The Future of Blogging

To me there is no end to blogging. As long as the Internet is around blogging will be there. However the future of blogging, to me, seems to be going in a visual direction.

More and more people are taking their camcorders and recording events in their day, and posting them as a video diary or blog. YouTube is filled with video blogs and journals, daily updates and even specific channels devoted to an entire year of your life, doing one video every day.
This is why for my last two posts I’ve been experimenting with the video blogging idea. So far it’s been decent, I try to treat it like it’s a stand up routine and play off an invisible crowd. It’s not as easy as I thought it was. To be able to hear laughter after telling a joke is how a comedian can tell if it’s funny or not, but while I record myself talking and ad-libbing there is no one laughing.
I love making people laugh and can do so very easily, but trying to write or perform a blog that you want to be funny is a completely different animal.
Back to video blogging though, it’s a completely different game than writing. In some ways it’s more involved, you can be more creative and for me (if I’m being honest) it’s less work, but only because I’ve been shooting and editing video for so long now.
The steps to shoot a video blog are as follows.

1. Writing a point form script.
-This is so that I can remember on the fly what I want to talk about, I can also create breathing room to improve a different joke into a certain take. This way I’m not bogging myself down with a script I must follow.

2. Shoot supporting footage/ Find supporting footage (Optional)
-Now it’s not 100% necessary to have supporting footage, but I’m a big proprietor or “Don’t tell me, show me” I want to see what you’re talking about, not look at you talking about it.

3. Film Monologue
-Really the backbone of the video blog, this is where you set up the camera (in this case my webcam) and start reading your script. It usually takes me 30 minutes to an hour to get the right read that I want to use. Of course changing up the background scenery is a good idea so that when the camera does cut back to you it’s not the same ugly location. (You can also just record your voice if you have enough supporting footage to go the entire time)

4. Editing
-For me editing is the fun part. It’s where you get to be the most creative. Importing video into your choice of editing software. (I recommend iMovie or Windows Movie Maker for first timers) and start filling in the blanks. I always think that it’s better to see video of what you’re talking about than your face, however some people are really good at speaking and having no video reinforcement which is also fine.
YouTube is the best place to post your videos and then just hyperlink or embed them into a blog post on blogger. That way you can easily track all of your views, comments and ratings. Plus YouTube has a great feature called “Insight” where it lets you know some very specific demographics about your audience so you can then cater to them more in your videos.