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I was a little annoyed at the shit I got for maintaining Wikipedia’s entry for Vlog. Everyone’s an expert it would seem, on what a vlog is, and very few seem to remember the point of Michael Verdi‘s Vlog Anarchy video: the minute you define what it is, you kill off all other possibilities. I tried to support this view on Wikipedia, but I failed.
Recently, one of my earlier videos, which received quite a bit of acclaim at the time, has been virtually forgotten in favour of a newer similar video that is being touted as the first of it’s kind. Don’t get me wrong, the new one is much better. But after I got over my slightly bruised ego, I got to thinking about all the cool videos I’ve seen over the last four months, and the few if any of the new videobloggers that will ever see them. I think it’s time new vloggers went back and checked out some of the cool stuff that’s been done in the last six months, specifically the amazing stuff that originally inspired me to start videoblogging in the first place.
Trigger number three was Adrian Miles‘ recent exceptionally cool remix of Michael’s afformentioned vlogging masterwork. What better example to use, even though he’s picked on in the video.
So yes, I maintained Wikipedia, I deleted a fair number of examples because I thought they were posted as traffic pullers, and here I am responding in text and not video. These are all things Michael disdain’s in his video, and I can’t find a single fault in his reasoning.
So here it is again. If you’ve already seen it, please take another look. If you haven’t, its mandatory viewing. In everything I do and everything I write, I cannot fault this man and a video which may forever be the videoblogging community’s manifesto and masterwork. I give to you again — Michael Verdi’s Vlog Anarchy.
Wikipedia works. By all rights it shouldn’t, but it does. There’s been a lot of analysis of Wikipedia in the blogosphere, so I’m not going to go into here. But I do want to talk about some of the problems we face as self appointed Wikipedia editors.
Vlogging, or videoblogging, is fairly new in its purest form, blog posts recorded as video. Now because vlogging is a new form of blogging, vloggers are looking to the lessons of blogging, as the direction they’re headed as well.
In blogging, whether you like it or not, traffic is pretty much everything, and those who say otherwise are probably either lying, or fooling themselves. Why blog in a public space, if you don’t care about traffic? It would be much easier to pop into Word or Notepad and write notes to yourself, than posting to a blog. Videobloggers know that traffic now, is the key to being on the A list when videoblogging breaks into the mainstream.
So what happens when an entry for vlogging appears on Wikipedia, and there’s a section for examples? Well, in the early days, all the known videobloggers were listed, all 12 of them. But now there’s several hundred, so where do you draw the line? Every few days someone goes in to the examples section and adds themselves to the list. It’s all about traffic and prestige.
I’ve been maintaining the list of examples for the last few months, and I’ve been applying the following rules to each added example:
- Does it match the actual vlog definition?
- Does it offer anything innovative or new, that the current examples don’t have?
- Is it well known on the Yahoo! Groups Videoblogging list, the defacto home of videoblogging?
- Have they been videoblogging for a while, or are they new?
But this doesn’t change the fact that every few days, without fail, someone goes in and adds their vlog as an example. It’s all about traffic and prestige.
So let’s do what vloggers are doing, and look at blogging for an example. The Wikipedia entry for Weblog handles examples by not actually having any. This is only a recent change, because only a month ago, there were about 30 examples. I guess they feel they’re at a point where people know what a blog is, so they don’t need to give an example.
Ultimately, this is what needs to happen with the Vlog entry, but is now the right time? Can we now get away without any examples? I think so, before there’s several hundred examples in Wikipedia, which are all mostly identical.
Remember, it’s all about traffic and prestige.