Blog is simply a web log, or diary, that one shares with others. But when users were finally able to add video to these blogs, a viral phenomena was born. In the fall of 2001, text-based weblogs began to grow exponentially in popularity, followed a few years
Blog is simply a web log, or diary, that one shares with others. But when users were finally able to add video to these blogs, a viral phenomena was born.
In the fall of 2001, text-based weblogs began to grow exponentially in popularity, followed a few years later by audio blogging or podcasting. But the October, 2005, launch of YouTube has made video increasingly the personal expression of choice.
Video blogging (a.k.a. video podcasting, vlogging or vidcasting,) takes place in two realms on the internet. Many text-based bloggers have added video to a pre-existing (or specially-created) weblog. And there are lots of people who view their clips on YouTube and other video aggregation sites as their daily diaries - their video blogs - with or without a text-based blog to supplement the video.
While there are plenty of other online video aggregators, YouTube, with its huge viewer base (upwards of 80 million in a month), serves both ends of the video production spectrum quite well. Its tiny video screen, displaying videos with a resolution of 320 by 240 pixels, looks dwarfed on the typical PC's LCD monitor screen. And already, several other, sharper, newer video aggregation sites have superseded YouTube in video quality (a topic we explored in the December 2007 eNews article, "Online Video Distribution"). But YouTube's quirks can benefit both beginners and experts.
Since most people clicking through YouTube want to view a story in a very economic form, YouTube is a tremendous place for beginners to practice and get their video chops down. Neither YouTube's slightly funky low-res codec nor its ten-minute cap on video length is an impediment to beginners.
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