by Domnall Óg
Home >> Vlogs
For centuries people had kept diaries or logs of their adventures, thoughts and feelings. The diaries of famous people were even published. From Samuel Pepys to Anne Frank , diaries created a new kind of literature. And that was the beginning of an industry that was to develop dramatically in the early 21st century. Web logs orBlogs were the millennium phenomena as hundred of thousands of computer savvy citizens hung out their lives on line.
Web logs became podcasts as mobile media players like the Apple iPod gave us the opportunity to sound off about ourselves. And now… it’s time for the next step.
-—-—-—-
And the next step is this. Video Web Logs. Or Vlogs, as the neologists would have it. All you need is a home video camera, a microphone and a computer and you can step into the glamorous world of Vlogging. But, just as blogs were a technological way of saying “I’ve got no friends,” so Vlogging is victim to the same geeky mediocrity.
You may very well be familiar with You Tube or Google Video . Apart from stolen clips from copyrighted films and TV shows, there is very little good original content. Technology is no substitute for good writing and good journalism.If all we are going to see on Vlogs is people’s holidays and how cute their kittens are… then no thanks.
But where Vlogs may have a future is in citizens journalism. Up to now, what is and what isn’t news has been decided by Rupert Murdoch and other wealthy media tycoons. That may be coming to an end now.
The Drudge Report in America is an early example of one man taking on and beating the media establishment with nothing more than a basic knowledge of making webpages and a journalist’s eye for a story. Ask Bill Clinton!And that’s the point. Matt Drudge is a journalist first and a geek second.
Anyone can write a Vlog but not everyone should. Some people should go back to writing old-fashioned diaries. And when they’ve finished. Lock the diaries away. Quality is what we need. Not quantity.
What do you think? Do you keep a diary? Would you publish a blog or appear on a Vlog?Let us know. Down below you can leave your comments. We’d love to hear from you. See you soon. Bye bye.
-—-
Blogs are a good way to listen to English. Checkout the internet. Google ‘Blogs’ or why not make your own.Let us know if you do. -—-
Released under the following licence: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeriv
You are free to copy, distribute and display the contents of this article but you must give credit to and mention the original author. You are not allowed to use these contents for commercial purposes, and you may not modify them to make any derivative works.
For full licence description, go to: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.1/es/deed.en
Posted on http://www.weeklyletter.com at 2007-05-24 10:00:00 +0200
Copyright (C) ITT (http://www.itt.es) and Planet Lingua (http://www.lingua.es)
We have more weekly letters by Domnall
Poll for this weekly letter
Blog and Vlogs...
Licencing
You are free to copy, distribute and display the contents of this article but you must give credit to and mention the original author. You are not allowed to use these contents for commercial purposes, and you may not modify them to make any derivative works.
(click the above link for more information)
Add a comment
Hi everybody!
This world will be a “Big Brother” in a short space of time. To write a diary is very romantic and it helps you to not have lacks of orthography. I remember when I was child in the school, the teachers always told us that we had to do a lot of writing. And I suppose that a diary is only for yourself.
Hello Dónal,
I do like like reading other people’s blogs, there are some nice ones out there. One of my favorites right now is www.kirainet.com
I usually read blogs not because I want to find out about other people’s personal life, but because the blog is about a subject I’m interested in.
Regarding the evolution of blogs to vlogs, I don’t quite see it succeeding, unless they are really elaborated and, again, about a certain subject, not just about someone’s personal life.
Regards,
Cristina
Some years ago, book publishing saw a surge of the “memoir” genre. Memoirs by nobodies are either WOT (worth our time) or WOT (waste of time). By “nobody” I mean someone pretty normal, your everyday girl or boy. This means that he/she wasn’t the first Secretary-General of the United Nations or something like that. Among the nobodies who write about nothing really, but who are worth reading, is David Sedaris, and that’s because his “nothing memoirs” are tongue-in-cheek. I am a fan.
I write a diary when we travel. I have to. My mom says I have to because she had to, too. She says it’s a good exercise in every way. I like to make collages in my travel notebook, using bits of tickets, leaflets, menus, etc. I prefer that to the writing and the drawing.
One of the funniest books I have read is Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith.
If someone is a great writer they can find the magical in the humdrum. Great writers are few and far between[1] sadly.
Oscar, why don’t you keep a video diary? It’s more fun and just as useful. You still get to write as you need to write the ‘script’.
—[1] rare
The problem about vlogs is that they aren’t so easy to skim and scan. When you read a text, you can search for the information you’re most interested in and leave the less interesting parts for the end.
Anyway, Donal, what an excellent job you’ve done! Yes, maybe in the future it should be The Weekly Video…
Thanks Paola.I think the future is audio-visual. I suppose that someone will invent a speech recognition search engine so you can search vlogs for certain phrases.
Sadly I think there will be more illiteracy as we move away from a text based internet.
I’ve never written neither a dairy nor a blog. I haven’t written a Vlog, either. I think my life is exactly mine. I don’t want to share my own figments with strange people. I don’t have the need to post my life in a screen in order to be seen byl the whole world.
Obviously everyone must do what he wants to do, of course, but it’s clear to me that if any geek can post what he wants in a Blog, or in a Vlog, citizen journalism could become a fraud.
The blogs should be considered only as entertaintment, but not as a source of information.
Hi everybody!
I think that writing a diary is a good way to know better yourself and to fix your ideas. It is very useful if you have any problem, because you can see it from out your mind and you can take the correct decision. It is like a good friend that help you in that moments that you need help. It is also a good memory exercise, because writing it you must memorise all the events of the day.
The blogs are different. They can help other people to resolve some problems in certain subjects, but I don’t think that they are so useful for the author. In my opinion, the diary must be read only for the author.
The vlogs are very near of the show bussiness. The author must do very interesanting things in order to the vlog is visited for other people.
The citizen journalism can have a great future, but I think that we cannot trust in it.
Bye.
Conchi Calvo
Thank you Toni and Concepción.
You both raise the point about the trustworthiness of citizens’ journalism. That is a valid doubt.
However, I have my own doubts about the trustworthiness of mainstream news organisations (with the notable exception of the BBC in most areas).
Who decides what is news?
Why?
is it possible that the people who control the media (governments and/or multimillionaires) will use it to defend their own interests? isn’t that fraudulent?
Citizens’ journalism can be more diverse, less manipulated and better targeted, can’t it?
Hi everyone
This an article which make me think how fast the world go on.Besides the tecnology, weapons, lifestyles, etc the common items as a diari has even changed from the traditional style of paper which was written by pen to the tecnological ones which are used those days.It seems to have to be aware of IT to write down even your thoughts, feelings,relate experiences .
The worse of all from my point of view is that is going to be more difficult to know about someones life after dead, just because all those items which are extremely tecnological are protected with passwords that no one apart from the user might know it and those words will extinguish for good.
I still keep my diari from the primary school and from time to time I like cheking out what is still in my room and love the way of reading those memories,the finally school trip all together and those museums, zoo and attractions park which were visited.
Definetely I prefer the traditional way of keeping those experiences, feelings and stuff than the ones we have are used to using nowadays.
Greetings
I had a dream to begin my own business, but I didn’t have got enough of cash to do that. Thank God my friend advised to use the business loans. Thence I received the financial loan and realized my old dream.
Are you willing to increase traffic to your website? Why not buy SEO packages at seo link building service? It can get you higher PR!
No more writing pain! We propose to ask: ” write my essays ” to relieve your academic writing pain.