I can see the tsunami wave of adoption building now ever since TechCrunch announced that it was going to be adding support for video comments to posts. I am seeing a few more posts showing up discussing the whole idea but for me it is just another matter of doing it because we can. That doesn’t mean that it is a good idea or that it is even something that will be used beyond the first blush of coolness.
It makes total sense for Seesmic to be excited about the idea because it is a great way to get their brand out to a wider audience but that doesn’t mean that it is a good solution for blog owners or even the readers of those blogs. While I might not be as extreme in the idea of video blogging or Seesmic being useless as Frederic from The Last Podcast is I do agree with him that for blog comments text is the better medium.
For comments on a blog - text is a far better medium. Why? Scannability - by human and computer.
I can easily scan through the 150 comments on the TechCrunch post announcing this ‘feature’ in a minute. But if I wanted to watch 150 videos, that would take me forever - and there is no indication right now of how long they are before you click on them, btw.
A computer can do the same and look for spam and, if I so prefer, profanities, racial slurs etc.
All of this, I give up when I use video for my comments.
Then Corvida over at SheGeeks makes a valid point that regardless of the hype around the idea this isn’t anything revolutionary and that really when push comes to shove as readers of blogs do really have all that time available to A) read the post and B) view any of the video comments that are there
Video comments are, in general, a major time waster because of our hectic schedules. Recording it, uploading it, and then having to sit there and view it; do you notice how much time that’s taking up? You might as well just type your comment out and save readers the trouble. Readers barely have enough time to read an entire blog post, let alone sit and watch a video with a response that could’ve been typed out for scanning purposes.
Now while the current Seesmic plugin is geared to Wordpress based blogs using the default comment system I saw over on Howard Lindzon’s blog that the folks over at Disqus are working very quickly to have the idea compatible with Disqus. I can understand this from a business point of view especially when you have someone like Howard as one of your investors but I would have far preferred that time being spent on getting working support for pingbacks and trackbacks in place. That is something that is of far more benefit to the bloggers and users.
The question is now - will I enabled the feature if Disqus gets support for it working?
Not unless the majority of my readers request it.
