The Era of the Blog Part 4 - New forms of media publishing

Gone were the days when we would video tape our friends' weddings on VCR. Gone were the days when we had to fork out money to buy CDs to listen to music. Gone were the days when we could just rely on our dusty hard-cover (or paperback, whatever suits your fancy) diaries and journals to log our daily lives.

So far I have been discussing the blogging phenomenon. However, technology has paved the way for other methods of media publishing that some Internet users have found quite useful.

Video blogging, or V-logging, is becoming very popular as a means to replace blogging, or just a way to make logs of your daily life more fun. Videos have the power to express what many people may feel difficult to express when writing: explaining certain situations, feeling, emotion and tone. An example of popular v-loggers are Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld, a.k.a. JakeandAmir. They created their own blog-based domain and instead of posting regular text posts of their daily lives in all their madness, they post funny videos of them at work.

A screenshot of Jake and Amir's official web-blog, JakeandAmir.com with a video uploaded as a blog-post.

Andrew Sullivan (2007) wrote for The Australian saying,

"Blogs were and are central to the online discourse, their personal touch presenting information in a way that seems to suit the internet audience best. But something else is happening now that may give those blogs even more power: they are ceding to, or incorporating, video."

Another form of media publishing online has given encouragement and complimented video logging: video sharing. Youtube is probably the most popular video sharing website on the net. Websites like Youtube reach a great number of users in the net, some sharing their videos as a way of expressing their thoughts, some just kicking back and enjoying the show. But just like video logging, video sharing holds much greater power when it comes to getting the message across as videos are shared with millions of viewers all over the Internet.

Sullivan (2007) states,

"Senator George Allen made a minor racist remark at a rural campaign stop in the heart of his conservative home state of Virginia. In days gone by, it would have been a completely trivial piece of base retail politics, and instantly forgotten. But the damning video found its way to YouTube, and then it was carried by the TV networks, and before long Allen's re-election bid hit a brick wall."

With the technology in our hands, there are many more forms of media publishing that exist currently and are yet to be invented. Designers can use these forms to have better chances at achieving their publication goals.

References:

Sullivan, A 2007, Video boosts power of the bloggers, The Australian, viewed 9 November 2008
<http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/530670.php>

2008, Jake and Amir.com, viewed 9 November 2008,
<http://www.jakeandamir.com/>