners of the earth. Viewers download video to watch at home or to transfer to a portable device like an iPod or Zune. Though podcasts and blogs function in similar ways, all in all, you can use them quite differently.

A video blog may serve us as a production journal of events or a personal story archive like a diary. Video blogs tend to be more personal than podcasts and display automatically in reverse-chronological order. This means viewers don't have to scroll all the way from your first entry to your last to see a new video. The freshest behind-the-scenes look at your latest production sits right at the top. Videos in blogs link to a source somewhere on a web server. You can make them available for downloading or streaming, in a Flash video format or QuickTime, for example. Many video-sharing sites list an "embed code" along with displayed video. You can easily copy this code and paste it into your blog entry, which links back to the sharing site. Since no video is stored on your blog, there is no additional bandwidth fee.

Services like Blogger and WordPress offer video-blogging capabilities at a low cost - free. Pair them with a free account on a video-sharing site, and you have one lean mean blogging machine! Video is stored on a sharing site and is then displayed on your video blog. You can customize and brand blogs to a greater extent than video-sharing sites like YouTube. So, if you're picky about preferences, creating a blog is the way to go.

Video blogs can serve videographers in gaining valuable audiences they would not be able to reach otherwise. Unlike a journal that lives in the dark of an old desk, blogs are live and public. By reading the comments left by viewers, we can gauge how well our video project engages our audience. Video bloggers like Michael Verdi and Josh Leo have gained much notoriety by using video blogs to share their everyday stories. Viewers leave comments, and bloggers return with feedback and personal messages to them. Auto-archiving takes care of the nitty-gritty duty of backing up your stories.

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