Brief Rant: The Videoification of the Web
Alternative title: Screw the deaf and blind. Second alternative title: Screw the people at work who don’t have time to watch an entire video.
Digg’s starting a series of “dialoggs”, where they solicit questions from the digg population in text form. Then they ask a random assortment of the top voted questions and the interviewee responds. Their first target: Nancy Pelosi. They partnered with CNN (pretty much the king of tabloid news, strike 1) and they performed the interview in front of a camera without taking down a transcript (strike 2), and finally, the video is 22 minutes long (strike 3, total knock-out!).
I’m all for using technology to make our lives easier — I’m no Luddite — but the videoification of the web has to stop. It does not make our lives easier, it just makes them “flashier”. What the popularity of the Internet pre-Youtube has proven is that people want to get information in text form, at their own pace, and on their own schedule. Sites like CNN, and now apparently digg, fail to recognize this when they put up a long video without including links to transcripts.
I’ve even seen video-only tutorials for programming tools. Seriously, who’s got time for this? Probably the same people that can religiously attend webinars.