By the way, given Loic‘s passion and ability to market his products I have no doubt that Seesmic itself will be a success. Not many startups can get Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg and the man that ruined the Star Wars legend to use their service to promote their movies and Seesmic also keeps trying new things too while the other videoblogging services just seem to wallow. So Seesmic itself will do well and make money for their investors and employees but I think this video comment aspect is not a good development.
You may have seen a few blogs of late allowing people to leave video comments in the comments section. That’s due to not very reliable flash based video blogging service Seesmic. I tried using it a few months back and was less than impressed. Totally flakey and bug ridden and it crashed Firefox. It’s improved an awful lot and I think Loic the founder and the team understand blogs and social networks more than most in that area. But leaving a video comment instead of a string of text? Not good for SEO, not good for people that scan through comments. Video comments make blog posts less usable, not more usable. Just like podcasts as a means of getting around typing make the web worse, not better. Too many lazy people and those who love the sound of their own voice are using podcasts and videos to produce content which would be better in text form.
Instead of quickly scanning through comments and finding interesting links that those leaving comments might provide, now you have to click 17 individual videos and watch people feed their egos when they leave comments. Joy oh joy.
Photo owned by koka_sexton (cc)
But while Loic says it stops nasty anonymous comments, I think Seesmic blog comments are perfect for spamming. Askimet won’t stop some video spammers since there’s no text to figure out if it’s spam or real conent, a person that clicks the message won’t spot it’s spam til the video is playing. Spammers resort to image text spams by email now, so why not video text spams for blogs? There’s enough people gaming YouTube with shit videos by keyword spamming and they can’t tackle that so well. Seesmic will prove a perfect distribution mechanism for spam. I’m sure it’ll eventually be dealt with somehow but in the short term expect blogs that allow video comments to start getting video spam.
Techcrunch removed the Seesmic widget after it crashed the site three times on Saturday due to problems with its external javascript not loading, With youtube its just a matter of pasting in the link rather than have to add javascript into the of your page and then have your site crash as it waits to load.
Twas an EPIC FAIL on their part.
silly me no tags 🙂
add javascript into the HEAD of your page
The jury’s out Damien
Although It may be used by people wanting to use a new gadget and effects for the sake of it rather that any creatively thought out broadcast and spammers, video has a real place in blogging, Video comments is a exciting technology with goos potential in the right hands.
It could be used for lively debate and highlighting important issues.
Chapter encoding may work or some type of voice recognition system to wade through the waffle but eventually credible contributors should come to the fore
To run video reliably especially QT you need need to upload js file to your server and get a good plugin. Also when encoding your video file make sure its optimized for streaming and fast start otherwise its a long wait for the end user