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September 16, 2006
Appropriate media
Appropriate media: Brad Templeton hits on a "don't vlog" discussion by comparing media types (text, audio, video) to production levels (amateur vs professional), but doesn't touch on distribution channels (broadcast vs surfing vs notifications vs brick stores and so on). ("Vlog" is a contraction of "video web log": casual video, frequently updated.) Brad explicitly compares production costs (how easy is it to make?) to consumption costs (how easy is it to pull meaning out of the media?). He recommends a multi-media approach of providing text transcripts, but doesn't touch on "getting to the point" -- thinking hard about what ideas you want your audience to take away, and then using media to most effectively convey those ideas. We've got multiple media types at our disposal these days -- speech, text, images, animation, audio, video -- and each has different blends of immediacy, universality, accessibility, global understandability, cross-IQ value, vividness, persuasive power and more. They're all good. But the very first thing is to figure out what you want to say, then look at who you want to understand it, and then choose and execute the media types to actually convey your idea. We'll see a lot of bad video over the next few years -- just eavesdrop on phone conversations on the street, or read the casual web to prove it -- but I think it's very, very useful to democratize universal video publishing nevertheless. The next step will be figuring out how to learn what's most useful to attend to....
Posted by JohnDowdell at September 16, 2006 08:37 PM
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Comments
"speech, text, images, animation, audio, video"
What about the best common denominor of these, the least badnwidth eater which also happens to be skippable, scannable and searchable? Don't tell me Adobe/Macr are not working on some form of reliable transcript-gen tool. I would be ashamed to learn that there is no product coming down the road aimed to fix a real problem.
[jd sez: I don't recall any announcements about such a thing, but even so, each author would still need to get to the point. I'm less interested in static text-to-speech than interactive text-to-speech... with a pocket device, speech may be the most natural medium for both display and control.]
Posted by: Stephane Rodriguez at September 17, 2006 03:10 AM