This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
As of today, Jonathan's Coffeeblog makes its debut as Jonathan's CoffeeVlog. That's right, instead of the usual static image, there's a video, courtesy of YouTube. If you can get the YouTube link to run, you will see a talking head clip of your trusty CoffeeVlogger pondering the difficult question of whether the term vlog is monosyllablic, with a V instead of a B, or polysyllabic, pronounced vee-log in English.
But what is the dead horse to which I allude in the title of this vlogpost? Yes, you guessed it, the dead horse is the blog, that is, a weblog without video. Earlier this year I wrote pondering what would be the next big thing. Well, now I know. The next big thing is here, and it's video. I should have known back then. I used to watch a program called "Captain Video" on television back in the early 1950's. It now appears that Captain Video has been promoted to Generalissimo Video and he has become the Caudillo of the Internet. Jonathan's Coffeeblog is mere weeks short of celebrating its second anniversary, and already it's Old Media. That is, it was until today.
Is vlogging just a passing fancy, a fad, and will the Internet of the future be ruled by text and static images? I doubt it. However motion graphics, in my opinion, always seemed to be grafted onto a website rather than an integral part. Those fancy (or boring) Flash animations on high-priced websites seem to require a "skip" link so that the viewer doesn't have to watch them before he moves on the the nitty gritty he was looking for. YouTube, successful as it is, seems (in my opinion) to be a place to link to, not so much of a place to browse.
Adrian Miles, an Australian media academic, takes video blogging very seriously. He calls them vogs, not vlogs, and at the turn of the (21st) century, declared a manifesto he called vogma, about vogs. He has published a video blog with minimal text, but on the topic of vogging, he publishes a plain old text-and-static-image blog, just as I did before I became the CoffeeVlogger. In fact, I may go back being the Coffeeblogger again and save this vogging business for times when (to paraphrase Marshall MacLuhan—remember him?) the motion is the message.
